The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c8.4

c8.4

The purpose of these sculptures was to glorify the Buddha. This they did by recounting episodes from the story of his life and of his previous births, or sometimes, but only rarely, from the subsequent history of the Buddhist Church. In the earliest monuments the stories of his previous births, or Jātakas, as they were called, greatly predominated. Later on, interest shifted to the events of his last earthly life, and still later to his image, which was destined to eclipse all else in Buddhist art. But that was not until the School of Gandhāra had initiated the idea and established the practice of portraying the Buddha in bodily form. In the Early Indian School there is no trace of the Buddha ever having been so portrayed. In that School it was an inflexible rule that his presence should be indicated by means only of a symbol: by his footprints, for example, or his throne, or the promenade (*caṅkrama*) on which he was wont to take his daily exercise, or by his special bodhi tree, or his funeral mound (stūpa). This rule, which extended also to the Previous Buddhas, was religiously observed until the last days of the Early Indian School and was one of the chief characteristics that distinguished it from the School of Gandhāra.