The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c7.33

c7.33

In the scenes of the last life of the Master we shall, of course, find employed the same method of composition. But there will be added to it another convention, a most unexpected one, and one capable of completely baffling our researches, were it not that we have already been made aware of it; or rather, to employ a better expression, it is not that some element comes in to increase the pictorial complication of the scene; it is, on the contrary, something which is wanting in it, and that something is nothing less than the figure of the principal hero. In all these illustrations of the biography of Buddha we shall find everything that the author desires, except Buddha himself. It is already a good number of years since the inscribed bas-reliefs of Barhut, by informing us that a certain worshipper, on his knees before a vacant throne merely surmounted by a parasol or marked by a symbol, is in the act of « adoring the Blessed One », have placed beyond doubt this invariable and surprising abstinence. The Sânchî sculptures, which on the whole are better preserved, tell us more on this point than do the ruins of Barhut. From these latter we already knew that the ancient school of Central India had not at its disposal a type of the perfect Buddha : the façade of the middle lintel of our eastern gate, which represents the « Great Departure of the Bodhisattva » (pl. X, 1), proves to us, in its turn, that it refrained no less rigorously from figuring the Predestined even before the Sambodhi, when it would have been so simple and so easy to lend him the usual features of Viçvantara or some other « crown prince ». We have here a new fact and one of prime importance in the limited sphere of Buddhist archæology. To the list of conventional representations of the Buddha by a throne of stone, the imprint of two feet, a wheel or some other emblem, we must now add the no less strange representation of the Bodhisattva by a horse without a rider under an honorific parasol (¹).