The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c6.2

c6.2

Ancient India has bequeathed to us a considerable mass of texts and a very restricted number of sculptures : this means that for our instruction concerning its civilization we possess many more written documents than carved monuments. The latter deserve all the more to attract our attention. Their most ancient remains may, in fact, furnish us, as regards the external appearance and the material side of Indian life in the second century before our era, with a number of concrete and precise details which we should never have been able to expect from the most extensive or the most profound study of the literature. I hasten to add that I do not conceive the identification of these works of art as possible without their confrontation with the texts. These latter alone can help us to understand the mute language of the stones and, even in the absence of any explanatory inscription, to assign names to the characters, speech to the gestures, in one word titles to the subjects. In practice it is precisely thus that matters fall out. We find ourselves possessing in the holy scriptures of Buddhism a ready made commentary for the greater part of the surviving ancient bas-reliefs ; and these pieces of sculpture, rare or scattered though they be, are, for their part, a mine of illustrations quite appropriate to as many episodes of the Buddhist legend. You divine without difficulty the interest of this intimate accord between the written and the figured versions of the same stories and the advantage still to be obtained from it for the comprehension of both. This is what I should like to verify experimentally by studying, in accordance with the texts and the monuments, the traditions relating to some of the previous existences of the Buddha Çâkya-Muni. For this purpose we will make use, on the one hand, of the Pâli collection of the Jâtakas (¹) and, on the other, of the bas-reliefs of the stûpa of Barhut (²). From their rapprochement will quite naturally emerge for our convenience a small illustrated collection of some twenty-five Indian tales; and you shall judge if I exaggerate their charm.