KnI 71. Vedikā pillar from the Kanaganahalli stūpa

The editors doubt ’s suggestion (169471) that the term ālambana points to the coping. See also 1660. Yet the word ālaṁbana occurs in KnI0231, which is of the very same type as the objects bearing KnI0085–91: these are edited under the heading uṣṇīṣa. Yet it is striking that the MIA unisa—or any other MIA form corresponding to Skt. uṣṇīṣa—common, for instance, in the Amaravati corpus is nearly absent from the Kanaganahalli corpus, as it is, for instance, in Sarnath, and that the single occurrence of the term Uṁnisa (KnI0044) occurs on a puphagahani and may point to a part of the casing. The term āla(ṁ)bana moreover occurs once on ca. 1st-c. BCE piece of “rail stone” found in Sarnath. See ASI–AR 1906–1907: 95 (Sarn 85). On the basis of the designation āla(ṁ)bana, Sten Konow who based his reading on the rubbing (XXX) assumed that this stone was originally the lower horizontal stone of a rail. But the object is described as a coping stone … with rounded edge at the the top in Sahni’s catalogue of the Sarnath museum (1914: 214–215, no. D(a) 39). Sahni further adds that [i]t is curious that in the epigraph the coping stone is referred to as a base stone. KnI0231 now proves that this is not an isolated case, and that ālaṁbana can not mean, in the context of Kanaganahalli or Sarnath, “base stone.” In the Mahāvastu, the term ālambana occurs alongside adhiṣṭhānaka as a qualifier of sūcika, the cross-bars fixed on the uprights (pādaka) in the description of the railings surrounding the city of Dīpavatī. See Mvu (S) I.194.20–195.4 / Ms. Sa, 54a3–5; Mvu (S) III.227.7–13 / (M) III.282.8–13. See also Divy 221.9–10. In light of the evidence Kanaganahalli, Edgerton’s understanding of ālambana (, s.v. [3]), should be revised: in these passages, while the adhiṣṭhānaka would point to the base of the vedikā, the ālambana could point to the crowning element holding together the railing.

On Bhogavaḍḍhana (Skt. Bhogavardhana), present day Bhokardan (Jalna distt., Maharashtra) see 1660.