IDENTIFICATION OF THE STŪPA

At the time when Hsuan Tsang visited Taxila, the city of Sirkap had been deserted for more than five centuries and its ramparts and buildings must long have been in ruins. The city in which the pilgrim himself sojourned is the city now known as Sirsukh, where numerous structures of the early medieval period are still traceable. In the neighbourhood of this city there were four famous Buddhist monuments which he described. One of these was the tank of Elāpatra, the Dragon King; another was a stūpa which marked the spot where, according to the Buddha's prediction, one of the four Great Treasures will be revealed when Maitreya appears as Buddha; a third was the stūpa of the ‘sacrificed head’ said to have been built by Aśoka and situated at a distance of 12 or 13 li to the north of the capital; the fourth was a stūpa also said to have been built by Aśoka to commemorate the spot where his son Kunala had had his eyes put out. The first and second of these monuments were rightly identified many years ago by General Cunningham: the one with the sacred tank now known as the Pañjā Sāhib at Hasan Abdāl, the other with a ruined stūpa which crowns the ridge above Baotī Piṇḍ. As to the other two, Cunningham laboured under the false idea that the city which Hsüan Tsang visited was the city on the Bhiṛ Mound instead of in Sirsukh, and he could not, therefore, but fail to identify the location of the two stupas. Now that we know that the earliest city of Taxila was on the Bhiṛ Mound and the latest in Sirsukh, it is clear that the stūpa of the ‘sacrificed head’ is none other than the Bhallaṛ Stūpa, which occupies a commanding position on the extreme western spur of the Sarḍa hill, and it is probable that the memorial of Kunāla's misfortune is the stūpa which occupies a hardly inferior position on the northern slopes of Hathiāl, commanding a splendid view of the lower city of Sirkap and of the whole of the Haro valley (PL xiv).