The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c16.4

c16.4

In the series of illustrations which follows, I have given the first two places to figs. 113 and 114, because they appear to mark the transition from the earlier to the later phase of the Maturity Period. The former (fig. 113) is representative of a small but highly interesting group of reliefs, of which, had it been possible, I would gladly have included more examples. Fortunately, four other pieces belonging to this group have already been published elsewhere. One of them, a fragment depicting the ‘Birth Scene’ from Loriyān Tangai, can be seen in Foucher’s *L’art gréco-bouddhique*, vol. I, fig. 154; the remaining three in *Ancient Monuments of India*, figs. 97, 100, 136; fig. 100 was found in the Nathu monastery; the provenance of the others is unknown; but their style is so similar that there can be little doubt but that they and the Loriyān Tangai fragment came from one and the same atelier, and it is highly probable that the atelier was in the Sanghao-Nathu district. Fig. 113, which is now in the Lahore Museum, is a rectangular panel, picturing the miracle of the black snake at Rājagṛiha. The story was that a wealthy miser of Rājagṛiha buried his treasure in his garden. After death he turned into a black snake in order to guard it, and in that form terrorized the neighbourhood. At the request of King Bimbisāra the Buddha subdued the snake, which forthwith crept into his begging-bowl. In the centre of this relief stands the thick-set, stocky figure of the Buddha, holding his begging-bowl in his hand with the snake coiled inside it. Below, is a clump of lotuses growing from a small patch of water, and near by stands Bimbisāra, gazing reverently at the snake. At the Buddha's left side is the Vajrapāṇi—a bearded figure armed with a sword—and round about are courtiers and attendants, four on one side and four on the other. Apart from the bearded Vajrapāṇi there are two distinct types of faces in this relief, namely, a thinnish type with long nose and lips rising at the corners, as seen in the faces of the king and the courtier immediately above him, and a much fuller type with short nose, rounded cheeks and softer mouth, as seen in the Buddha and the two attendant figures next to him. These two facial types are characteristic of all the reliefs belonging to this small group, and so, too, are the elaborate head-dresses of the male and female figures. In point of style and workmanship the reliefs show some disparity, enough at least to prove that they are not all by the same hand. None of them, however, is of a high order. Indeed, the impression they convey is that they are the work of indifferent copyists. As to their date, certain early features, like the elaborate head-dresses, the type of the Buddha in fig. 113 and the heavy leaf canopy in A.M.I. No. 136, might suggest relegating the group to the Early phase of the Maturity Period, but the stylized grouping of the figures and the modelling of some of them individually (e.g. the devas squatting on the acanthus capitals in A.M.I. No. 97) point rather to the Later phase. Probably we shall be near the truth if we place them at the very beginning of that phase.