The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c8.33

c8.33

And this is not yet all : what should I not have to tell you concerning the diffusion in India and the Far East of the idolatrous worship of Buddha, parallel to that of the images! But reassure yourselves : sufficient for each hour its subject, and I will not further abuse your patience. Moreover, as we remarked at the beginning, nothing is easier than to see how much better preserved — or, if you prefer, less deformed — at all times and in all places was the face of the Blessed One than his doctrine. I shall not, therefore, insist to-day on the conquest of upper and lower Asia by this irresistible propagator of the Indo-Greek school of Gandhāra. But you would not forgive me, if I did not show in conclusion how this Buddhist school finds itself by its origins in contact with our Christian art. Look at these two statues (pl. XVI, 2); the one represents Christ, and the other Buddha. The one was taken from a sarcophagus from Asia Minor, and is to-day to be found in Berlin; the other comes from a ruined temple in Gandhāra, and is at present in Lahore. Both, with the pose of the right arm similarly draped in their mantles, are direct descendants of a common ancestor, the beautiful Greek statue of the Lateran Museum, called the Orator, in which we have long recognized a Sophocles. It is not to be doubted that, plastically speaking, they are cousins-german. The one is a Greco-Christian Christ; the other is a Greco-Buddhist Buddha. Both are, by the same right, a legacy left in extremis to the old world by the expiring Greek art.