The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c9.106

c9.106

All these works of art, painted or carved, whether Chinese, Japanese, or Indian, represent more or less, in fact, — to make use of the expression employed in literature, — the vaipulya method of sculptured tradition. Let us return to our starting point, I mean to the quite summary lesson presented to us by the stele of the Archæological Survey (pl. XIX, 1) : we shall see connected with it also a series of replicas no less sober than itself. A carving, which we believe to be unpublished, will furnish us with a type of them, at least as far as Magadha is concerned (pl. XXIII, 1). A great Buddha, seated, in the attitude for teaching, on a lotus whose stem is flanked by two Nâgarâjas, is inserted between two other images of himself, with feet also resting on lotuses. The only novelty introduced is that the two acolyte Buddhas, instead of confronting the spectator, as in plate XIX, 1, or being turned towards the central person, as in plate XXI, 1, or slightly turned from him, as in plate XIX, 2, are looking in exactly opposite directions. This slab, of rather rude workmanship and late date (²), will serve as a perfectly natural transition to the miniatures of the Nepalese or Bengal manuscripts of the XIth-XIIIth centuries, where the representation of the « great miracle » of Çrâvastî by three Buddhas back to back has become the constant rule (¹). The identification of our plate XXIII, 1, which already flowed naturally from the analogy of the new stele of Sârnâth, receives, on the other hand, an interesting confirmation in extremis from these latest indigenous manifestations of Buddhist art.