In India, in the town of Sarnath outside Varanasi (formerly Benaras), at the Archaeological Museum, I came upon a four-headed lion made from sandstone. Each head looks in a different direction. The lion once topped a pillar erected by the Emperor Ashoka. The broken pieces of the pillar lie nearby.
At Sarnath, Buddha preached his first sermon after achieving enlightenment. Ashoka championed Buddhism. The four lion heads are said to symbolically convey the pervading influence of the Buddha, his religion, his order, and “the ever active potency of the law.”
