The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c8.4

c8.4

In strictness, the title of « Illuminated » — for such is very nearly the equivalent of « Buddha » — ought to be reserved for a personage whom, for my part, I should not hesitate to regard as historic, for that scion of the noble family of the Çâkyas, who was born in the north of India, at the foot of the central Himâlaya, towards the middle of the VIth century before our era; who about his thirtieth year gave up his possessions, his parents, his wife, his child, in order to embrace the wandering life of a mendicant monk; who, after six years of vain study and austerities, finally at the foot of the ever-green fig-tree of Bodh-Gayâ discovered the secret of liberating human beings from the evils of existence; who during more than forty years preached in the middle portion of the basin of the Ganges salvation by the suppression of desire, the root of all suffering; who died and was cremated; whose ashes, regarded as holy relics, were distributed to the four quarters of India and deposited under vast tumuli, where we still find them to-day; whose image, finally, is still enthroned above the flower-adorned altars, mid clouds of incense and murmurs of prayers, in all the pagodas of the Far East. And, doubtless, this effigy served in its turn as a model for those of the mythical predecessors, or of the transcendent hypostases, which Indian imagination was not long in creating for him in unlimited numbers, through infinite time and space, in the depths of our terrestrial past as well as in the abysses where at this moment move all the other universes. But such is the servile fidelity of these copies that from the iconographic point of view one may say : « There is no Buddha but Buddha ». Now the essential character of this figure is precisely that always and everywhere, through all the differences of gesture and pose, it assumes only one form, simply and purely human. This is the most important fact to be borne in mind. As for the particular signs which prevent our ever failing to recognize the type, the first statue or photograph to your hand will familiarize you with them.