The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c9.27

c9.27

No one expects from an Indianist that he shall undertake more closely to identify Gallo-Roman divinities or even to distinguish very carefully between them; but perhaps he may be allowed to point out the existence, on the opposite confines of the world known to the ancients, of perfectly analogous figures and even groups (pl. XVIII, 1 and 2). As far as one can judge of the popularity of gods by the always fortuitous result of excavations, this divine pair was in Gandhâra no less in vogue than in Lyonnaise; but there we possess more precise information concerning it. The Buddhist community showed itself more receptive to popular superstitions than the Christian clergy. It assigned a place in its convents, and dedicated passages of its scriptures, to this conjugal association of the fairy with the children and the genius with the purse : for, after all, they are only demi-gods of fairly low extraction, created for the use of the middle classes, and on a level with them. In the man it has long been proposed to recognise Kuvera, the « King of the Spirits » (²); but the texts merely designate him as their « general », by his name Pâñcika, and it is in virtue of this title that he is nearly always leaning upon a lance. These *Yakshas* of India, like the dwarfs of our mythologies, are essentially guardians of treasures; and doubtless this is how Pâñcika must have commenced his career; but the « purse of gold », which he holds in his right hand, would sufficiently prove, even if we were not expressly told, that he had already transformed himself from a jealous gaoler into a generous dispenser of riches. Whilst the miserly demon was thus changing into a liberal genius, his wife Hâritî was undergoing a parallel evolution, and from an ogress was becoming a matron. Originally she personified some terrible infantile epidemic; and, although herself a mother of five hundred little elves, she found her food in the children of men; but when she is depicted for us by religious art, she is supposed to have been already converted by Buddha, and her sole function is to accord to the vows of the faithful a numerous progeny. If we care to translate the myth into Greco-Roman terms, Lamia was metamorphosed into Lucina. Most often she is represented as holding on her knees, or even suckling, her last-born, which has caused her to be called the Buddhist Madonna (¹), whilst numbers of her sons frolic around her or, climbing about her person, make her look like an Italian allegory of Charity. The authors of pl. XVIII, 1 and 2 have expressed the traditional conception of the fruitful and fructifying Hâritî in a manner more sober than usual, being content with putting a cornucopia into her left hand. They forget only one point, namely that according to Indian ideas a horn or any other remnant of a dead animal (except the black antilope) is an unclean thing, and that only people of the currier caste, the least fastidious and the most despised of men, can touch such an object. For us Europeans, who are not disturbed by such refinements of delicacy, this attribute, far from shocking, only awakens in the delighted mind ideas of fer-