The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c7: Chapter 1. Introduction
The Buddhist Art of Gandhāra: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c7
- Language
- English
Chapter 1. Introduction
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For the information of those who may not be familiar with the word ‘Gandhāra’ let me start by explaining that it was the ancient name of the tract of country on the west bank of the Indus river which comprises the Peshāwar Valley and the modern Swāt, Buner and Bajaur. It was a country with rich, well-watered valleys, clear-cut hills and a pleasant climate: a country where a Greek might well dream of being back in his homeland. Situated on the borderland between India and Western Asia, Gandhāra belonged as much and as little to the one as to the other. In the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. it formed part of the Achaemenid empire of Persia. In the fourth it was occupied for a brief period by the armies of Alexander the Great. Thereafter it was conquered by Chandragupta Maurya, but after a century of Indian rule the West again asserted itself, and for another century (roughly, the second century B.C.) Greek dynasts took the place of Indian. Then came, early in the first century B.C., the victorious Śakas or Scythians, to be followed, after yet another century, by the Parthians and Kushāns. And even then the tale of foreign conquest was not ended. For in the third century of our era Gandhāra again reverted to Persia, now under Sasānid sovereigns, and was again reconquered by the Kidāra Kushāns in the fourth. Finally, the death-blow to its prosperity was given by the Ephthalites or White Huns, who swept over the country about A.D. 465, carrying fire and sword wherever they went and destroying the Buddhist monasteries.
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With such a history behind them it is not surprising that the people of Gandhāra were thoroughly cosmopolitan in their culture and their outlook. Of their physical appearance we get some idea from the old sculptures. Some of the men, with strikingly tall and dignified figures, closely resembled many present-day Pathāns, and wore the same distinctive kind of baggy trousers and sleeved coat. Others were characteristically Greek; others just as characteristically Indian. And, no doubt, if we knew more about them, we should recognize other racial elements portrayed by the sculptors. The common speech of the people was an Indian Prākrit, but the script they used for the writing of this vernacular was not, as might have been expected, the current Brāhmī of Northern India but a script known as Kharoshṭhī—a modified form of the Aramaic of Western Asia, which had been adopted for official use throughout the Persian Empire during Achaemenid times. Other languages and other scripts were also employed, on occasion, in Gandhāra. The coins, for example, normally had Greek legends on their obverse, Kharoshṭhī on their reverse; but in rare cases the legends were in Brāhmī. Brāhmī, too, was the usual script employed in the sacred manuscripts of the Buddhists. Nevertheless it is true to say that Gandhāra took its everyday speech from India and its writing from the West. This intimate fusion of widely divergent elements was equally apparent in the religious life of the people. As each successive conqueror added his quota to the local galaxy of deities and creeds, the number and variety went on growing. In the second century A.D. the coins of the Kushān kings Kanishka and Huvishka, whose capital was at Peshāwar, exhibit a truly amazing gallery of gods and goddesses, unparalleled, I think, elsewhere in the field of numismatics. Most numerous are the Iranian types, including among others the sun (Mioro), the moon (Mao), the wind (Oado), fire (Athsho), war (Orlagno), victory (Oanindo). The names are given in corrupt Greek. The sun and moon also appear with the Greek labels of Helios and Salene [sic], the fire god with that of Hephaestos, while another Greek deity is Herakles. From the West, too, comes Anahita, the Babylonian Aphrodite, under the name of Nana or Nanaia; and from Egypt come Sarapis and Horus. Of Indian deities the most conspicuous are Śiva (Oesho) and the war gods, Skanda, Kumāra, Viśākha and Mahāsena (Skando, Komaro, Bizago, Maasena). To conclude that these multifarious deities were all worshipped at the heart of the Kushān empire in Gandhāra would be rash; for they may well have been designed as a means of popularizing the new gold currency in distant parts of the Kushān empire and even beyond its borders, where it was hoped the currency might compete with the Roman aureus. Indeed, the great predominance of Western Asiatic types on these coins suggests that the currency was intended for use in the West rather than in the East. But, however this may be, this gold coinage leaves us in no doubt that the attitude of the Kushāns towards religion was as thoroughly cosmopolitan as it was towards other matters, as cosmopolitan indeed as that of the Romans or Alexandrians, and perhaps no less practical. Looking at this
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coinage one would never guess that in the time of Kanishka and Huvishka Gandhāra and the greater part of the Kushān empire were overwhelmingly Buddhist.
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The beginnings of Buddhism in Gandhāra go back no further than the middle of the third century B.C., when the Maurya emperor Aśoka sent one of his many missions to spread the gospel of his newly adopted faith among his subjects on the North-West frontier. Evidence of this mission's activities may still be seen in the fourteen Edicts of the emperor engraved on the rocks at Shāhbāz-Garhī in the Peshāwar Valley, which set forth the Buddhist principles of religion and ethic, and such simple rules of conduct as Aśoka deemed most conducive to the welfare of his people. To Aśoka also was due the outstanding importance of the stūpa or funeral mound as an emblem and cultural object of worship among the Buddhists. For one of the many acts by which he sought to popularize the Śākya faith was the gift to each of the principal cities in his dominions of a portion of the body relics of the Buddha. These he obtained by opening seven of the eight stūpas in which the relics had originally been enshrined and dividing up their contents. Along with the relics he also presented each city with a stūpa worthy of housing them. In making these gifts the emperor may well have recognized the value of providing the worshippers with some visible and tangible object on which to focus their thoughts and prayers. But, whatever his purpose, the effect of these relic-stūpas was profound and lasting. Not only did the presence of the relics make them cult objects of worship, but in after days the stūpa itself, whether it contained a relic or not, came to be regarded as a special symbol of Buddhism, worthy to be worshipped for its own sake; so that the mere erection of a stūpa, large or small and in whatever material, became an act of merit, bringing its author a step nearer salvation. This matter of the stūpa cult deserves our particular attention because it was on the adornment of the stūpa that the early Buddhists lavished the wealth of their sculpture, and stūpas, sometimes richly decorated, figure prominently among the reliefs of Gandhāra.
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By the side of some of his relic-stūpas Aśoka also erected tall pillars of stone, crowned by lions or other symbolical animals and usually inscribed with one or more of his Edicts. These, too, came to be looked on as characteristic emblems of the Buddhist Church, and are frequently to be seen portrayed in the sculptured panels of the Early Indian and Gandhāra Schools. The finest of the pillars were executed by Greek or Perso-Greek sculptors; others by local craftsmen, with or without foreign supervision.
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How Buddhism fared under the Greek princes of the North-West during the second century B.C. is largely a matter of inference and surmise. For among the myriads of Buddhist monuments and antiquities that have survived until the present day there is not one that can be referred with certainty to Greek authorship in the second century before our era. Indeed, the only positive bit of information about this Greek period that we possess is the story told in the Milindapañha about king Menander and his conversion to Buddhism by Nāgasena. Though the story may be largely apocryphal, there is no reason for doubting its substantial truth. The Greeks were very open-minded about religious matters; and the teaching of Śākyamuni, by its essentially ethical character, by its logical reasoning, and by the stress it laid on free will and the observance of the golden mean, was bound to make a strong appeal to the Greek intellect, notwithstanding that it was based on a view of life altogether more negative and joyless than the Greek. Moreover, from a political point of view Menander must have had the strongest reasons for identifying himself with the Buddhist Church in its struggle against their common enemy, the Śunga king Puṣyamitra, and the violent Brahmanical reaction championed by him, which had led to the wholesale destruction of Buddhist monasteries in the Eastern Panjāb.
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In spite, however, of the general dearth of monumental or other evidence in regard to the Greek period, we shall be safe in concluding that Buddhism was a flourishing and powerful religion under Greek rule and in all probability supported by the State. This seems evident from the fact that the ruling families of the Śakas, who made it their policy to follow, wherever possible, in the footsteps of their Greek predecessors, lost no time in adopting Buddhism as their official religion. On the other hand, there are no grounds for supposing that the Greeks demonstrated their sympathy for Buddhism by erecting more memorials in honour of the Founder or by employing the resources of Greek art to embellish those already existing. It may well be that, so far as their adhesion to Buddhism had any but a political significance, they were mainly interested in the abstract doctrines of the great Teacher, and had little time or sympathy to spare for the cultural worship of a stūpa or the adoration of a lion-crowned pillar.
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As to the material culture of the Greeks in this region, the available evidence goes to show that it was on the same general level as that of the Hellenistic world of the West. Thus, the Greek city of Sirkap at Taxila was laid out on the same chessboard pattern and fortified with the same kind of bastioned stone-walls as were then in vogue among Hellenistic town-planners elsewhere. And the Greek temple at Jaṇḍiāl outside the north gate of the Sirkap city exhibits a surprisingly pure type of Ionic capital, which in the second century B.C. would have done credit to an Athenian architect. But the stability and continuity of Greek art in Gandhāra and the North-West is best illustrated by the striking series of coins issued in those areas. These coins were not, be it said, up to the standard of the magnificent Greek coins of Bactria, unsurpassed by any in the ancient world, but they were well up to the average standard of contemporary Hellenistic coins in Western Asia, and they show that there were local coin engravers of ability capable of carrying on the art from generation to generation. That there were equally capable experts in other spheres of art need not be questioned.
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When the Greeks were overcome by the Śakas, most of them doubtless stayed on, to live out their lives and bring up their families under alien rule. There could not, of course, be any question of their returning to the land of their forefathers in Bactria, since the Bactrian Greeks had long since been despoiled of their heritage by the Śakas. Doubtless it was some consolation to the Greeks in the North-West to know that their new masters had already come under the influence of Greek culture and familiarized themselves with the Greek way of life in Bactria, and that they could be counted on to continue the methods of administration established by the Greeks, to encourage Greek arts and crafts, imitate the local Greek coinage and in other ways follow their predecessors' example.
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The Śakas themselves do not appear to have been a very artistic people. Here and there among their ornaments are some attractive examples of Scythic and, particularly, Sarmatian designs, but, with these few exceptions Śaka art in the North-West was nothing more than a perpetuation of decaying Greek art—so much so, indeed, that no one comparing, for example, the coins of the two peoples or taking note of the ornamental features of Śaka buildings, can doubt for a moment that the Śakas continued to employ the same Greek artificers as their predecessors, or that these artificers and their descendants were responsible for carrying on the Greek traditions to the last days of Śaka rule in the North-West. As the years went by, those traditions tended to grow weaker and the workmanship to deteriorate. That, indeed, was inevitable, seeing that the Śakas and their Greek subjects were almost entirely cut off by the Parthian empire from intercourse with the Western world. Later, when the Parthians themselves became masters of the North-West, Greek arts and crafts received a fresh and invigorating stimulus. For, like the Śakas, the Parthians were confirmed philhellenes and proud of their Hellenistic culture, and not only had they large numbers of Greek subjects in their empire but they were in a position to maintain close commercial contacts with the Mediterranean coasts. This revival of Greek arts and crafts is very noticeable at Taxila after its conquest by Gondophares, the Suren of Eastern Parthia. That an earlier revival had followed the transient victories of his predecessor Vonones is a possibility, but only a remote one. There is no evidence for it at Taxila. All the evidence from that site and all the evidence of the sculptures themselves go to show that at about the close of the last century before the Christian era there existed in Gandhāra local artists capable of turning out work in a decadent Hellenistic style which served at first as a basis for the incipient Buddhist art of that region, but that after the Parthian conquest of *circa* A.D. 25 there was a notable revival of Hellenistic art followed by a striking change for the better in the character of local Buddhist art. All this I shall discuss in detail in a later chapter. But first we must take stock of some artistic influences other than Greek which contributed to the making of the Gandhāra School, namely those of the Early Buddhist School of Central India and Hindustān.