Kuru-Kshetra, or the “Plain of Kuru,” near Delhi, India, has been deemed holy ground from time immemorial. At Thâvesar, on this plain, a temple of Siva was built on a site that was sacred long before Sivaism was known. It is even believed that the sacredness of this site runs back to the ancient times of the Rig Veda. The boundaries of this “Holy Land” are given in the great Hindoo epic, the Mahabharata. This plain is said to comprise three hundred and sixty holy shrines, each of which is erected on a foundation sacred from the times of the gods themselves.[446]
So general, in India, is this habit of building a sanctuary on an old sacred foundation, that it is said that “the erection of a mosk by a Muhammadan conqueror always implies the previous destruction of a Hindu temple.”[447] Thus a mosk erected by the emperor Altamash, A D. 1232, is supposed to have been on the foundation of a temple of the sun, built for Raja Pasupati about A.D. 300.[448] Not a new foundation, but an old one, was sought, in India, for a new temple, even to a god newly worshiped there.
Fourteen centuries before Christ, Pan-Kăng, an emperor of China, moved his capital from north of the Ho to south of it because he had ascertained that the original foundation was attempted to be laid there by his ancestor Thang in the Shing dynasty, seventeen reigns before him; hence the removal back to that first foundation would renew the blessing of Thang upon his descendants.[449]
A temple has added sacredness in China according as its foundation is on a spot originally chosen or honored by a representative of Heaven as a threshold of a place of worship. Thus Tai Shan, or the “Great Mount,” in the province of Shantung, China, is mentioned in the Shoo King, or Book of Records, as the site of the great Emperor Shun’s altar of sacrifice to Heaven, 2254 B.C., or, say, three centuries before the time of Abraham. On this holy mountain, as the earliest historic foundation of Chinese worship, “is the great rendezvous of devotees, every sect has there its temples and idols, scattered up and down its sides;” and great multitudes come thither to worship from near and far.[450]
This idea shows itself in modern discoveries among the ruins of ancient Greece. It appears that when Pericles (437 B.C.) began his building of the new Propylæa on the Acropolis, he would have cleared away the remains of such ancient sacred structures as stood within its outline. “The plan of Mnesikles the architect was very simple, and is still clear enough, though it was never fully carried out.” “That the original plan of Mnesikles had undergone modifications was long ago seen by every architect who made the Propylæa matter of serious study.” Dr. Dörpfeld thinks he has discovered how the plan was modified, and why. The enforced departure from the original plan seems to have been because that plan involved the destruction of shrines on an earlier foundation, with a threshold that might not be moved. The gate of Cimon, with its “statue of some guardian god of the gate,–it may be Hermes Propylaios himself,”–was within that outline, and also other sacred sites.