A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c10.s3.21

c10.s3.21

The substance of these criticisms seems to mean that all high-class Indian sculpture must be an expression of Brahmanical metaphysics, nothing else being truly Indian or national. But the Gandhāra artists, who certainly did not worry about a ‘superhuman, transcendental body’, or take any interest in the Upanishads, agreed in those respects with the artists of all the early Buddhist schools, who were, nevertheless, just as Indian and national as any ninth-century Brahman could be. Although the technique of Gandhāra differed widely from that of Bharhut, Sānchī, and the rest, all the early Buddhist schools alike, that of Gandhāra included, were animated by the Buddhist kindly humanistic spirit, as different as possible from the Tantric notions dominating mediaeval art, both Brahmanical and Buddhist, but equally Indian. We are not entitled to denounce Gandhāran art as ‘lacking in spirituality’, and so forth, merely because it does not express the ideas of Elūra and Elephanta. As a matter of fact, many of the good Gandhāra sculptures may be fairly held to express with admirable feeling and sincerity the ideal of a saintly Indian man, and to be not lacking in ‘restrained dignity’. For instance, the beautiful Berlin Bodhisattva (*ante*, Fig. 63) is very far from being a ‘soulless puppet’; the Lahore Museum Kuvera (Plate XXVIII)