The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.334

c10.s7.334

Ultimately the Indian artist reached what he sought, a spirituality which the Greek Apollo type could never have given him. Beside the writers whom I have been quoting, Sir John Marshall has pointed out³ that, in the great Buddhas of the Gupta period, we get a spiritual quality in the Indian conception of the Divine which could not have arisen in a school based upon classical tradition; and I may perhaps refer to the wonderful and saintly face of a Buddha-statue in the Lahore Museum,⁴ where the bones, outlined through the starved flesh, bring vividly before us one who had suffered deeply with and for suffering humanity. But all that Indian artists did—and it is immaterial here whether, as regards style, all subsequent Buddhas derive from the Indian Buddhas of Mathurā or from the Buddhas of Gandhāra—originated in a reaction against the established Greek type of Buddha. What they might have done had the Greek type not existed is bootless speculation; in the way that things did happen as matter of history, all the Buddha-statues in Asia with all their implications—and the Buddha-statue played its part in that conversion of Buddha from a man into a god which took place in the Mahāyāna¹—are there because some nameless Greek artist in Gandhāra, who had to earn his living, first portrayed Buddha in the only way he knew of. I have been tracing the history of an idea, the idea of representing the founder of Buddhism as a man; and that idea originated, not with India, but with Greece. It was the one great mark which the Greeks set upon India; and they did it by accident.