The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c7.5

c7.5

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.