The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c8.28

c8.28

Shall we lean over the crucible in which the formula of this new compromise was elaborated, and try to reconstitute from the monuments themselves how things happened? Let us take the princely heir of the Çâkyas (pl. XV, 2) at the critical moment when he is realizing his religious vocation. The moral crisis which has just cast him out of the world, and, as a beginning, has made him flee by night from his native town, must, in fact, be translated occularly by a complete transformation of his exterior aspect. Now we read, and we see, that on the dawn of his escape, judging himself beyond capture, he stops and sends back horse and squire. At the same time he charges the latter to carry back to his home all his princely jewels, including the rich turban which encircled his long hair, gathered up in a chignon on the top of the crown. Thus he appears to us, his head bare and already in the act of changing his silken clothes, which are no longer suitable to his new state, for the coarse garment of a hunter. In all these details the figured tradition conforms with a good grace to the written. There is only one point on which the Indo-Greek artists have shown themselves intractable. At that instant all the texts will have it that the Bodhisattva himself with his sword cut off his hair : but to this last exigency of Indian custom the school of Gandhâra has never given its consent. Whether it represents the Master at the height of his ascetic macerations, or whether it shows him in all his splendour, at the moment when he has just attained to Illumination, his chignon continues to remain such as it was before his entrance into religion. When at last he begins to convert his first disciples, there is only the more striking contrast between his wavy hair and the shorn crowns of his *bhikshus*: for these latter, evidently sketched from life, wear the full tonsure, exactly like the bonzes of the present day. Accordingly, we may say that by systematically refusing in the case of the Blessed One to complete the expected transmutation of layman into monk, the Gandhâra sculptors have not only put themselves in intended contradiction to the sacred writings : they have also obstinately closed their eyes to the data supplied by the direct observation of a number of their own clients.