The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c16.21

c16.21

By way of contrast with these typical examples of the architectural style, I have appended two more reliefs of the Grand Miracle executed in the more usual style of the period (figs. 124 and 125). Both reliefs are carved out of ordinary phyllite-stone and are characteristic of Gandhāra sculpture towards the end of the second century A.D., when art had become smug and complacent, and even craftsmanship was already on the wane. From an iconographic point of view these two reliefs are also instructive. Fig. 124 shows Śākyamuni seated on a lotus beneath a canopy provided by the miraculous mango tree. Of the four attendant figures the pair at the back are to be identified clearly as Indra and Brahmā, Indra by his high hat and the vajra he is carrying; Brahmā by his head-dress and the flask in his left hand. It follows, then, that the Bodhisattva on the Buddha’s left, who is likewise carrying a flask, must be Maitreya, the future Buddha, while the one on his right is presumably Mañjuśrī or Avalokiteśvara.