The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c18.11

c18.11

I hope that I have now said enough to give the reader some idea of the radical differences which distinguish the Earlier and Later Schools of Gandhāran art. Such differences imply a long and active period of evolution between the eclipse of the Earlier School in the first half of the third century A.D. and the appearance of the Later School in the second half of the fourth century. What happened during this century and a half? No connecting links between the two Schools have yet been found in the Panjāb or North-West Frontier; nor, for two very good reasons, does there seem any likelihood of their being found on the soil of Pakistan. The first reason is that the whole of that terrain has already been relatively well explored and it is hardly believable that the existence of such remains, which must have been both widespread and abundant, could have escaped all observation. The second reason is that the Early Gandhāra School owed its development mainly to the patronage which the imperial Kushān rulers, from Kadphises I to Vāsudeva, gave to Buddhism, and the eclipse of the School came, suddenly and completely, when the Kushān power was broken, the Buddhist monasteries destroyed and the Kushāns themselves driven back to their former home in Bactria. It was there, in the north of the modern Afghānistān, where the Kushāns had long before become imbued with the brilliant cultural legacy of provincial Hellenism, that we must, in my view, look for the missing links between the Early School of Gandhāra and that Later and very different School of Art which the Kushāns brought back with them when they returned to the North-West in the second half of the fourth century, and which was flourishing there so richly and luxuriantly until the final overthrow of the Kushāns and the utter destruction of the Buddhist monasteries at the hands of the White Huns.