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Indian Sculpture and Painting, Illustrated by Typical Masterpieces, with an Explanation of their Motives and Ideals c8: Chapter V. The Human Ideal and the Sculptures of Bharhut, Sanchi, and Amarâvati

Indian Sculpture and Painting, Illustrated by Typical Masterpieces, with an Explanation of their Motives and Ideals c8

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English

Chapter V. The Human Ideal and the Sculptures of Bharhut, Sanchi, and Amarâvati

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We will now proceed to make acquaintance with a phase of Indian religious art which will appeal to most Europeans more than the study of oriental iconography, for it brings us down from the transcendental heights of philosophic Hinduism to the plane of our common humanity.

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It is necessary, however, to bear in mind that though it might be supposed that in rendering the ordinary human form and events of human existence Indian art is on exactly the same plane of thought as European, there is, nevertheless, a wide difference between them. Greek and Italian art would bring the gods to earth and make them the most beautiful of men ; Indian art raises men up to heaven and makes them even as the gods. And until the fine arts were kept quite apart from religion, as in the Mogul period, the types of divine beauty established by artistic and ritualistic tradition profoundly influenced the Indian artist's outlook upon life and the nature he saw around him.

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The ideal of manly beauty he set before himself was not represented by a Rajput warrior, but by the divine Buddha, Krishna, or Siva. His ideal of female beauty was not seen in the fairest of Indian women, but in Parvati, or in the heavenly Apsarases. Before, then, we begin to assume that Indian sculptors never realised the same degree of technical achievement as Praxiteles or Michelangelo, we must always clearly understand how far it is possible to draw any comparison between them; and, except in their mutual reverence for the beauties of Nature, and in the important part which art took in national life and education, there are not many points of analogy in the spirit of classic art and Indian.

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In an age when reading and writing are rare accomplishments, the arts of painting and sculpture play a part in national life and education hardly to be realised nowadays. In the great epoch of Indian religious art which we are reviewing, art, religion, and education had no existence apart from each other as they have in this age of specialisation and materialism. They were similar and interchangeable forms and expressions of national thought and culture. The Buddhist monks were often themselves practising artists, and, like the Christian artist-monks of the Middle Ages, they used the arts, not for vulgar amusement and distraction, but as instruments for the spiritual and intellectual improvement of the people.

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And, like all true artists, they were keen observers and lovers of Nature. In choosing the places for their retreats, they always had the keenest eye for the beauties of hill and plain, mountain, forest, river, and sea. Dr. Burgess thus describes the prospect from the Elephanta caves, the sculptures of which we have discussed in the previous chapter:

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“The view from the front of the cave is one of exceeding beauty, commanding the fine bay between Elephanta, Trombay, and the mainland. From the grey dawn of morning till the shades of night close upon it, whether crowded with the white sails of hundreds of fishing craft, or only marked here and there with one or two passenger boats, and perhaps a small steamer, it is an ever-fresh and varying scene of beauty. And a few steps from the porch will lead the visitor to the site of an old *bangalá* which commands the prospect to the south-west of Bombay and its splendid harbour, with Butcher Island in the foreground. Any true lover of Nature will feel himself amply rewarded by the magnificent views to be here enjoyed.”

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But beauty, for them, was for religion and love, not for pleasure only; they had the artistic insight which sees beneath and beyond the external facts and beauties of Nature. They always sought for and found—

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Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good (God) in everything.

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The alternative reading of Shakespeare’s text would make the philosophic Duke express perfectly the Eastern outlook upon Nature. Mr. J. Griffiths, in noticing the wonderful position of the Ajanta cave-temples, says:

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“All the forces of Nature are considered by devout Buddhists as expressions and symbols of the faith. For the vulgar, the waterfall or the wind turns the mechanical prayer-wheel, but to those devoted to meditation and the cultivation of a higher life, the mere sound of running water, the rustle of the leaves as the wind plays through them, the movement of the clouds of the sky, and the manifold life and activity of the creatures of the jungle, are so many hymns of praise to the great harmonious law enunciated by the life of Buddha.”¹

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¹ “*Ajanta Caves*,” Introd., p. 1.

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The people themselves shared fully in the feeling of their spiritual leaders. To take the pilgrim’s staff in hand and leave the worldly life, to be one with Nature in all her moods, was the supreme desire of every devout Buddhist or Hindu, whatever his sect might be. The pious Buddhist would set out to follow, step by step, the Master’s life on earth, from his birthplace in the Lumbini garden to the final accomplishment of Nirvana at Kusinara. And, as the great story was told again and again round the camp-fires at night, the teeming life in the jungle around seemed to become part of it, and wondrous legends grew of the *jâtakas*, the Master’s pre-existence in the form of bird or beast, preparing, by many an act of devotion and self-sacrifice, to show the way of release for suffering humanity.

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And then, as now, Siva’s followers climbed the steep Himalayan slopes, up through a paradise of tree and flower, above the dark forests of the mighty deodar, to the region of cloud and mist and eternal ice and snow; gazing there with awe on the shining glories of the silver mountain where the great god sat in sublime meditation.

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Others would explore the country made sacred in national song and legend; they would tread the sacred hill of Chitrakuta and track the course of Rama’s and Sita’s wanderings by the banks of the Godavery, and in the forests of the Deccan; roam over the battlefields of the heroes of the Mahâbhârata, and the scenes of Krishna’s adventures and amours among the pastures of Brindaban.

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And wherever the pilgrims went, and whatever might be their creed, the gods were with them always. They felt their presence in the countless denizens, seen and unseen, of forest, field, or flood. They heard them in the many voices of the jungle; in the winds which swept through the forest trees, and in the waters which poured down from their heaven-built Himalayan throne. They knew their power and beauty by the rising and setting of the sun; by the radiant light and heat of midday; by the glories of the Eastern moonlit nights; by the majestic gathering of the monsoon clouds; by the fury of the cyclone, the lightning-flash and thunder, and the cheerful dripping of the life-giving rain. From this devout communion with Nature in all the marvellous diversity of her tropical moods, came the inspiration of an art possessing a richness of imagery and wealth of elaboration which seem bewildering and annoying to our dull Northern ways of thinking.

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Their art was glowing with spontaneous warmth and fantasy, like the Nature which inspired it. Yet it was not based upon a sensual Nature-worship, like Hellenic art, but upon Nature regarded as the manifestation of one great Universal Law. It was less coldly reasoned than the art of Greece, but far more spiritual; for the poets and philosophers of a highly intellectual age joined in using this jungle-lore which clung round national history and popular beliefs as a framework for moral and spiritual instruction, inculcating by poetry, fable, and allegory the supreme law of life which Buddha preached, and the eternal truth of the Immanence of God.

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The schools of art were not the courts and palaces of kings, or offices of state, but the monasteries and the sacred shrines at which the pilgrims paid their devotions. The early history of this art and architecture belongs to a period when, the greater part of the country being covered by dense forests, the most convenient material for building and sculpture was wood. But, though in this perishable material no actual monuments of this earliest period have survived to the present day, we can gather a clear idea of the style from the monuments of Asoka's time, in which all the forms of the ancient wooden construction began to be copied in stone, and from the pictures of the buildings given in the Ajanta cave-paintings. The modern wooden architecture of the sub-Himalayan countries, like Nepal, and that of Burma, has many affinities with it.

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It is not, however, my purpose to attempt a history of Indian fine art, but rather to show the highest development of it at a time when the monasteries and sacred shrines had become great national sculpture and picture galleries ; and when, after many centuries, the traditions of Indian art-practice had become perfected into a science which was afterwards reduced to writing, and recorded in the literature of Indian ritual and religion. Modern "educated" Indians, to their shame be it said, are profoundly ignorant of and indifferent to this great science, the traditions of which are kept alive by the artistic castes of the present day ; though they are fast being crushed under the vandal heel of what we mis-call civilisation, just as the traditions of the mediæval artists and craftsmen have been extinguished in Europe by a barbarous and godless commercialism.

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The practice of circumambulating a sacred shrine, one of the oldest of religious observances, gave rise to the decoration of the pilgrims' procession-paths with painted and sculptured representatives of sacred symbols and images, or illustrations of religious history and dogma. The painted decoration was generally the work of the Buddhist monks; the sculptures and images in the precious metals were often the gifts of kings or other wealthy devotees.

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The sculptured stone rails which enclosed the procession-paths at Bharhut, Sanchi and Amarâvati have been minutely described and illustrated in archæological works; and as they by no means represent the highest type of Indian sculpture it is unnecessary to enter into detailed critical examination of them. Artistically they are extremely interesting because they illustrate the development of Indian sculpture from the time of Asoka (263-221 b.c.), to whose reign the Bharhut rail is attributed, down to about a.d. 170, the supposed date of the later Amarâvati sculptures.

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Obviously the construction of these rails is borrowed from wooden prototypes; but it is not only in the constructional forms that they give indirect evidence of the ancient crafts of India, which are frequently referred to in the Râmâyana and Mahâbhârata. The whole technique of the sculpture is a curious rendering in stone of the craftsmanship of wood-carvers, metal-workers and painters, and, as nothing similar to it is to be found in the sculpture of other countries, it will be interesting to inquire how this peculiar style originated.

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Before the time of Asoka the principal artistic crafts of India, exclusive of weaving, were those of painting, wood-carving and metal-work. The two former were no doubt practised in the Buddhist monasteries of Northern India, as they are now in Nepal and Tibet. It must not be supposed that the mason's and stone-carver's art was unknown; but only that, as in all countries where wood is cheap and plentiful, the latter material was generally preferred for structural and decorative purposes: and, therefore, the wood-carvers greatly exceeded in numbers those who worked stone.

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When Asoka succeeded to an empire greater than India had ever known before, and settled down as a devout Buddhist to practise the arts of peace, he employed the energies of his subjects in constructing a vast number of monuments and offices for the new state religion and many magnificent public buildings; and, as he desired them to be more permanent than the ordinary buildings of his day, he made most of them of brick and stone.

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"Asoka," says Mr. Vincent Smith, "was a great builder, and so deep was the impression made on the popular imagination by the extent and magnificence of his architectural works that legend credited him with the creation of 84,000 *stûpas*, or sacred cupolas, within the space of three years. When Fa-hien, the Chinese pilgrim, visited Pâtaliputra, the capital, at the beginning of the fifth century A.D., in the reign of Chandragupta Vikramâditya, the palace of Asoka was still standing, and was deemed to have been wrought by supernatural agency.

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"‘The royal palace and walls in the midst of the city which exist now as of old, were all made by the spirits which he employed, and which piled up the stones, reared the walls and gates, and executed the elegant carving and inlaid sculpture work in a way which no human hands of this world could accomplish.’"—*Early History of India*, p. 144.

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This extraordinary activity in building must have created a demand for skilled masons and sculptors much greater than India could supply; and, just as in later times Shah Jahan brought masons from Samarkand, Shiraz, and Baghdad, to assist in building the Taj Mahal, so doubtless Asoka imported similar craftsmen from the great cities of Western Asia. We can still recognise their handiwork in the magnificent monolithic pillars, some of which are fifty feet in height, and about fifty tons in weight, with which Asoka marked many of the sacred places of Buddhism. One of these, which has recently been unearthed at Sarnath, on the spot where Buddha preached his first sermon,¹ is a perfect specimen of the stone-mason’s and carver’s art, but purely Persian in style.

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¹ See “Benares, the Sacred City,” by the author. (Blackie & Sons.)

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The chief direction of all these works would have remained in Indian hands, and the great majority of the craftsmen must have been Indian also, and therefore more accustomed to work in wood and metal than in stone. The wood-carvers found in the red sandstone which abounds in Northern India an excellent material, which could be worked with practically the same tools as they had always used: there was no necessity for them to alter their usual technique. Fergusson thought that the surprising degree of technical skill shown in the Bharhut sculptures proved that stone must have been a material perfectly familiar to the craftsmen who executed them, and that their skill must have been acquired by centuries of practice in the same material; but, on technical grounds, I see no reason to suppose that this was the case. Even now there is very little difference in the tools used in India for decorative purposes by wood, stone, and metal workers, and technical skill acquired in the material could easily be transferred to another. The technique of the Bharhut relief suggests that they were the work of skilled wood-carvers attempting for the first time to use stone instead of wood. This would explain why the sculpture of the early stone monuments of India shows a much higher degree of technical perfection than is found in the first attempts at stone-carving of a primitive state of art-culture. The sculptors were not tyros in craftsmanship, but skilled wood-carvers, or sometimes metal-workers.

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Asoka was by principle averse to warfare, and India, under the greater part of his rule, enjoyed a profound peace, through the suppression of the rivalry and jealousy of the numerous petty states, then consolidated into one great empire. There was, therefore, less occupation for those who manufactured and ornamented weapons of war, but a great demand for skilled craftsmen in decorating the sacred shrines of Buddhism. The artist-monks, also, now that Buddhism was the state religion, under the patronage of a powerful sovereign, were not satisfied with humble *stupas* and monasteries of brick or clay, decorated with fresco paintings on plaster; they faced them with stone, and made painted *relievos* instead of frescoes.

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These circumstances explain the peculiar technical characteristics of the Bharhut, Sanchi, and Amarâvati sculptures. So vast was the labour bestowed on the decoration of the great Buddhist monuments that each one became a permanent art-centre and created a school of its own. The technical traditions were handed on from one generation of craftsmen to another, and so we find that even centuries afterwards, when they were dealing with the hard limestone of Amarâvati, they still reproduced in stone the artistic processes of the days before Asoka. Only in Western India, and a few other localities, where Asoka's zeal for the Buddhist faith led to the excavation of temples and monasteries out of the solid rock, the craftsmen were forced to modify their methods, and another school was created, with a perfectly glyptic style of technique, which RELIEF FROM BHARHUT (The Sudarsanâ Yakshini)

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culminated in the magnificent sculptures of Elephanta and Ellora already illustrated.

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The Bharhut rail is, according to Fergusson, the most interesting monument in India from an historical point of view. It is especially important for the study of Indian sculpture, because it shows the degree of technical development the fine arts in India had reached before India came in contact with the Graeco-Roman art of Gandhara, before the Indian artistic ideal had been evolved, and before Indian artistic philosophy had been differentiated from that of Europe. Fergusson says:

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"It cannot be too strongly insisted that the art here displayed is purely indigenous. There is absolutely no trace of Egyptian influence; it is, indeed, in every detail antagonistic to that art. Nor is there any trace of classical art; nor can it be affirmed that anything here could have been borrowed directly from Babylonia or Assyria. The capitals of the pillars do resemble somewhat those of Persepolis, and the honeysuckle ornaments point in the same direction; but, barring that, the art, especially the figure-sculpture belonging to the rail, seems an art elaborated on the spot by Indians, and by Indians only."¹

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¹ "History of Indian Architecture," p. 89.

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Fergusson's judgment in this matter, though disputed by some archæologists, seems to me to be perfectly sound. We must found our theories on the style as a whole, taking into consideration the esoteric elements, not the external accretions, as those which determine the character and origin of it. The ordinary archæological method is rather like trying to ascertain the nature and growth of an oyster by analysing the crust outside its shell, ignoring the living organism, and perhaps a pearl, within.

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The Bharhut sculptors also show the interesting fact that in Asoka's time the worship of the person of Buddha was not a part of Buddhist ritual: "Everything is Buddhist, but it is Buddhism without Buddha. He nowhere appears either as a heavenly person to be worshipped or even as an ascetic." The objects which attract the reverent homage of both men and beasts are the symbols of the faith: the sacred footprints, the bodhi-tree in which the Presence dwelt, but not the Presence itself.

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Much of the figure-sculpture at Bharhut is very primitive, but there is some which proves that, several centuries before the Gandharan school had developed its ideal, Indian sculptors had by their own unaided efforts achieved no mean skill in rendering the human form.

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The figure called Sudarsanâ Yakshini (Plate XXVIII.) is one of the best of a series of semi-divine beings which appear as guardians at the four entrances, on the upright supports of the rail. The two most obvious points to be noticed in it are, first, that the technique is entirely that of a wood-carver; and, second, that the treatment is frankly naturalistic. There is no attempt to idealise: no indication of the abnormally narrow waist, or of the complete suppression of the muscular details which are characteristic of all later Indian sculpture. Here we have "the shoulders loaded with broad chains, the arms and legs covered with metal rings, and the body encircled with richly linked girdles," which, according to Professor Grünwedel, prevented Indian sculptors from producing an anatomically correct form. Yet the principal anatomical facts are remarkably well given, especially the modelling of the torso and the difficult movement of the hips. In fact, it is very astonishing that in this, one of the earliest monuments of Indian art, we find such a high degree of technical achievement, and such a careful study of anatomy.

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If we accept the conclusion of archæologists that the Indian artistic ideal is a feeble attempt to imitate the Gandharan models, or those of Græco-Roman art, we must assume that, many centuries later than these Bharhut sculptures, when every other branch of art had progressed and India was the acknowledged head of the scientific world, Indian sculptors and painters had actually retrograded in their art, and were less proficient in anatomical knowledge than the artists of Asoka's time. The only alternative to this conclusion is that which I propose, that at some period after the Bharhut and Sanchi sculptures Indian artists abandoned purely naturalistic aims and adopted an ideal of their own devising.

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The Sanchi sculptures are supposed to cover a period beginning with Asoka's reign, down to about 140 B.C. It would require a whole volume to do them justice, but, except as an important link in the evolution of the Indian ideal, they do not belong to the scope of this work. They provide, however, a most wonderful picture of Indian life and thought, as I have described at the beginning of this chapter. The visits of the pilgrims to the sacred shrines, the stories told by the camp-fires, the fabled pre-existences of Buddha in the form of bird and beast, and all the mysteries of the untrodden primeval forests, are revealed in a series of sculptures which, besides being most valuable for historical purposes, makes a most delightful, original Indian jungle-book. We can see, also, how strongly the idea of the essential unity of creation had taken hold of the Indian mind. For all Nature is shown animated by a single purpose; man and beast, gods and demi-gods, and the weird monsters of Indian mythology thronging together to join in worship of the emblems of the Buddhist faith.

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The Sanchi sculptors are, like those of Bharhut, entirely naturalistic in the treatment of the human form. As Fergusson says:

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"All the men and women represented are human beings, acting as men and women have acted in all times, and the success or failure of the representations may consequently be judged by the same rules as are applicable to the sculptures of any other place or country. Notwithstanding this, the mode

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THE EASTERN GATEWAY, SANCHI

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of treatment is so original and local that it is difficult to assign it to any exact position in comparison with the arts of the Western world."

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The person of Buddha as a divine being receiving adoration is still unrepresented, though he appears as Prince Siddhartha and as an ascetic. There are some figures of primitive Indian divinities, such as Sri, the goddess of fortune, but they do not seem to suggest any connection with the Dhyâna or Yoga doctrine, or to represent an idealised type of body. The Indian artistic ideal, if it had been evolved at all, had not yet been introduced into Buddhism.

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For European artists the greatest interest of the Sanchi sculptures, apart from their decorative beauty, will probably be in their wonderfully truthful and skilful rendering of animal life. This is especially remarkable in the East Gateway, one of the latest of the Sanchi sculptures, illustrated in Plate XXIX.

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Yet some of the single detached figures are extremely good, and show a great advance upon the art of Bharhut, though the style is similar. Plate XXX. is an illustration of a female figure, singularly beautiful in movement and strongly modelled, which forms a bracket on the right-hand side of the same gateway. The style of it shows no trace of the Hellenic tradition, nor of the idealism which developed in later Indian sculpture. It is a piece of simple, forceful realism by Indian sculptors, before any attempt was made by them to idealise the human form. Nevertheless, it would be difficult to find among the Gandharan sculptures anything to surpass it, either in technique or in artistic feeling.

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Though the wooden forms of construction are retained, the later sculptures of Sanchi, of which these are examples, show a perfect familiarity with the technique of stone-carving and great freedom in execution. The best figure-sculpture found here, taken in conjunction with that of Bharhut, make it abundantly clear that before the Sanchi gateways were finished, or long before any of the Gandharan sculptures were executed, India had developed an original school of sculpture, and was no longer dependent upon foreign aid, as it was, to some extent, in the time of Asoka. Indian art continued to assimilate foreign elements, as every living art will. The Gandharan sculptors, no doubt, occasionally found employment in India, but they did not come there as teachers, for India had nothing to learn from them in technique, and she deliberately chose ideals different to those of Greece.

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The next important series of sculptures representing early Indian life and history are those of Amarâvati,¹ a Buddhist settlement on the banks of the Krishna river, in Madras, probably a half-way house for those adventurous emigrants from India's north-western seaports who after-

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¹ Some of them are now in the British Museum, a few in the Indian Museum, Calcutta, but most of the finest and best-preserved are in the Central Museum, Madras.

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FIGURE FROM THE EASTERN GATEWAY, SANCHI

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wards colonised Java and Kambodia. They are attributed to the last half of the second century A.D., so there is an interval of something like three centuries between them and the later Sanchi sculptures. It is quite evident that there must have been a great deal of Indian sculpture produced in the interval, but very little of it remains, no doubt for the same reason that nothing has been found before the time of Asoka, namely, because most of it was executed in wood.

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Asoka's immediate successors did not continue his great propaganda of Buddhism, so Indian architects and sculptors naturally reverted to the use of the material with which they were most familiar. In the meantime, however, on the north-west frontier of India, the Indo-Roman school of Gandhara arose. Gandhara was a country in which suitable stone for building and sculpture was more plentiful than wood; so while all the wooden, or semi-wooden, buildings constructed in India in this period have totally disappeared, the stone monasteries and the *stupas* of Gandhara have left a great deal of their rich sculptures to posterity. This, and the fact that Gandhara was closer to the outskirts of the Roman Empire, and therefore more susceptible to Græco-Roman influences than India, have given the Gandhara school a rather fictitious importance in the history of Indian art. To understand this early period of Indian art rightly we must always bear in mind that for every monument in stone which now exists there were in India perhaps a thousand in less permanent materials, which have completely disappeared.

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The Amarâvati sculptures show Buddha for the first time in Indian art as a divine being receiving worship, and as the type of Buddha closely resembles that of Gandhara, Professor Grünwedel and other archæologists infer that the Græco-Roman artists of the Gandharan kingdom supplied Indian Buddhists with the ideal of their Divinity. But the Amarâvati Buddha is *not* the Indian ideal of Divinity: it is a transitional type. In all the art of Amarâvati we see Indian sculpture passing from the naturalistic school of the Asokan epoch into the idealistic school in which Indian art reached its highest expression. The simple, direct naturalism of the Bharhut and Sanchi sculptures is here beginning to give place to a very pronounced style of an academic character, but wholly different to the style of Gandhara, though in the detail Gandharan, or Græco-Roman, types frequently occur.

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One of the finest and best-preserved of the Amarâvati reliefs is a sculptured slab from the base of the *stupa* (Plate XXXI.) now in the Madras Museum. It represents the *stupa* itself, surrounded with its rail, with a crowd of adoring spirits, the *vidyâdharas*, hovering round its summit. These figures are perhaps the most beautiful in composition of all, and they show clearly the idealistic treatment which had developed RELIEF FROM AMARÂVATI (From the base of the Great *Stupa*)

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in Indian sculpture since the Asokan period. The floating movement of these heavenly spirits is conceived with rare artistic feeling and a thorough grasp of the mechanism of the human body, although the details of the muscular system are purposely suppressed.

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In the centre of the frieze on the top of the slab the Buddha appears receiving worship. Here, and elsewhere in these reliefs, he is clad in the same loose robe as the Gandharan Buddhas. This partially conceals the form and makes the idealistic treatment less conspicuous than it is in the nude figures of the *vidyâdharas*, or in the Buddha of later Indian sculpture which we have seen before. In the small upright panel on the right and left of the centre are two very expressive figures of a Nâga Raja and his wife worshipping. They are well drawn and modelled with more anatomical precision than the *vidyâdharas*, as if to suggest a contrast between ordinary mortal form and a divine one.

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This distinction, if it is intentional in this particular case, is not observed throughout the reliefs; nor is it characteristic of Indian sculpture as a whole. But it is easy to understand that the recognition of a special type of beauty for divine beings would very speedily resolve itself into a general idealisation of the human form in the same direction; the first step being its application as a mark of distinction for persons of high rank, and the next its adoption as a common academic standard.

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The Amarâvati reliefs, so far from being inspired by Western ideals, indicate a deliberate attempt to Indianise them: except for a few obviously borrowed details and *motifs*, there is very little that is distinctively foreign about them. The style and whole method of artistic expression are developments of the Bharhut and Sanchi school, as can be seen in the beautiful group from the British Museum, Plate XXXII. The slim-waisted figure standing by the horse, probably intended for Prince Siddhartha, shows the tendency towards Indian idealism. The two female figures, charmingly natural and full of feminine grace, are ordinary human beings like those of Bharhut and Sanchi, but the execution shows no trace of the Western academic style. The exaggerated thinness of the legs in all the figures was probably less marked when the sculptures had their finishing coat of fine plaster.

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The foreign elements in all the Amarâvati sculptures are not more conspicuous than those usually found in the art of any country which from its imperial position has become a centre of attraction for people of many and diverse nationalities. Nowhere do they justify the archæological assumption that Indian art at this period was in Græco-Roman leading-strings. If Indians were to apply to European art the same methods of exegesis as archæologists apply to Indian, it would be easy for them to leave Europe with hardly a shred of originality.

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There is this in common with the Gandharan sculptures and those of Amarâvati—that both were inspired by the monastic schools of Northern India; the former employing foreign agents, the latter mostly Indian. The foreign artists of Gandhara were naturally slower in absorbing Indian impressions, derived from the philosophical schools, than the native artists. The great culture-centres of Asia at this time were the Indian universities of Takshasila, Benares, Sridhanya Kataka, on the banks of the Krishna, and Nalanda: their influence was supreme, and compared with it the whole influence of Hellenism in Indian art may be taken as a negligible factor. It is to the direct teaching and influence of these great educational institutions, rather than to the occasional intrusion of foreign suggestions and foreign technique, that we must look for an explanation of the development of Indian artistic ideals. For certainly the teaching of the Mahâyâna doctrine by Nagarjuna and the infusion of Brahmanical philosophy into Buddhism were the influences which shaped the ideals of Indian art, not the migration of Western artistic ideas eastwards. India was not then in a state of pupilage, but the teacher of all Asia, and she only borrowed Western suggestions to mould them to her own way of thinking.

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"What Cluny and Clairvaux were to France in the Middle Ages," says Fergusson, "Nalanda was to Central India—the depository of all true learning and the foundation from which it spread to all other lands of the faithful.” The whole range of education in these great universities was schemed and co-ordinated with a breadth and largeness undreamt of in modern India. There were schools of painting, sculpture, and handicrafts as well as of mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and other sciences; at Nalanda religion and philosophy were taught from a hundred chairs. Not less greatly planned were the equipment and environment of the colleges. Hiuen Thsang, who resided at Nalanda for several years, says it was “an enchanting abode.” It had been in existence for seven centuries when he visited it. Six successive Indian kings had devoted their pious efforts to building and adorning it. The last one reorganised the work of his predecessors, opened a number of halls for conferences, and surrounded the whole convent with a single wall. One gate opened into the great college which the Chinese pilgrim thus describes :

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“The richly adorned towers were arranged in regular order; the pavilions, decorated with coral, appeared like pointed hill-tops; the soaring domes reached up to the clouds, and the pinnacles of the temples seemed to be lost in the mist of the morning. From their windows one could watch the movements of the winds and clouds, and above their lofty roofs the sun and moon could be seen in conjunction.
“All around pools of translucent water shone

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with the open petals of the blue lotus-flowers ; here and there the lovely kanaka-trees hung down their deep red blossoms ; and woods of dark mango-trees spread their shade between them. In the different courts the houses of the monks were each four stories in height. The pavilions had pillars ornamented with dragons, and beams resplendent with all the colours of the rainbow—rafters richly carved—columns ornamented with jade painted red and richly chiselled, and balustrades of carved openwork. The lintels of the doors were decorated with elegance and the roofs covered with glazed tiles of brilliant colours, which multiplied themselves by reflection, and varied the effect at every moment in a thousand manners.”¹

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¹ “La Vie de Hiouen Thsang,” by Stanislas Julien, pp. 150, 151.

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The groves of mango-trees and the immense tanks still remain as memorials of this splendid convent. There were thousands of these convents in India, though this was the finest of them all. To them flocked students from all parts of Asia, and from them went out the missionaries who brought Indian religion, philosophy, science, and art to the most distant parts of the continent—China, Korea, and Japan.

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Among such surroundings and by such influences were nurtured and developed the culture and ideals which created the great monuments of Indian art, and such was the respect for the dignity of learning inspired by them that, according to the Chinese pilgrim, no single instance of deliberate rebellion against the rules had been known at Nalanda during the seven hundred years since the foundation of the college. Apparently they possessed a secret of which modern India is ignorant. But could love of the *alma mater* ever grow up among the squalid, hideous surroundings, unkept and uncared for, of most Indian colleges?

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The Amarâvati reliefs are considered by Fergusson and Professor Grünwedel to represent the culminating point in Indian sculpture. But this view can only be upheld by those who regard as decadence, instead of a new development on a higher plane of thought, the departure from European canons which here took place. Indian sculptors reached much higher imaginative flights and achieved much greater technical triumphs, but, after Amarâvati, they adopted an ideal of beauty totally different to that of Greece. They never attempted such a minute scientific investigation of the human structure as the sculptors of the Italian Renaissance made, because it would have been useless to them in perfecting an idealistic creation based upon imagination and artistic feeling, rather than upon scientific facts.

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Though they are far from being the best Indian sculpture, there is much beautiful work in them. The traditions of Sanchi are upheld in the most delightful studies of animal life, combined with extremely beautiful conventionalised ornament. The most varied and difficult movements of the human figure are drawn and modelled with great freedom and skill. The action and grouping of the figures are singularly animated, sometimes to an exaggerated degree. In skilful composition they far surpass the contemporary school of Gandhara, and, although the sentiment seems sometimes forced and artificial, it is much more genuine than the conventional, smug pietism of the Græco-Roman or Indo-Roman sculptures.

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In Indian art they take much the same place as Cellini’s work holds in the sculpture of the Italian Renaissance. But technically the two rails must be considered as painted *relievos* rather than true sculpture. The artists relied upon colour instead of alternation of light and shade to give emphasis and variety to the composition, and, now that the colour is entirely gone, the effect of the sculpture, when viewed at a short distance, is comparatively cold and lifeless, in spite of the prodigious amount of labour bestowed upon it.

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The Indian ideal which we see in process of evolution at Amarâvati was finally perfected several centuries later. The various types of it have been described in Chapters III. and IV. The next great series of sculptured reliefs in which Indian real life is vividly portrayed are those which adorned the procession path of the great Buddhist shrine of Bôrôbudûr, in Java, which may justly be styled the Parthenon of Asia. These must be dealt with in greater detail in the next chapter.

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