The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c16.25

c16.25

Of fig. 129, which depicts the same scene, little need be said. It is a crude, commonplace piece of work referable to the closing years of the Later Maturity Period and gives us the measure of the degeneration which was taking place in the output of many of the Gandhāra ateliers at this time, though other ateliers were still maintaining a somewhat higher level. And here we may profitably pause for a moment to look back at the earlier representations of the *Parinirvāṇa* illustrated above in figs. 68, 72, 87, 127 and 128, and observe how in the century and more that intervened between the first and last of this series Gandhāra sculpture lost, step by step, its old virile spirit and its power of imaginative expression. Contemplating fig. 72, we are immediately conscious of the dramatic sense of the artist, of the ‘rapture of repose’ portrayed in the lifeless features of the Blessed One, of the crushing sorrow in the tearful faces of the Vajrapāṇi and the monks in the foreground, of the despair of the Malla chiefs in the background, and of the contrasting impassivity of the *deva* at their side. But when we turn to fig. 129, what do we see? On the bed in the centre a figure that looks for all the world like a stone image fallen on its side—and round about the bier a group of puppet-like figures, with smooth, boyish faces as plump and fatuous as that of the corpse itself and indistinguishable from it or from one another. We can recognize the Vajrapāṇi by the *vajra* in his hand, and Mahākāśyapa by the nude ascetic at his side. Whether the other figures are meant to be celestials or Malla chiefs, it would be hard to say.