The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c14.7

c14.7

However this may have been, it is significant that the general adoption of phyllite in preference to other stones coincided not only with the decline in the style of this sculpture noticed above, but with other notable changes in its history. One of the most outstanding of these was connected with the development of the Buddha and Bodhisattva images. As far as their attitudes, dress and other canonical features are concerned, the types of these images had been largely standardized before the middle of the second century, but it was left to the latter part of that century to produce the highly refined and delicately wrought images for which Gandhāra art is famous. The beauty of these images is rarely a spiritual one. We look in vain for any expression of the deep, thoughtful compassion which distinguishes, for example, the superb fifth-century head of the Bodhisattva from Kālāwān (fig. 152).¹ Their beauty is a purely physical one, resulting in the main from their exquisite finish and the meticulous care lavished on the elaboration of their detail. But we must not underestimate the value of this material beauty. It marks an immense advance on the Buddha and Bodhisattva statues of an earlier period, and to those who were as yet unaware of what the skill of the sculptor would one day achieve in the expression of the spiritual, it must have seemed very near to perfection. So striking, indeed, is it that some of these images were referred by that great authority on Buddhist art, the late Alfred Foucher, to the first century B.C.—two hundred years before their actual date—on the ground that they closely approximated in style to the Greek and must