The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c8.34

c8.34

After this last experience it will, doubtless, seem to you proved that this figure of Buddha, which, smiling at us from the depths of the Far East, represents for us the culmination of what is exotic, nevertheless came originally from a Hellenistic studio. Such, at least, is the truth to-day — I mean the conclusion arising from the documents at present known — and such, at the point which archæological researches have arrived, will probably be the truth to-morrow. Must we be glad or sorry for this? Facts are facts, and the wisest thing is to take them as they come. It was recently still the custom to triumph noisily over the artistic inferiority of the Indians, reduced to accepting ready made from the hands of others the concrete realization of their own religious ideal. At present, owing to æsthetic bias or to nationalist rancour, it is the fashion to make the school of Gandhâra pay for its manifest superiority by a systematic blackening of its noblest production. We for our part refuse in this connection to share either the unjustifiable contempt of the old criticism for native inspiration, or the ill-disguised spite of the new against the foreign make. It is not the father or the mother who has formed the child; it is the father and the mother. The Indian mind has taken a part no less essential than has Greek genius in the elaboration of the model of the Monk-God. It is a case where the East and the West could have done nothing without each other. It would be childish to associate ourselves, in a partizan spirit and turnabout, with the exaltation or the contempt, whether of Europe or of Asia, when so fine an opportunity offers for saluting in the Eurasian prototype of Buddha one of the most sublime creations wherewith their collaboration has enriched humanity.