TH

BUDDHIST ART IN INDIA

HE teachings of the Buddha are very plain: that suffering is inseparable from existence, that it arises from a comprehensible cause, that it can be suppressed, and that there is a "way" to accomplish this; that suffering, impermanence, and the absence of any perduring ego or eternal soul are the three essential marks of conscious being. The Buddha offers a remedy to those who are oppressed by the problem of evil: by psychological analysis he leads his hearers to the perception of "things as they really are," and announces the glad tidings that there is here and now accessible a way of escape from the quandary in which man finds himself.

The state of release is known by many names, among which the term Nirvana is familiar to Western students. This Nirvana is in no sense a heaven, to be reached after death; it is precisely that noble condition which Jacob Behmen describes as "free from all things, and that only good, which a man cannot express or utter what it is, there being nothing to which it may be compared, to express it by."

The way of the Buddha is monastic. The higher man is called upon to avoid the world of sensuous experience and to "wander alone like a rhinoceros," to work out his own salvation by the extinction in him

self of all resentment, lust, and sentimentality, and by the realization of instability and non-existence. The Buddhist attitude is strictly hedonistic; beauty in life or art is merely a sensuous lure and a support of sentimental delusions. Like every other hedonistic system, early Buddhism is puritanical. On the other hand, the Buddha himself is a man, claiming no supernatural power: he speaks of the gods, but only as standing in need of release as much as men. "Be ye lamps unto yourselves" are his final words. The desire for rebirth in a heaven is "a low aim." Thus early Buddhism affords no sanction either for secular or for hieratic art.

But with the development of Buddhism as a popular cult with lay-adherents arose the wish to embellish the sacred sites and to set forth visibly the familiar stories of the Buddha's life and previous incarnations. Thus the simple Sanchi reliquary dome was ornamented in the third century B. C., or a little later, with elaborate festal gateways, crowded with edifying pictures carved in low-relief. At Bharhut, too, there is an ornamented railing with figures of guardian nature spirits. This is "early Buddhist art"; but from what has already been said it will be readily understood that it could only have been what it actually was, the popular secular and animistic Indian art of

It is, however, Buddhist in one important respect: that is in its constant omission of the figure of the Buddha himself, whose presence is always indicated by symbols, such as the Umbrella of Dominion, the Footprints, the Wisdom-tree, or the Wheel of the Law, for "the Perfect One is released from this, that his being should be gauged by the measure of the corporeal world."

But the material of Buddhist belief was rapidly changing, exhibiting an emotional and devotional development closely related to the familiar bhakta doctrine of the Bhagavad Gita. For the layman, and perhaps still more for the laywoman, "taking refuge" in the Buddha, the Law, and the Order, the former assumed the likeness of a personal deity approachable by worship: still more was this the case with the Bodhisattvas or Buddhas-to-be, who have not yet entered upon their Nirvana, but are ever disseminating saving knowledge and

The typical Buddha image is an ascetic figure seated in superconscious rapture (samadhi), cross-legged, the hands disposed in the "seal of meditation," and the gaze abstracted. To understand this figure we must refer to the Yoga, which is a common element in Buddhist and Brahmanical discipline. Its purpose is the attainment of a certain station of consciousness, or rather unconsciousness; the method consists in the concentration of thought upon a single point until the duality of subject and object is resolved into a perfect and timeless unity. The likeness of the Yogin is thus described in the Bhagavad Gita:

"Abiding alone in a secret place, without craving and without possessions, he shall be seated on a firm seat, with the working of the mind and senses held in check, with body, head, and neck maintained in perfect equipoise, looking not round about him;

so let him meditate, and thereby reach the peace of the Abyss; and the likeness of one such who knows the boundless bliss that lies beyond sensation and is grasped by intuition is that of a flame in a windless place that does not flicker."

It was thus that Gautama sat beneath the Wisdomtree on the night of the enlightenment. When the need of cult images was felt, no other form could have been found so plainly representative of "Him-whohad-thus-attained"; and beside this seated image (page 128), which constitutes the highest expression of Indian plastic art, the standing figures of Buddha and of the Buddhist gods, however gracious, are of secondary importance.

stream of Indian development; it is a local phase of Græco-Roman art patronized by Scythian kings. It is true that by this route

We meet, nevertheless, with standing images of extraordinary beauty; and of these, it is again at Anuradhapura, and also at Amaravati, that we find the finest examples, the prototypes of innumerable later repetitions. It is, moreover, in these Southern primitives (page 127), far more than in any of the Northern types, that we recognize the expression of that powerful creative impulse which reappears in the classic Chinese sculpture of the Wei and T'ang dynasties.

I have not so far spoken of the abundant Buddhist sculpture of Gandhara on the northwest Indian

frontier (first to

third century A. D.).

innumerable Western formulæ have found their way into Indian art: even the standing Buddha image seems to be founded on a Roman prototype. But we cannot recognize any original creative imagination. The listless and effeminate gesture, florid composition, and realistic detail are all remote from the austere integrity of early Buddhist thought. The whole work of the Gandhara school lacks conviction; and if it be true that a firm persuasion is required to move mountains, then we must look elsewhere for the sources of an inspiration that guided the course of Asiatic art for more than a thousand years. In northern

India Buddhist inspiration was for several centuries absorbed in adapting Hellenistic

motifs to its own spiritual ends. rather than in direct creation.

The suave and gracious Buddhist sculpture of the imperial age of the Guptas (fourth to sixth century), is known to us by the numerous works lately excavated at Sarnath and Mathura. Magnificent colonial phases of Indian Buddhist art flourished in Cambodia till the twelfth and in Java until the fourteenth century. The direct influence of Indian Buddhist sculpture on Chi

Gandhara art scarcely belongs to the direct

onward. Scarcely any work of Buddhist

sculpture on a small scale is superior to a little Ceylonese bronze Avalokitesvara (page 129), which unites the grace of eternal youth with the wisdom of infinite age. By the seventh century, in India proper, however, except in Bengal and Nepal, Buddhism was everywhere yielding place to the cults and the philosophy of Hinduism.

It remains only to speak of the Indian Buddhist paintings which are so wonderfully preserved in the excavated temples of Ajanta. These temples and monasteries here are cut deep into the nearly vertical wall of a wild ravine through which a turbid river rushes in the rainy season. The temples are like apsed Romanesque churches, with a barrel-vaulted nave and aisles; the monasteries are square halls surrounded by cells. Originally, perhaps, Buddhist pictures covered every wall and pillar; now they survive only in certain places; but what remains is priceless. Ajanta painting is technically a development of that early Asiatic art of outline fresco which passed into European tradition through Mycenæ, Greece, and Byzantium; underwent a calligraphic development in China and Persia; and is preserved in India with surprising vitality until the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The subject-matter of the Ajanta painting is for the most part the life of the Buddha and the stories of his former incarnations as a spiritual hero, related in the "Jatakas." In date the paintings range from the fourth to the seventh century A. D. Similar art of the fifth century is preserved in the open air at Sigiri in Ceylon, and also at Bagh in Central India, and there is older but very fragmentary work in Orissa. Some painted walls of about the twelfth century are found at Polonnaruva in Ceylon, and the Buddhist tradition was continuous in Nepal;

but with these exceptions there is almost a blank in the history of Indian painting until we come to the earliest illustrated Jaina MSS. of the fifteenth century and the oldest extant Rajput work of the sixteenth.

The Ajanta paintings afford a dramatic illustration of the changes which may take place in the history of a religion during a millennium. In early Buddhism the emphasis is laid on non-existence; but the Mahayana develops a poetic mysticism which finds the meaning of Nirvana in life itself. The art of Ajanta is a perfect fusion of intuition and expression, spirit and flesh. The beauty of women is praised as if by Kalidasa himself, and yet renunciation is not denied. At the same time, we must not overlook that this is a profoundly conscious and cultivated art, "primitive," indeed, in its sincerity, but well-nigh fin de siècle in refinement and accomplishment; each of those poses of the hands and expressive gestures that appears so spontaneous is known by name and has its

definite significance. In this respect it is closely related to the Indian art of dancing, which carries down the traditions of dramatic technique from the age of Bharata to the present day.

The decadence of Buddhist art may be studied in Ceylon up to the present day-though an original virtue of design, infinitely superior to the would-be elegance of Burmese alabasters, survives even in the most conventional works. The later Buddhist art of Bengal, on the other hand, was merged in the lyric cycle of Vaishnava mysticism. Elsewhere in India Buddhist art as a phase of religious art distinguishable from Indian art as a whole ceases at the moment of its maturity.

ANANDA COOMARASWAMY.