The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c12.29

c12.29

This time the circle of our pilgrimage of research is closed, but only after having embraced the whole of the Far East. We see that the observation of the Christian analogy of these images recurs like a refrain in the mouths of those Europeans whose eyes have once lighted upon them. In case the unanimity of the testimonies should run some risk of impressing the reader, he will quickly reassure himself by reflecting that, if some Egyptian mummy were wakened from its secular sleep, it would not hesitate in the least to recognize in them replicas of Isis suckling Horus, whilst every modern Hindu would with the same certainty see in them Kṛṣṇa in the arms of his mother Dêvakî or of his nurse Yaçodâ. The type of the woman with a child, the happy incarnation of the wishes of mothers and the natural object of their worship, belongs, in fact, to all times, if not to all countries. Still there are distinctions to be made. Not everywhere do the same images personify the same ideas, far from it : did they so, different civilizations would nevertheless know them under different names. The whole intention of this short study is to assign to the heroine of the frontispiece and pl. XLV her authentic position by restoring to her, if possible, her moral physionomy and replacing her in her milieu. Deified, as witness her halo; a feminine divinity, as witness her forms; goddess-mother, as witness her progeny ; affiliated to the Buddhist pantheon, as witness the place in which she was found ; Indian by origin, as witness her Gandharian prototypes; we have been able, without any shadow of violence, to include her in the group of idols, and the cycle of legends, dedicated to the ancient ogress of smallpox. Of course, she is shown to us only as transformed into a protectress of children and a dispenser of fecundity to women : from the very moment when we catch sight of her in India, this transformation is already an accomplished fact. In the last analysis, the best verification of her identity rests, here as there, in her entourage of urchins : were it not for this suspicious trace of her past, which even in her subsequent dignity continues to cling to her, we should not have been able with absolute certainty to call her by her Sanskrit name of Hâritî, the so-styled « mother of the little demons ».