The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c5.s2.1

c5.s2.1

To begin, we have the best reasons for thinking that the habit of adoring human images, and even the art of fabricating them, were still less general in the India of the Brahmans before Alexander than in the Gaul of the Druids before the time of Cæsar. Certainly this absence of idolatry properly so-called did not in any way exclude the existence of more rudimentary forms of fetichism (¹): nevertheless, the fact remains that Buddhism did not develope, like Christianity, in a world long infected by the worship of images and prompt to contaminate it in its turn. Not only did the first century already know symbolical or allegorical representations of Christ; but from the second century we meet with his portrait on the paintings of the catacombs (¹). When that of Buddha makes its appearance in India, the religion which he had founded was already four hundred years old : even so it had required the contact of the civilisation, and the influence of the art, of Hellenism. On the other hand, Buddhism was not born, like Islam, in an environment beforehand and deliberately hostile to idolatry. We do not find that the Vedic texts breathe a word about it, either for or against : and their silence is explained precisely by the fact that the idea of it had not even presented itself to the Indian mind. As soon as the time for it shall have come, the grammarians will not fail to mention in the employment of the learned language the mode of designating the new fact of the Brahmanic idols (²). Likewise, when the question of the images of the Master presents itself to the faithful Buddhists, their writings will supply explicitly the opportune solutions; and if these successive solutions are, moreover, contradictory, it is simply that in the interval the needs of the religious conscience have changed at the same time as the conditions of artistic production. But, as far as concerns the most ancient period with which we have to deal, investigations into the literature have remained from an iconographical point of view as sterile as the researches on the spot. For the moment the history of religious art in India, previous to Buddhism, is, whether it must remain so or not, philologically a blank page, archæologically an empty show-case.