The History of Buddhist Thought c4: Illustrations

The History of Buddhist Thought c4

Language: English

Illustrations

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I. A BODHISATTVA : GANDHĀRA SCHOOL *Frontispiece*

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II. THE WHEEL OF BECOMING . . *to face page* 68

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III. GOTAMA PRACTISING AUSTERITIES . ,, ,, 116

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IV. Above : BUDDHA’S FIRST SERMON . ,, ,, 192

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Below : PRESENTATION OF OṂ MAṆIPADME HŪṂ

Pl. I. Bodhisattva of the Gandhara school. The figure, 5 ft. 9 in. high, probably from Yusufzai near Peshawar, is in the possession of Messrs. E. Goldston, 25 Museum Street, London, to whose kindness I am indebted for the reproduction. The sculptures of the Gandhara school are found on the North-West Frontier, and belong to the Kushana period from the first century B.C. to the fourth century A.D., but we have no means of exactly dating any of the figures. They were evidently produced by workmen with a knowledge of Greek sculpture, but the ideas that they reveal are purely Indian.

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Pl. II. The Wheel of Becoming, from *Journ. As. Soc. Bengal*, 1893, vol. lxi, pt. 1, p. 133; described below, p. 69.

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Pl. III. Gotama practising austerities before he found the true method of meditation. Gandhara figure found at Sikri in the Peshawar District by Captain Deane in 1889, now in the Lahore Museum; see *JA.*, 1890, i, p. 139.

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The prominence on the head is one of a Buddha’s thirty-two bodily marks, which appear also on bodhisattvas in their last birth (below, p. 142). One of these is that he is said to be *uṣṇīṣa-śīrṣa* or *uṇhīsa-sīsa*, ‘turban-headed,’ a term which as applied to a bodily mark can only mean having the head in the shape of a turban. This is how it was interpreted by the later Indian artists, who represented a prominence of the skull covered with short curls, and it has been assumed that they were trying to copy the bunched-up hair of the Gandhāra figures. But this mark is mentioned in the list of marks as given by all known schools, and these lists must have been already in existence when the Gandhāra art arose. There is no reason to think that these artists were ignorant of the tradition, and the probability is that the bunched-up hair of the Gandhāra figures is their way of indicating the mark without making it appear as a deformity.

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Pl. IV. The two scenes are from paintings in a MS. of the *Kāraṇḍa-vyūha* from Nepal in the possession of H. Wilkinson, Esq., C.S.I., C.I.E., who has kindly lent the MS. for reproduction. In the first the preaching of the First Sermon to the five disciples in the deer park at Benares (see p. 140) shows how Mahāyāna continued to preserve the old legend and recognize the Hīnayāna teaching. In the second the bodhisattva Sarvanīvaraṇaviṣkambhin is receiving the spell, *Oṃ manipadme hūṃ*, from a reciter of the Doctrine as described in the *Kāraṇḍa-vyūha* (below, p. 192), and Avalokiteśvara in the sky is giving his approval.

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On Gandhāra art see A. Foucher, *The Beginnings of Buddhist Art* (1917). On the significance of art and religion M. Focillon’s *L’art bouddhique*, Paris, 1921, is a work of deep penetration and sympathy.

Linked texts (1)

Kāraṇḍavyūhasūtra — Sanskrit