The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c15.30

c15.30

Of about the same age as the foregoing and closely akin to them in the athletic build of the figures is a group of sculptures from Jamāl-Garhī, one of the earlier Buddhist foundations in Gandhāra. Three examples of these will suffice to demonstrate the emphasis laid on physical development. Fig. 103 is a part of a stele or *urdhvapatta* of greyish-white micaceous schist. The scene in the upper panel has not been identified; that in the lower is a later edition of fig. 69, namely, the submission of the Nāga Apalāla. But the artistry of the reliefs is of a very different order. In the earlier (fig. 69) the artist has given us a lively and dramatic picture of the incident, with little regard for the forms of the individual figures. In the later, he has paid as much attention to the correct anatomical modelling of each figure as to the effectiveness of the composition as a whole, and has imparted to his work a certain heroic quality which is seldom found outside this group. The same high standard is maintained in fig. 104, which tells so simply and convincingly the story of the simultaneous birth of the Bodhisattva's groom Chandaka and of his horse Kaṇṭhaka. The scene is set in the royal stables. There, side by side, we see the mother of Chandaka bathing her new-born child, and the dam of Kaṇṭhaka giving milk to her foal, while she herself receives a bran-mash from the hand of a royal groom; and in the background are the heads of other horses watching the double event from their stalls. The seated figure of the mother, with her well-developed limbs and refined, delicately chiselled face, is in keeping with other sculptures of this group, but there is no close parallel that I know of to the animals. The sympathetic feeling that the artist has put into their modelling calls to mind the two horses' heads on the East Gateway of the Great Stūpa at Sāñchī (fig. 8 above), though the style of the latter is very different.