The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.321

c10.s7.321

Most writers who regard the Indian Buddhas of Mathurā as earlier than the Gandhāra type have not attempted to explain, though it urgently calls for explanation, how the Indian came to discard the old rule of only representing Buddha by symbols, which had lasted for centuries, and to make of him a human figure; an interesting view however *has* been put forward, which at first sight seems as though it might provide an alternative to the explanation that it was due to the Greek example, and that is that it was due to the penetration of Buddhism by Bhakti.¹ But the chronological difficulty is considerable. Bhakti, which means devotion, has been defined as ‘passionate self-oblivious devotion to a deity’ (say rather, a supreme personal Being) ‘who in return bestows his grace’;² its scripture is the Bhagavadgītā, which was added as an episode to the Mahābhārata and which enjoins the worship of a personal god.³ When Bhakti began to penetrate Buddhism seems unknown, but it substituted devotion to the person of Buddha for the original idea of Buddha as a teacher, and was one of the factors which led to the divine Buddha of the ‘Great Vehicle’, the Mahāyāna. But Bhakti penetrated other religions also: it created the new Vishnuism, the personal cult of Vishnu-Krishna as an all-embracing god, the Bhāgavat whose worshippers were called Bhāgavatas.⁴ Possibly the new Vishnuism did originate at Mathurā, the traditional birthplace of Krishna, but it is far older than the Mathurā Buddhas; it is said to be mentioned in Pāṇini,⁵ and also in a Brahmi inscription of the second century B.C.,⁶ and indeed it rather looks as if Bhakti, generally speaking, may have been partly the reaction of the Indian mind to, or against, the foreign invasions, Persian and Greek. By about 100 B.C. the Bhāgavata religion was well established in places as far distant as Taxila and Vidiśā, as is shown by the column at Besnagar of Heliodorus the Bhāgavata from Taxila (p. 381) and by another column two miles away at Bhilsa,⁷ set up by a man named Bhāgavata in connection with the temple of Bhāgavat and dated in the reign of the Sunga king Bhāgavata (the names explain themselves); while in the course of the first century B.C., besides the occurrence of the word in inscriptions,⁸ a king of the Audumbaras in the eastern Punjab called himself a Bhāgavata.⁹