The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c3.3

c3.3

Buddhism — for it is especially Buddhist monuments that are here surveyed — is, of course, a subject of vast extent. We may add that it is a highly organic subject, and that the study of it is still at a specially interesting stage, the stage of discovery. We cannot touch it in any part without evoking responses from distant and unexpected quarters. We might compare it to a magic carpet; we fix upon some well defined topic, relating, let us say, to the Græco-Buddhist school of Gandhāra, and promptly, even without our volition, some analogy or connection transports us to the Central Asia, China or Japan of many centuries later, even if we have not to continue our flight to Java in the ninth century or Cambodia in the twelfth. The reader will find in these pages abundant examples of such transitions. The first essays reach back by a highly ingenious and probable hypothesis to the very origins of Buddhist art in India itself, and give us the measure of its possibilities by what it has achieved at Sānchi and Barhut. Already we detect some traces of foreign influence, from the Persia of the Achæmenids. Soon an abrupt irruption of Hellenistic art overwhelms the native schools, and creates a repertory of religious compositions, which the Buddhist propaganda carries to Central Asia, the Far East, and the Malay islands. Thus is established a genetic connection between the religious art of Europe and Asia, a double efflorescence from one root, most strikingly exemplified in the case of the Buddha type, which closely resembles the earliest sculptural type of Christ, and most curiously in that of the ‘Tutelary Pair’, found throughout the whole Buddhist sphere and at the same time in ancient Gaul : or shall we claim the highest degree of interest for the case of the ‘Madonna’ group (Essay IX), which — ultimately derived, in all probability, from ancient Egypt — has ended by conquering the whole world? This splendid generalization cannot fail to be fruitful, both on the European and on the Asiatic side, in inspiration for future researches : in the meanwhile it may be welcomed as reëstablishing by the aid of art that feeling of solidarity and sympathy between India and Europe, which flourished during the palmy days of Vedic studies, but latterly has been somewhat discouraged by specialism.