The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c9.109

c9.109

Whilst definitely taking this turn in eastern India, our subject became in the West by degrees stereotyped under a form equally abridged, but sensibly different. The place occupied by Elias and Moses in the Christian pictures of the Transfiguration is now, in the representations of the Buddhist « great miracle », no longer held by the two acolyte Buddhas, but by two divine attendants. The imagery of the valley of the Ganges had reduced their part to almost nothing, or even omitted it entirely : here, on the contrary, they end by figuring alone at the side of the Master, standing on lateral lotuses and retaining in their hands their fly-flappers. As to the central Buddha, at one time he continues to sit in the Indian manner upon a *padma* like that of plates XIX-XX; at other times, and more frequently, he is installed on a throne after the manner of Europeans, as in plate XXI, 1, and only uses the necessary lotus as a footstool : but nevertheless the two traditional Nâgarâjas continue to hold up its stem. We borrow from a mural sculpture of Kuḍâ the most reduced type of the first variant (pl. XXIII, 2) : a no less summary specimen of the second would be furnished by one of the caves of Kondivté (²). But, above all, we must recognize that all the cavetemples of western India are covered with representations of this kind. On this point it is sufficient to refer to the testimony, which no one will think of challenging, of Fergusson and Burgess. Along with them we might gather an ample harvest of replicas of the « great miracle ». If we do no undertake to draw up a list from their descriptions or from the too cursory notes which we formerly found occasion to take, it is because on these sculptures of a late period there is always reason to fear contamination of subjects (¹).