The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c6.19

c6.19

To-day we are concerned only with the period of his previous lives, beginning with the most humble of them : but even within these limits we cannot help but regret the manner in which the monks, more solicitous for edification than for poetry, have bungled the subject. In the same way as, according to the naturalists, the embryo of mammalia reproduces in the course of its development the divers characteristics of the inferior species, so we should like to follow through the course of the animal forms which he remembered having assumed one after the other — fish, reptile, bird, quadruped, quadruman — the whole embryology of a Bodhisattva. But for that we should have to give ourselves up, in the midst of the disorder — or of the still more outlandish order(¹) — of the texts, to a veritable task of patchwork, joining together here and there the scattered portions of a poem which was never written. Evidently the idea of following out any series and gradation whatever did not occur to the minds of the compilers of these stories. We must say in excuse for them that the theory of evolution troubled them, for reasons easy to guess, much less than it does us. Furthermore, if they are incapable of composing a harmonious whole, they make up for it in detail by the naive savour and, at times, humourous attractiveness of their style : it is impossible to deny them a veritable talent as narrators. Once we have renounced for them higher ambitions, the compensation will appear to us very appreciable. Their stories of ani-