The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c5.s2.5

c5.s2.5

That in Buddhism, as in all religions, art is at first only a simple manifestation of worship, every one will willingly admit. The only question is to know what branch of Buddhist worship has supplied this special excrescence with an opportunity for its production. It is evidently not in the periodical reunions of the monks that we shall find the smallest decorative pretext. The veneration shown to the mortal remains of the Blessed One explains the leading role of the funeral tumulus in Buddhist architecture. It will not escape us that it is still the same veneration which, thus advantaged, has offered in the obligatory surroundings of those reliquary monuments the natural support to the sculptures, the sole destination of which for a long time was to decorate the balustrades of the *stûpas*. We might even suspect a mark of its influence in the almost entirely biographical character that this decoration has assumed, just as, by the rite of circumambulation, it has fixed the direction in which the scenes must succeed one another and be read. But, beyond this general orientation, we discover at the basis of this kind of devotion nothing that could have determined the mode of compositon of the bas-reliefs. There remains the third and last ancient form of Buddhist worship, that which Buddha himself is supposed to have taught on his death bed to his well-loved disciple, « There are four places, O Ānanda, which an honorable worshipper should visit with religious emotion. What are these four? »... They are, as we know, those where the Predestined One for the first time received illumination and preached and those where for the last time he was born and died (¹). Now just in this devout practice of the four great pilgrimages resides any hope which we have of at last coming upon the long-sought point of departure. In order that we may grasp at once the germ and the directing principle of Buddhist art, it is necessary and sufficient to admit that the Indian pilgrims were pleased to bring back from these four holy places a small material souvenir of what they had there seen.