The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c5.s4.12

c5.s4.12

(²) Cf. the tables of D. B. SPOONER, loc. cit., pp. 156-157. As for the above mentioned interpretations of the lotus and the bull, we, for our part, give them as simple conjectures. In any case, we may at this point observe that in later Buddhism the lotus has retained the symbolical signification of « miraculous birth », and that the bull appears again with its astronomical value on one of the best-known bas-reliefs of the Lahore Museum (cf. A. GRÜNWEDEL, Buddhistische Kunst in Indien, 2d ed., p. 121, or Buddhist Art in India, p. 129). The lamented Dr Th. Bloch in one of his last also, although we possess no concrete proof of this, that the gate through which the Bodhisattva had been cast by his vocation out of the world may, at an early date, have found copiers and amateurs. But these are merely accessory questions : what is important here is that only the traditional avoidance of images, inherited from the humble pioneers of former days, can give us the key to the later improbable compositions, child-births without children, rides without riders.