The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c18.9

c18.9

As in the Early Indian School, the subjects of these reliefs were the Birth (*Jātaka*) stories of the Buddha in his previous lives and the chief events in his last life, but in Gandhāran art the former are much rarer than they had been in the older art of India. By the time the Later Gandhāra School emerged, the form and decoration of stūpas, both large and small, had undergone radical changes. Their bases were now split up into two or more receding terraces, and these in turn were covered with lines of Buddha or Bodhisattva figures set in ornamental niches and divided one from another by stunted pilasters of debased Corinthian pattern. For by this time the Buddha or Bodhisattva images had become supreme and ubiquitous as objects of adoration, and were being endlessly multiplied on every imaginable scale, from the tiny figures impressed on clay sealings and buried in the heart of stūpas to the colossal cult statues enshrined in chapels, 30 ft. and more in height. And this kind of decoration, with its myriads of duplicated figures, was, of course, at once facilitated and encouraged by the use of clay and stucco in place of stone, since it was now possible to cast the images and architectural embellishments in moulds, and to repeat them indefinitely and with the least possible labour over the surface of a monument.