The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c5.s5.9

c5.s5.9

we remark already tentatives towards freedom from the tyranny of the ancient customs by recourse to subjects previous or subsequent to the last existence of Buddha. However, the school of the north-west comes on the scene. By reason of the very fact that it has been almost entirely removed from these traditional influences, it must, in our system, present characteristic signs quite different from those of the ancient school. Now, the conclusions of an extensive study which we have long dedicated to the Greco-buddhist bas-reliefs, seem to have conspired in favouring, point for point, the reverse of the preceding propositions. What we have observed at Gandhâra is, first, the almost total disappearance of legendary scenes later than the cycle of the *Parinirvâna*, as also a marked diminution in the number of *jâtakas*; in the second place, there is an indefinite multiplication of episodes borrowed from the youth or the teaching career of the Master, whose corporeal image occupies now the centre of all the compositions; finally and correspondingly, there is an extreme rarity of symbolical representations (¹). In any case — and this is our concluding argument — the old emblems do not disappear completely. Not only at Gandhâra, but even on the latest productions of mediæval India, not to mention the Lamaïst images of the present day, these survivals of a former age continue to manifest themselves. If the *stûpa* is regarded as having on nearly all the new representations of the *Parinirvâna* become superfluous, the Tree of Knowledge never fails to rear itself behind the Buddha of the *Sambodhi*, whilst the wheel between the two gazelles, either back to back or face to face, continues to mark the throne of his First Preaching (see pl. VI, 2). And thus the decline of Buddhist art is linked to its most distant visible origins, the only ones (need we specify?), which have been taken into consideration here (¹).