The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c8.2

c8.2

One of the advantages of the Musée Guimet most appreciated by its orientalist lecturers is that they are free to dispense with the oratorical precautions which they must take everywhere else. Generally, wherever they venture to open their mouths, they believe themselves obliged to begin by asking pardon of their auditors for the great liberty which they take in speaking on subjects so far removed from their usual occupations and for drawing them into surroundings so different from those in which they are accustomed to move. Such a formality would in this case be entirely superfluous. You could not but be aware of the fact that on crossing the threshold of this Museum you would immediately find yourself transported from Europe to Asia, and you would hardly expect me to apologize for speaking of Buddha in the home of Buddha. For, if he is not the sole inhabitant of this hospitable house, haven of all exotic manifestations of religious art, I dare at least to say that he is its principal tenant. To whatever gallery your steps may lead you, be it consecrated to India or to China, to Indo-China or to Tibet, to Japan or to Java, him you will never fail to meet again and again, in room after room, with the dreamy look of his half-closed eyes and his perpetual smile, at once sympathizing and disillusionized. If the distraction of your gaze, wandering from image to image, does not too much dissipate your attention, and if your minds succeed by degrees in disregarding the diversity of the dimensions and the variety of the materials, you will not be long in noticing that always and everywhere, minute or gigantic, carved in wood, cut in stone, modelled in clay, cast or beaten in metal, he continues to be astonishingly like himself. Soon, by dint of verifying the justness of this first observation, you will arrive at the reflexion that so great an uniformity supposes, at the origin of all these idols, the existence of a common prototype, from which they will have been more or less remotely descended. And thus in the end you are inevitably confronted by the question which I have to-day set myself the task of answering. If it shall appear that the reply brings us back straightway and in a rather unexpected manner towards the familiar horizons of our classic antiquity, well! that will simply be one more element of interest.