The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c8.18

c8.18

However, it was to be feared that these narratives of a personal intervention of the historic Buddha in Gandhâra might justly meet with the same incredulity as those which, in my native province, begin with the words : « At that time, our Lord Jesus Christ was travelling in Brittany... » For the purpose of localization in the country they preferred, it seems, to fall back upon the numerous previous lives in the course of which the future Buddha attained the summit — or, as we should say to-day, established a record — in all perfections. The monks of several convents in the neighbourhood of Shâh bâz-Garhî had, for instance, divided among themselves, by very clever adaptation to the picturesque accidents of the landscape, the various episodes of the romance of Viçvantara, that monomaniac of charity. Others had, so to speak, specialized either in the touching story of the young anchorite Çyâma, sole support of his old blind parents, or in the galant adventure of the wise Ekaçringa, whom the seductions of a courtesan reduced to the role of beast of burden, etc... But they did not stop there; an exceptionally holy tetrad of great stûpas, situated in Gandhâra proper, or in the bordering territories, soon marked the place where the Sublime Being had formerly, in one existence after another, made a gift of his flesh, his eyes, his head, and his body — the first to buy back a dove from a hawk, the last to satisfy a famished tigress, and the two others with an intention whose practical utility, if not its edifying character, escapes us. And thus northern India came to possess, like central India, its « four great pilgrimages ». It is not in any way an exaggeration to say that Gandhâra thus became (after Magadha) as it were a second Holy Land of Buddhism; and we see that certain Chinese pilgrims were quite content with a visit there, without feeling the necessity of pushing as far as the basin of the Ganges.