A History of Indian Literature v2.c19.s6.t3.23

v2.c19.s6.t3.23

The artists who adorned the Græco-Buddhist monuments of Northern India with scenes from the life of the Buddha, must already have been familiar with the Buddha legend, as it is related in the Lalita-Vistara. It is true that they did not work from texts, but from living, oral tradition. Not infrequently, however, the agreement between the pictures and the texts is so striking, that we must assume that the literary tradition, too, was sometimes influenced by art. Art and literature influenced each other.⁴ Whilst the ancient Buddhist art of the time of Aśoka (reliefs of Bharhut, Sānchi, etc.) knows no representations of Buddha, but puts only symbols (*e.g.*, the wheel) in the place of the person of the founder of the religion, the representation of Buddha is one of the principal objects of the Gandhāra art. May this not be connected with the fact that the Buddha had, in the meantime, become an object of Bhakti, and that Buddha-worship had assumed the central position in the religion? Thus everything favours the supposition that the period of the development of the Gandhāra¹ art, that is, the first two centuries of the Christian era, is also the period of the earlier Mahāyāna texts which deal with the Buddha legend.