In our description of Palenque we have mentioned one of the most curious
of all the reliefs--that representing, according to Stephens, women with
children in their arms. The Oriental survivals would seem to be
specially strong at Palenque, and it would not surprise us if in these
women-figures there is hidden a cogent proof of the origin of America's
first architects. In _Buddhist Art in India_, Professor A. Grünwedel
writes: "At Sikri, Yusufzai, excavated by Major H. A. Deane in 1888, was
found a statue of a woman accompanied by three children, one of which
sits astride of her right hip in true Indian fashion, and which she is
about to suckle. Among sculptures at Lahore Museum is a statue of a
woman completely draped and holding on her left arm a child. It is
suggested that these are forms of Haritri--'Mother of the Demons.' She
was the mother of five hundred demons or yakshas, to feed whom she daily
stole a child. Buddha rebuked and converted her. An image of her was
found sitting in the porch or in a corner of the dining-halls of Indian
monasteries holding a babe in her arms." Why should not the Palenque
figure be a representation of the Hindu goddess Haritri?
A still more remarkable similarity is illustrated by a tower-like
building at Yaxchilan into which is let at about the middle a huge human
face. This queer edifice has probably replicas as yet undiscovered in
the forests of Guatemala. If it could be shown to have a counterpart in
the Malay Peninsula, that would be a connecting-link between the two
civilisations which would need some explaining away, would it not? Well,
we have traced such a counterpart just where it ought to occur, if our
theory is to hold good, viz. in the forests of Cambodia. At Angkor there
are several such structures built of large blocks of hewn stone. Of
these extraordinary towers M. L. Fournereau in _Des Ruines d' Angkor_
(Paris, 1890) gives some excellent photographs. It would need a bold man
to say that the fact of these Cambodian towers having such a striking
replica at a spot near the earliest settlements of our supposititious
Oriental architects is due to coincidence.
Then there are the curious figures carved on the walls of the Nunnery at
both Chichen and Uxmal and on other Mayan ruins. They sit cross-legged
in Buddhistic fashion in niches in the walls surrounded by an
oval-shaped ornamentation. These are like the images in the niches of
the temples of all great Buddhist buildings; the oval-shaped
ornamentation may easily be, it really looks exactly like, the aureole
which invariably surrounds the figure of the Buddha at Boro Budor and
elsewhere. Moreover these figures in Yucatan have a nimbus too, just
like the Buddhas. We are not of course endeavouring to show that the
Yucatecan figures represent Buddha; but we are suggesting that the
Oriental pattern and designs for religious statuary had sunk deep into
the Mayan mind.
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