The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c8.20

c8.20

My second comment is that, although the art of this Early School was a religious art, initiated and developed under the aegis of the Buddhist Church, it was in fact based to a very large extent on the familiar mundane art of the period, only with such changes and additions—sometimes very slight ones—as were needed to give it its Buddhist complexion. This explains the presence on a Buddhist monument of such flagrantly sensuous scenes as those illustrated in figs. 11 and 12, which patently conflicts with the first principles of the Buddha's teaching. In such matters it seems to have been the Church rather than the artist who made the compromise. We shall see later that precisely the same thing happened in the case of Gandhāra art.