The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c5.s4.3

c5.s4.3

it is fully conscious that what it has now to do is to illustrate on a permanent monument the biography of Buddha; but it appears hardly to grasp clearly the fact that for this new purpose the old procedures, formerly perfectly appropriate to their object, are no longer suitable. Evidently, it was too late to rebel and to shake off the yoke of an artistic tradition which had ere long been strengthened by religious legends; at least it is about this same time that the texts, until then silent on the question, suddenly decide to proclaim — with an excessive precipitation to be contradicted soon after by posterity — the previous incapacity of the artists to portray during his lifetime the ineffable lineaments of the Blessed One (¹). And how otherwise, in fact, explain the persistent absence of his image, whilst so many of the popular divinities were paraded on the pillars of Barhut and Sânchî?