The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c15.25

c15.25

In fig. 3, above, we saw how a sculptor of the Early School portrayed the Birth of the Buddha by setting the figure of his mother, Māyā, on a lotus (the symbol of miraculous birth), with two Nāga elephants pouring the lustral water over her head. The picture was a formal and symbolic one, but as good, perhaps, as could be devised in an age when it was not permissible to represent the person of the Buddha himself. Here, in fig. 99, we see the more graphic and realistic way in which a sculptor of the Gandhāra School was able to portray the same event. In the centre, Māyā is standing under a *śāla* tree and grasping one of its branches. On her right are four deities, one of whom is delivering the infant from the side of his mother, while the rest look on in reverential attitudes. Balancing the deities on the other side of Māyā are her lady companions: first, her sister Mahāprajāpatī, who is supporting her; then a lady carrying a vessel of lustral water, and, behind her, a maid, gazing in astonishment at what is happening. Above the group are celestials, adoring the new-born Buddha. This nativity scene is the subject of many Gandhāra sculptures, some more abbreviated than this one, but all conforming more or less to the same stereotype pattern. Among them I know of only one that is of earlier date than fig. 99, namely, a panel from the Guides' Mess at Mardān, which is in precisely the same style as figs. 54 and 55 above and, like them, referable to the Adolescent Period. In all these other reliefs, both early and late, the deity playing the part of midwife is recognizable as Indra, and the one next to him as Brahmā. This was strictly in accord with the version of the Nativity story current in Gandhāra. But there was another version, found in the Pāli scriptures, in which the Regents of the Four Quarters took the place of Indra and Brahmā, and it is evidently this version which, by exception, was followed in fig. 99, where the deities on the right of Māyā are four in number and are all wearing the same head-dress.