The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c4.1

c4.1

When Alfred Foucher wrote his masterly work on the Graeco-Buddhist art of Gandhāra, he laboured under one disadvantage: he had little external evidence to assist him in reconstructing the School's history and, though he was remarkably shrewd in his surmises, they sometimes went wide of the mark. Witness for instance his dating of the well-known statue of the Buddha in the Guides' Mess at Mardān (fig. 132 below), which he placed in the first century B.C.—two centuries before its actual date. Since Foucher's book was published, this dearth of chronological data has been in a large measure remedied by discoveries made in the course of my excavations at Taxila, which revealed many significant facts relating to the history of the School. Among the most important of these were the following: first, they established the fact that there were two distinct schools of art in Gandhāra, the earlier of which was flourishing in the first and second centuries of our era, the later in the latter part of the fourth and fifth centuries; and they also showed that these two schools were sharply distinguished, not only by the widely different character of their art but by the different materials which their sculptors employed, namely, stone in the case of the earlier school, lime-stucco in that of the later. It is with the earlier only of these two schools that we are here concerned.