The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c6.17

c6.17

*The animals.* — After this indispensable preparation we may with full knowledge broach the examination of the twenty-five *jātakas*, of which, possessing the text, we recognize also the representation. A perfectly natural plan will be imposed upon us : it will be, if we may so express it, the biographical sequence of these successive lives, as well as the hierarchical order of the conditions into which the future Buddha had successively to be born. We shall see him mount one by one the rungs of the ladder of beings, first animal, then woman, and finally man. And indeed, putting aside all one’s complacency as Indianist, I do not think that the imagination of any race has ever created a finer or vaster subject for a poem than this destiny of a single being in whom are shown all aspects of life, in whom is concentrated all the experience of past ages, in one word, in whom the evolution of the entire human race is reflected. Unfortunately, as usually happens in India, the execution comes infinitely short of the conception. To sum up in one work, spacious and substantial, in view of the immense and varied career of the Predestined One, the original Indian system of the universe, would have required the powerful constructive genius of a Dante : Buddhism had not that good fortune.