Eastern Indian School of Mediaeval Sculpture c7.30

c7.30

The artists of the eastern school of mediæval sculpture obtained distinction in another branch of Buddhist iconography, as their predecessors of the school of Gandhāra had done several centuries earlier. After the Gandhāra School, the later schools such as those of Mathurā, Amarāvatī and Benares used to represent only certain incidents of the Master's life; but none of them ever produced the amount and the variety, which we find in the Gandhāra School, where the artists seized upon as many incidents of Buddha's life as they could for representation in basreliefs. Eight centuries after the decline of the great school of sculpture in Gandhāra, the artists of the eastern school of mediæval sculpture, at the other extremity of India, reintroduced the representations of many of the incidents of the Master's life, which had not been portrayed by the intermediate schools, after that of Gandhāra. In order to enumerate the varieties of the incidents of Buddha's life represented in the eastern school it is necessary, in the first place, to analyse the basreliefs of this school, which have been discovered up to date in stelæ or in the form of image-basreliefs.