The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.331

c10.s7.331

Though it is not known when Bhakti first began to affect Buddhism, it seems impossible to separate this by any long interval from the origins of the Bhāgavata religion, which probably gave the impulse¹ and which was well established in the Buddhist North-West by or before c. 100 B.C.; and where Bhakti may come in over the question of the Buddha statue is not in relation to the Mathurā Buddhas at all but in relation to the creation of the Gandhāra Buddha in the early first century B.C.;² it may have been the reason why the Buddhists of the North-West began to want the lives of Buddha glorified in stone and why they acquiesced in and took up the methods of their Greek artists, who could only represent Buddha, as they represented their own gods, in human form. The Indian artists of Mathurā discarded the old rule of representing Buddha only by symbols, not because of Bhakti, but because for generations that rule had vanished from the Graeco-Buddhist art of the North-West and they could not fall behind; it was too late to do anything else.