The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.255

c10.s7.255

No one has ever put the Mathurā Buddhas before the Christian Era,¹ and usually they are assigned to the late Kushan period, second century A.D., the association of the Kushan Huvishka with artistic activity at Mathurā being indisputable.² The champions of Mathurā are therefore in some difficulty, and are not certain whether to meet it by dating the beginning of the Gandhāra school very late (a matter to which I have already referred) or by positing two separate and unconnected creations. Dr L. Bachhofer³ for example, who dates the first Gandhāra Buddha not later than the Christian Era, has said that soon after Kanishka’s accession Mathurā did over again for itself what Gandhāra had already done; that is, he believes in two independent origins of the Buddha-statue. Waldschmidt, whose view has been much supported,⁴ also dated the first Gandhāra Buddha to about the Christian Era, and the first Indian Buddha of Mathurā, uninfluenced by Gandhāra, about a century later; he makes Greek influence reach Mathurā twenty years later still (which is odd, seeing that Greeks had ruled there from c. 175 to c. 100 B.C.) and die out again, leaving the path clear for the classical Buddhas of the Gupta age and all subsequent Buddhas to derive from the art of Mathurā. Dr W. Cohn, who has maintained since 1925 that on internal grounds the Buddha-statue must be a purely Indian invention even though this be only a theory resting on hypotheses,⁵ also believes that the Buddha-image was evolved twice and independently, and has said that the time will come when Mathurā will stand forth as the sole place of origin of the Buddha-statue, *even though it cannot be proved*⁶—a remark which deserves to live. (By ‘influence’ these writers mean influence upon style.)