The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c5.s1.1

c5.s1.1

None, indeed, of the monuments known at the present time, building or sculpture, takes us further back than the Maurya dynasty. Does that mean that art was created entire in India towards the year 250 before our era, by a decree of the Emperor Açoka? Of course it would be absurd to believe this. From the Vedic times Indian civilization had at its disposal the services not only of the carpenter, the wheel-wright and the blacksmith, of the potter, the weaver and other fabricators of objects of prime necessity, but also of those whom we call art-workers, painters, goldsmiths, carvers in wood or ivory. If the texts were not there to tell us this in words, the evidence of the sole surviving monuments would be sufficient to establish it. Ferguson has proved once for all that the oldest constructions in stone, by the servile manner in which they copy the framing and joining of timber work, testify to the previous existence of wooden buildings. On the other hand — as we know from a reliable source by means of an explicit inscription — it was the ivory-workers of Vidiçâ who carved, in the immediate vicinity of their town, one of the monumental gates of Sânchî. Besides, it is obvious that the finished and well polished bas-reliefs, which for us are the first in date, represent not by any means the first attempts of beginners, but the work of sculptors long familiar with their business and changing their material, but not their technique. The whole transformation which was accomplished during the third century before our era is limited to the substitution, in religious and royal foundations, of the reign of stone for that of wood. Unfortunately, there are no worse conditions, climatic and historical, for the preservation of monuments than those of India. All that was of wood was condemned beforehand to fall into dust; all, or nearly all, that was of stone and that the climate might have spared has been destroyed by the vandalism of man. Thus is explained why the most ancient remains of Buddhist art are at once so late and so rare. If we leave aside the great monolithic pillars dear to Açoka, as well as the caves excavated for the benefit of all the religious sects in every place where the geological formation of the rocks lent itself thereto, we find on the ground level, and pending more systematic excavations, scarcely anything to mention, except the debris of the balustrades of Bodh-Gayâ and of Barhut, and the four gates of Sânchî. The mention of the kings Brahmamitra and Indramitra, inscribed on the first, on the second that of the dynasty of the Çuṅgas, and on one of the last that of the reign of Sâtakaṇi suffice to date them generally, but with certainty, as belonging to the second, or first, century before our era. It is doubtless to the same epoch, if we may judge by the style, that we must refer the oldest fragments of the balustrades exhumed both at Amarâvatî and at Mathurâ. If to these few stray remnants of sculptures we add the remains of the most archaïc paintings of Ajaṇṭâ, we shall very soon have finished compiling the catalogue of what may be styled — in opposition to the later school, of the north-west frontier, much more penetrated by foreign influences — the native school of Central India.