The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c8.17

c8.17

Fig. 11 also gives us the same kind of crowded, animated scene—here a pleasure-retreat among rocks and waterfalls. In the foreground, ladies are bathing from the backs of elephants in a lotus-pool; to the left is a peacock; in the background, two amorous couples are seated in happy dalliance among the rocks, one of the males holding a drinking-cup, one of the females cooling her feet in the water. No doubt, this was one of the many genre scenes borrowed by the Buddhists from the mundane art of the day, and we can well believe that, like a well-known panel on the South Gateway, it was a work of ivory-carvers or inspired by an ivory prototype. But there is no reason to suppose that it served merely as a picturesque stopgap. That was not the way of the Buddhists. Admittedly, they were unashamed in appropriating popular mundane art (some of it of a flagrantly irreligious character) and flaunting it on their sacred monuments, but they never failed to invent new labels which would fit it into the Buddhist context. What new interpretation was put on this particular scene, we can only guess, but we may be sure that the setting for it was a celestial, not an earthly, paradise.