Apart from animal sacrifices Buddhism was the main agent in effecting a mighty revolution in worship and ritual.  One is tempted to regard the change as total and complete, but such wide assertions are rarely true in India:  customs and institutions are not swept away by reformers but are cut down like the grass and like the grass grow up again.  They sometimes die out but they are rarely destroyed.  The Vedic sacrifices are still occasionally offered,[408] but for many centuries have been almost entirely superseded by another form of worship associated with temples and the veneration of images.  This must have become the dominant form of Hindu cultus in the first few centuries of our era and probably earlier.  It is one of the ironies of fate that the Buddha and his followers should be responsible for the growth of image worship, but it seems to be true.  He laughed at sacrifices and left to his disciples only two forms of religious exercise, sermons and meditation.  For Indian monks, this was perhaps sufficient, but the laity craved for some outward form of worship.  This was soon found in the respect shown to the memory of the Buddha and the relics of his body, although Hinduism never took kindly to relic worship.  We hear too of Cetiyas.  In the Pitakas this word means a popular shrine unconnected with either Buddhist or Brahmanic ceremonial, sometimes perhaps merely a sacred tree or stone, probably honoured by such simple rites as decorating it with paint or flowers.  A little later, in Buddhist times, the Cetiya became a cenotaph or reliquary, generally located near a monastery and surrounded by a passage for reverential circumambulation.

Allusions in the Pitakas also indicate that then as now there were fairs.  The early Buddhists thought that though such gatherings were not edifying they might be made so.  They erected sacred buildings near a monastery, and held festivals so that people might collect together, visit a holy place, and hear sermons.  In the earliest known sanctuaries, the funeral monument (for we can scarcely doubt that this is the origin of the stupa)[409] has already assumed the conventional form known as Dagoba, consisting of a dome and chest of relics, with a spire at the top, the whole surrounded by railings or a colonnade, but though the carving is lavish, no figure of the Buddha himself is to be seen.  He is represented by a symbol such as a footprint, wheel, or tree.  But in the later school of sculpture known as Gandhara or Graeco-Buddhist he is frequently shown in a full length portrait.  This difference is remarkable.  It is easy to say that in the older school the Buddha was not depicted out of reverence, but less easy to see why such delineation should have shocked an Indian.  But at any rate there is no difficulty in understanding that Greeks or artists influenced by Greeks would think it obvious and proper to make an effigy of their principal hero.