The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c8.10

c8.10

Thus, following our thread, we have already remounted in the scale of years nearly twenty out of the twenty five centuries which separate us from the time of Buddha. The result is appreciable, and can only encourage us to continue. But just at this moment the thread which guided us step by step through the chaos of Buddhist art breaks off sharp in our hands. While statues of the Master, dated with certainty from the first century after, if not before, Christ, are to be found abundantly in the Upper Panjâb — as is proved by the collections of the provincial capital (pl. XI, 1) — we vainly seek their archetype in the still older monuments of central India, prior to the second century of our era. One significant fact robs us even of all hope of ever finding it by means of some excavation either better carried out or more successful. While on all the bas-reliefs of the Panjâb the Blessed One is represented standing in the middle of the panel, on the balustrades or the gates of Barhut or of Sânchî he is totally absent even from the scenes of his own biography. This fact is too well known to be again dwelt upon, especially as we have already made an experimental verification of it (¹). All that I wish to insist upon to-day is that the oldest known Buddhas are those which we have encountered in the « House of Marvels », as the natives call the museum of Lahore. To complete the geographical part of our quest, it remains only to find out exactly whence these Buddhas come. The former keeper — whom many of us know from the fine portrait drawn by the filial piety of Rudyard Kipling at the beginning of « Kim » — is no longer there to tell us; we regret to have heard last year of his death, and moreover he retired long ago. But his successor will answer you that all these carvings came originally from the district of Peshawar, on the right bank of the Indus, at its confluence with the Kabul-Rûd... And, doubtless, your first astonishment will be that, after having vainly sought not only throughout the whole of still Buddhist Asia, but in the very places which saw the birth of Buddhism, the cradle of the images of the founder, we have finally discovered it in a Musalman country and on the western confines of India.