The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c10.65

c10.65

Thus, whether we arrive at simple points of interrogation or at real certainties, according to the case, it is worth while to take note of these first results. It is well known that in matters of chronology the Indianist is accustomed to be satisfied with very little. He can no longer neglect the data afforded by a comparison of the texts and the monuments, wherever they lend themselves to it. We have certainly chosen a relatively favourable specimen for our attempt : but as regards more than one *jātaka*, and even more than one miracle of Buddha, it would already be possible to draw up a table analogous to that whose spontaneous generation we have just encouraged. We may augure that these studies in detail, in proportion as excavations and new editions supply their constituent elements, will come to each other's aid, and that by a series of tests chronological data will in the end become more and more precise. From that time it would no longer be of such or such a particular episode, but of the whole Buddhist legend that we should succeed in distinguishing the successive states. If it is permissible even to print prognostications which are still so vague, we should be very much surprised if we did not see reproduced, in a general way, the fact dominating the present list of the versions of the *Shaḍḍanta-jātaka*. In fact, it is self-evident that these latter divide nearly equally into two large groups, profoundly divergent from one another, between which the Singhalese commentator of the Jātaka vainly endeavoured to construct a bridge. The six first are closely connected with the old native tradition : the five last proceed no less unanimously from a new spirit, which probably filtered into India through its north-west frontier, as a result of foreign invasions. Thus, this table would be before all an excellent illustration of the « crisis » which a succession of great political upheavals at last, a short time after the beginning of our era, provoked in the Indian conscience, and which has already been described in a masterly fashion, by M. Sylvain Lévi, writing of Açvaghosha (¹).