The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c8.19

c8.19

In concluding this all too brief sketch of the Early Indian School, there are three comments on its general character that deserve, I think, to be stressed. The first is that, notwithstanding the foreign elements that can be detected in it, it was essentially and indisputably Indian. Many of its motifs and ideas it borrowed from Western Asia, Assyria and Persia, still more of them from Greece; and to Greece also, or rather to the Hellenistic art of the North-West, it was indebted for valuable help in surmounting technical difficulties and thus smoothing the path of its development. But whatever these borrowings from outside sources, Indian art was able to assimilate them so thoroughly and organically that its own fundamental character remained unimpaired. As I see it, that character developed primarily from the deep, intuitive feeling of the Indian, especially the non-Aryan Indian, for rhythm and symmetry, coupled with his equally deep appreciation of plant and animal life and his unerring instinct for the stylization of form. These were factors that were common to every phase of ancient Indian art and which uniformly lay at the root of its beauty.