Note 199 — LECTURE XIV. Sacred Places.

That is, ‘the lord of deer.’ Sāraṅga is a kind of deer, and the Buddha was probably called so because he is fabled to have wandered about as a deer in this very place in one of his former births (see p. 111 of this volume). The legend is that he was born eleven times as a deer, and on this account a deer is one of the sacred symbols of Buddhism. We learn from General Sir A. Cunningham (i. 105) that the name Sārnāth properly belongs to a temple dedicated to Ṡiva near the Buddhist monument, and the epithet ‘Lord of deer,’ is equally applicable to the god Ṡiva, who is often represented in the act of holding up a deer in his hand.