Indian Sculpture c5.s3.t1.23

c5.s3.t1.23

What holds good for the body is also valid for the face. No longer are the single features related to each other merely in their mask-like context (Bhārhut), equally distanced from the within as they are from the without, accentless thresholds between being and living, nor is physiognomy explored as indicative of emotions that spring from the body (Sāñcī, etc.), or by their intensity seem to trespass its vitality (Amarāvatī). But the single features simplified from, and partly also enlarged in comparison with, actual appearance show various possibilities of transcendental experience by very slight modifications in their angles or distances. In the early fourth century the conquest of the mind is the theme of the face. The ancient ideal of the Cakravartin, or the world-ruler, so mundanely interpreted in Mathurā in the first and second centuries (Fig. 41), has become transferred into the inner mind. There the conquest is wrought under the most intimate, and therefore most destructive, guidance of life over its denser aspects. Struggle and disdainful relaxation after conquest, in the firmly set, full-lipped mouth, a shelter against the outside world in the heavily-lowered eyelids, a glance that, while physically rivetted to the tip of the nose (yoga attitude, see Mohenjo-Daro), masters the fields of the mind. This inner world-conquerer is the Buddha as conceived by the Gupta artists of the early fourth century.⁹⁴