The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c11.s1.81

c11.s1.81

14. (L., 154). If the four preceding pictures are either totally or partially missing from Wilsen's album, the following one is, in compensation, more than complete. The designer began once more — with the aggravation of an indication of locks of hair covering an imaginary *ushnîsha* — the mistake of which he had already been guilty in no. 9 : of a monk with a round, shorn head he made a Buddha! Furthermore the two scenes nos. 9 (pl. XXXVII, 2) and 14 (pl. XXXIX, 3), which are quite symmetrical, bring face to face with one another, in the customary surroundings of a royal residence, the type of the monk and the type of the king. Only the continuation of the text reveals to us that this time the monk is no longer Mahâkâtyâyana, but Rudrâyana himself, who has just been ordained by Buddha in person at Râjagriha. In a long dialogue he rejects, for his first round in public as a mendicant monk, the seductive offers of Bimbisâra. You may well imagine that it was impossible to pass by so fine an opportunity for reproducing, both on the monument and in the text, the famous episode of the temptation of the future Çâkya-muni by this same Bimbisâra.