[Pramāṇa](https://indike.org/pramana/) › [Studies](https://indike.org/pramana/ins) › [Architecture and art](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.art) › [Indian Sculpture and Painting, Illustrated by Typical Masterpieces, with an Explanation of their Motives and Ideals](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.art.havell-1908) › c7.196 # Indian Sculpture and Painting, Illustrated by Typical Masterpieces, with an Explanation of their Motives and Ideals c7.196 Indian Sculpture and Painting, Illustrated by Typical Masterpieces, with an Explanation of their Motives and Ideals c7.196 - **Language:** English ### [c7.196](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.art.havell-1908.c7.196) The Buddhist creed originally was simply a rule of life founded on the precepts of right views, right resolves, right speech, right actions and living, right effort, right self-knowledge, and right meditation. Its ritual at first was purely symbolical and non-idolatrous, though Buddha’s followers in after-times adopted the image of the Master, or rather that of his spiritualised Self, as an object of worship. For several centuries this spiritualised human type in many variations remained the characteristic of Buddhist art, but when the orthodox Brahmanical influence began gradually to assert itself more and more strongly in Buddhism we find Indian artists attempting to differentiate the spiritual type from the human by endowing the former with superhuman attributes, quite regardless of physiological probabilities or possibilities. Indian art has never produced a Phidias or Praxiteles, not because an Olympian Zeus, or an Aphrodite of Cnidus was beyond its intellectual grasp, but because it deliberately chose an imaginative rather than a naturalistic ideal. - [Previous: c7.195](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.art.havell-1908.c7.195) - [Next: c7.197](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.art.havell-1908.c7.197) - [Up: c7](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.art.havell-1908.c7) --- Source: [https://indike.org/pramana/ins.art.havell-1908.c7.196](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.art.havell-1908.c7.196) · Pramāṇa