The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c5.s3.4

c5.s3.4

But we must hasten, in this rapid sketch, to come to the monuments whose Buddhist character can no longer be disputed. We know what impulse was towards the middle of the third century given by the imperial zeal of Açoka to the religious foundations of the sect. It is, therefore, only the more curious to observe how, even a hundred years after him, the school of Central India continues to follow faithfully in the beaten track of the past. From this point of view, the four gates of Sânchî, which we have had the good fortune to retain almost intact, may furnish a fairly safe criterion of the degree of persistence of the ancient usages. Now Fergusson long ago remarked there the extreme frequency of what he called « the worship » of the tree, the stûpa and the wheel. According to statistics hardly open to suspicion, since they were drawn up in support of theories quite different from ours, the first emblem is repeated no less than 67 times, the second 32 times; and if the last does not reappear more that 6 times, this number suffices, nevertheless, to assure it the third place in the order of importance of the subjects (¹). We have not, of course, to follow Fergusson in the strange anthropological speculations which he has engrafted on to these observations. All that we should be tempted at first to read in his table would be the preponderance of the miracle of the Sambodhi, or of the Parinirvâṇa, over that of the Dharmacakra-pravartana. In reality the larger number of the first two symbols depends upon another cause. The artists proceeded to apply to the Buddhas of the past the formulas which had at first served for the Buddha of our age. People were pleased to level all the seven by representing them at one time by their funeral tumulus, at another, and much more frequently, by their empty throne under their Tree of Knowledge (²) : the wheel alone had remained the special apanage of our Çâkya-muni, and consequently was repeated only at rarer intervals. But these are only subsidiary details; taking these figures all together, their imposing total testifies loudly enough to the constant repetition in traditional form of what we know, from the evidence of the coins, to have been the first attempts at Buddhist art. Being forced to cover the relatively extensive surfaces placed at their disposal, the sculptors of