The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c13.s2.15

c13.s2.15

I close this chapter on the Adolescent Period with two standing images of the Buddha in the round—the earliest of their kind that the Gandhāra School has bequeathed to us (figs. 85, 86). In the sandstone image, fig. 28, we saw what is probably the earliest of all the known effigies of the Great Teacher, and, in the stucco figures 38 and 39, the earliest known heads of the Bodhisattva. But these were found east of the Indus at Taxila, not west of the river in Gandhāra, and although they throw significant light on the rise of the Gandhāra School, they are not actually products of that School. In Gandhāra itself the oldest representation we possess of the Buddha is the one appearing in fig. 53, where he is distinguished from his companions by nothing more than his halo. That relief, which is essentially Hellenistic in style, dates, as we have seen, from about the middle of the first century A.D. or a little later, i.e. from about the same period as the stucco images of the Bodhisattva referred to above. Approximately contemporary with it, are the figures of the infant Bodhisattva to be seen in figs. 55, 57, 58. Then, a decade or so later, comes the Mardān group of reliefs, which show us how the Buddha and Bodhisattva types were beginning to take shape in the hands of local Buddhist sculptors. It is from the Buddha type as illustrated in those early reliefs that the two statues reproduced in figs. 85 and 86 derive their parentage. The relationship is, indeed, unmistakable. In the statues, as in the reliefs, the Buddha is portrayed wearing a moustache, with eyes wide-open and unduly large *uṣṇīṣa*. In both, too, his monastic robe is draped in the same way, with its edge falling from wrist or hand in a stiff, straight, or almost straight, line. On the other hand, there are some marked differences. In the reliefs, the halo is of moderate size, while the *uṣṇīṣa* is so large as to appear top-heavy. In the statues, the halo is disproportionately large, but the *uṣṇīṣa* is substantially flatter. In the reliefs, again, the drapery folds are roughly modelled and coarsely chiselled; in the statues, the carving is done with great care and precision and with a fine sense for the form beneath the robes. For these differences which are, no doubt, due to improving technique and changing taste, I do not think that more than a couple of decades need be postulated. The Mardān reliefs I ascribe to the beginning of the Adolescent Period, the two statues to a date prior to the Sikri reliefs, which I place at the very end of this period.