The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c12.32

c12.32

The productions of the ancient Buddhist art of China are in their turn connected in the most evident manner with those lately exhumed by the Russian, English, German, French, and even Japanese excavations in Turkestan. But these latter had been independently and from the first connected, by a transition no less evident, with the works of the Indo-Greek school of Gandhâra. Thus, thanks to the combined efforts of the latest scientific missions in Asia, we have seen joined again the scattered links, or, better, the broken glimpses, which we already possessed of the long chain of transmission. The most important result of the last explorations will have been definitely to arrange before our eyes in an uninterrupted series the numerous images which, escorting that of Buddha, followed it in procession as far as the islands of the Rising Sun or of the Southern Seas. In this varied train of gracious or furious figures, if there is none more charming, neither is there any more « representative », than that of Hâritî, were it only because we meet her at each step on the road; and this is why, among all those which have already been brought to the museums of Europe, this one, from the first, forced itself upon our notice.