The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c16.8

c16.8

One of the best known and most striking examples of Gandhāra art is a relief of phyllite in the Calcutta Museum which depicts the episodes of the White dog barking at the Buddha and of the Buddha exhibiting the serpent to the Kāśyapa brothers (fig. 115). The first of these episodes occurred when the Buddha was paying a call on a householder named Śuka in the neighbourhood of Śrāvastī. Śuka himself chanced to be out, and his dog, which was eating its food on a couch, barked furiously at the visitor. The Buddha bade it be quiet and told it that it was because it had been so rich in a former life that it had now been brought to its present grievous state. Whereupon the dog crept disconsolate into a corner. When Śuka returned and asked the meaning of it all, the Buddha explained that the dog had been Śuka’s own father in his previous life, and bade Śuka ask the dog where his father’s treasure had been hidden before he died. Śuka obeyed, and thereupon the dog crawled beneath the couch and began to scratch at the floor, and, sure enough, when they dug there, they found the treasure. This episode occupies the left end of the relief and comprises four figures, namely, the Buddha, a much defaced figure of the Vajrapāṇi behind him, the dog barking on a couch, and another partly defaced figure on the farther side of the couch, presumably intended for Śuka. But the dog and couch alone would have been quite enough for a Buddhist to identify the scene.