The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c8.8

c8.8

Owing to the ban imposed by the Buddhist Church on the representation of the Buddha’s person, artists of the Early Indian School were hard put to it to illustrate the story of his last life. At first they confined themselves to portraying the four chief events in that life, namely, his Birth, his Illumination, his First Sermon, and his Death. Examples of these four events are reproduced in figs. 3, 4 and 5. The Birth they inevitably symbolized by a lotus plant, the traditional emblem, as already remarked, of miraculous birth; and to clarify the meaning, they sometimes added the figure of Māyā, the mother of the Buddha, either standing or seated on the lotus. In fig. 3 she is seated, a particularly comely figure, with two Nāga elephants pouring water over her from pitchers. The Illumination was represented by the pipal tree (aśvattha) in the shade of which it took place at Bodh-Gayā, sometimes with the seat of the Buddha at its foot (fig. 4a) sometimes enshrined in a temple with the armies of Māra on the one side and the heavenly hosts acclaiming the Buddha’s victory, on the other (fig. 7). Of the First Sermon the recognized symbol was the ‘Wheel of the Law’ (dharmacakra), which the Buddha was figuratively supposed to have then set in motion and which has gone on revolving ever since. Sometimes the wheel was set on a throne or on the top of a pillar (in imitation of the pillar of Aśoka, erected on the spot where the sermon was preached) and frequently two or more deer were added, in allusion to the deer-park where this event took place (fig. 4b). Of the Death of the Buddha (mahāparinirvāṇa) the symbol, very appropriately, was the mound or stūpa in which his relics were enshrined (fig. 5).