The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.275

c10.s7.275

It seems evident that some of the writers I have cited are confusing two different things, history and psychology. What history desires to know is who made the first statue of Buddha, and when. But this school is so impressed with the belief that Indians ought, as a matter of psychology, to have made the first statue of that revered figure and that they alone would have possessed the necessary religious vision³ (this I think is in one aspect true and I shall return to it later), that they argue that what ought to have happened must have happened, a very dangerous procedure. It has led one writer to the statement that ‘the essential thing is to prove’ what he wants to believe;⁴ it has led others to the hypothesis that if Greeks made statues of Buddha they must have been copying Indian work and that therefore we must postulate earlier Buddhas of wood or ivory which have perished without trace,⁵ a hypothesis admittedly unsupported by evidence and definitely contradicted by the fact that on the Gandhāra statues Buddha’s hair is not shaved and his head is really the head not of an ascetic or a monk but of a king.⁶ Clearly what is wanted is not more theories but some definite piece of chronological evidence which shall decide whether the Gandhāra Buddha be early or late; and that evidence exists.