The History of Art Survey

Lecture 29

The Art of Ancient India I: Neolithic & Buddhist

[Gardner 160-172 +]

A continuity of tradition

B No chronological development of realism

C Eternal life as a problem ?

D Buddhist imagery

*A Site plan or aerial view, urban settlement Mohenjo Daro

1 Steatite Bust, 7≤, Indus Valley Civ, 2600-1900 BCE Mohenjo-daro

*B Male torso, 3.5≤ Harappa

2 Indus Valley Seals: a) Zebu; b) ≥Unicorn≤; c) Lord of Beasts. Mohenjo Daro

*C Lion-capital standard and stupa, 6π, Maurya, Vaishali

3 Dharmacakra-Lion capital, 8π, Maurya, 272-231 BCE. Sarnath

4 Entrance facade, Lomas Rishi, Maurya, late third century, Barabar Hills

5 Great Stupa, c 10 BCE - 10 CE, Early Andhra, Sanchi

6 Plan and Section, Great Stupa,

7 Eastern gateway, Great Stupa, c 10 BCE - 10 CE, Early Andhra, Sanchi

8 Yakshi, Eastern gateway, Great Stupa, c 10 BCE - 10 CE, Sanchi

*D The Buddhaπs Enlightenment, North Torana, middle crossbar Sanci

*E Sangharama site plan, c 100 BCE, Bhaja

9 Interior, Chaitya hall, 120 CE, Karli

10 Section and Plan, Chaitya hall, 120 CE, Karli

11 Couple, Chaitya hall, facade, 120 CE, Karli

*F Facade, Chaitya hall, facade, 120 CE, Karli

14 Enlightenment Buddha Preaching, 2nd century, 2π 3≤, Mathura

13 Seated Buddha in Meditation, Gandhara

*G Bodhisattva (MFA) Gandhara

*H Bimaran Reliquary Gandhara

15 Buddha Preaching the First Sermon, 5π3≤, 5th century, Sarnath

*J Sangarama and Vihara of Cave I, c 500 CE, Ajanta

12 Bodhisattva Padmapani, Cave I, c 500 CE, Ajanta

*K Interior Cave XIX with Stupa, c 475 CE, Ajanta

*L The Colossal Buddha, Bamiyan Afghanistan

A note on the conception of lectures 29 and 30

This and the following lecture are not intended to offer the big single story of Indiaπs art. Unlike the survey model in Gardner, I donπt believe that a single great narrative is either possible or ãfor that reasonã useful. My intention is to present some valuable and useful insights about the art of South Asia, and some of the useful insights that the art leads us to when considering the culture of India. At the same time, because this is an element of our broad survey, I will take particular care to bring out items that have interest for considering the art of India in relation to the art of the other cultures and periods we have been examining.

South Asia

Though the entire region we will be considering here has been referred to as India in the Anglo-European tradition, and though the majority of images considered here will be from the region of modern India, the fuller title for this region today is South Asia. South Asia in its entirety includes the lands east of the Hindu Kush and south of the Himalayas: modern Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Sikkim Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. This is an area slightly larger and more diverse in populations, languages and cultures than Europe. The regions of population density, that have generated the visual imagery that has pervaded the area, have been concentrated around the Indus system of modern Pakistan in the west, the Ganga (Ganges) river system of India in the east and the Deccan plateau and coasts of Indiaπs south. Like Europe, the distinct linguistic cultural regions have each generated local variations of this shared culture as well as unique forms of their own.

The cultural orientations of South Asia in historical times have been westward across the Persian Gulf and Iranian plateau, northward across Afghanistan into Central Asia and southward across the seas to Southeast Asia. Internally there has been a division between the Deccan and far south, where the languages are of the Dravidian group, peculiar to South Asia, and the north, where the main languages are Indo-European and so connected the cultures further west, including particularly those that have been the focus of our course. Equally important has been the division of each of these regions into local sub-regions.

Given this diversity of so many people over so vast an area, the consistency of the monumental production indicates an important degree of cultural unity. Most of the imagery we will see will be religious imagery, which is what has survived from the earliest periods, because it was constructed in the most resilient materials. In order to make simplify the discussion I will focus on Buddhist imagery in the early historical period, when it is most common and then focus on the Brahmanical art that became more common later and move to Islamic art that only rose near the end of the period of our interest.

The Proto-Historic Cultural Origins

During the period between 2600 and 1900 BCE, there flourished in the Indus region a rich urban civilization comparable to those found in contemporaneous Egypt and Mesopotamia. This Indus Valley (or Harappan) Civilization was the product of Neolithic development that has been traced back for six millennium or so within the region. The cultural production of this mature urban period was focused in a series of urban settlements with as many as 50 to 60,000 inhabitants at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro on the Indus, and in medium and smaller cities and towns spread across a rural agricultural hinterland extending a thousand miles north to south and east to west. It was involved in significantly developed overland and sea trade links to Mesopotamia, where during the Neo-Sumerian period, of circa 2150-2000 BCE, it is mentioned in documents, as Meluha. Indus Valley seals and biconical beads have been found in Neo-Sumerian sites. It is called a proto-historical culture because the form of writing that existed there was quite limited in scope and has not yet been successfully translated, so just about all of what we know about it comes from the material record of archaeology.

Both the richness of archaeological finds and the sophistication of the study developed around them have led to a great deal of understanding and provided us material we can compare usefully with the remains of the other early civilizations of China, the fertile crescent and Egypt. The combination of Carbon 14 dating and connections with Mesopotamia have provided landmarks to tether its internal development to the chronology of the ancient world.

A Mohenjo-Daro site plan, 2600-1900 BCE,

By the period of their major urban development, the larger cities of the Indus Valley region and their satellite towns were being carefully laid-out on solar grid, with major thoroughfares running north-south and east-west, and a distinctly separate administrative core. At Mohenjo Daro the site was constructed within a perimeter wall and divided into superblocks that were maintained within wide thoroughfares, lined by the civilizations characteristic drainage systems, that underwent few alterations during the seven centuries of the urban period. Upon the raised central block on the west of the site, were constructed several particularly large structures, including a great bathing tank. As of yet no structure there or anywhere else in the city that could be distinguished as a either a palace or a site set aside for public gathering.

This siteπs organization reveals a level of social control and careful planning distinctly different from the cities of the Fertile Crescent, where cityπs grew irregularly around their earliest cores or Egypt where paralleling the Nile was the rule. As the early cities of Mesopotamia and many other places, those here were constructed of mud and baked bricks, but unlike those the size of the bricks in the Indus Civilization, once established, were maintained rigorouslyãat 7 x 14 x 28 centimetersãover the entire geographic and chronological spread of the civilizationπs mature phase.

1 Steatite Bust, 7≤, Indus Valley Civilization, 2600-1900 BCE, Mohenjo-daro[1]

Though a lot of fairly simple terracotta figurines have survived, only a dozen or so examples of stone sculpture have been found. The Steatite Bust from Mohenjo Daro is the most interesting in terms of later developments. We see is bearded male, wearing a robe that crosses over his left shoulder and under the right arm. It is a fragment, broken off below the chest. The oversized head features broad lips and elongated, half-closed eyes and a band carrying a circular ornament, worn prominently in the middle of its forehead. A similar band appears and on the figureπs exposed arm as well. Two fragmentary stone figures found in association with this one show that it was originally depicted as seated on the floor in a position with one knee raised.

Though the nature of the possible connection is not at all clear, the location of the circle on the bustπs forehead and its half-closed eyes seem distinctly related to the practice of yogic meditation and body control known in later India. The yogic ideology includes a concept of the body emphasizing major psycho physical centers, with one of the most important in the forehead. Later Indian religious and secular imagery has been particularly conscious of the spot this spot, several important deities having an important mark there. The half-closed eyes may depict the focal yogic interest in achieving states of trance through meditation.

B Red Sandstone Torso, 3.5≤ Harappa

Among the other figurative remains of the Indus Valley Civilization is this small sandstone torso, fragment of a standing male, that shows a level of naturalism quite different from the steatite bust. It is a nude image revealing a deftly articulated anatomy with a slightly inflated belly. The piece has a tenon at the neck that would have taken an attached head, and mortise grooves in the shoulders of precisely the same proportions (reversed), indicating the attachment there of some other sort also. Its arms, legs and penis have been broken off.

The bulk of the terracotta figurative images of the Indus Valley culture are, in contrast to our examples, female figures neither as abstracted as the steatite bust or as naturalistic as the sandstone torso.

2 Indus Valley Seals: a) Zebu; b) ≥Unicorn≤; c) Lord of Beasts. Mohenjo Daro

One of the most widely spread and intriguing finds of the Indus valley sites are then two-and-a-half thousand steatite (soapstone) stamp seals, ranging from three-quarters of an inch to an inch-and-a-quarter square and fixed with a perforated boss on the rear for stringing. What we see reproduced in our book are relief estampages taken from these seals. The seals themselves are intaglio cut, to produce these estampages in soft clay, that would dry, leaving their identifying mark. Nearly every seal has a single animal or figure at the center of a square with a few ideographic signs, usually at the top. Collectively these signs make up the bulk of our archive of the still-untranslated Indus ≥script.≤[2]

With no two exactly alike, the general interpretation has been that they are representations of identity. Intaglio cut seals with scenes and cuneiform labels were common and important in Mesopotamia, where they were used to signify ownership on commercial documents. Those seals were cylinders, rolled-out to make an image, and they were cut in the hardest of stones. Though these may have been intended for the same use, they are stamp seals and in quite a different fabric. A few have turned up at Ur, where Indus Valley traders were known to have been present, but the two sets share no common script or visual imagery. They may have had similar functions, but they are of totally distinct esthetic traditions.

a) Zebu seal, Mohenjo-Daro

A good number of the Indus Valley seals carry images of actual animals, such as the Zebu, or Bos indicus, seen here.[3] This hump backed bull, with its prominent dewlap, is the characteristic domestic oxen of India and has long been associated with it. We saw them among identifying animals brought as annual tribute from the Persianπs South Asian satrapy of Kandahar, among the reliefs of the Apadana staircase at Persepolis, in the 5th century BCE. Though the depiction is somewhat schematic, given its small size, the image is a fairly naturalistic one in the vein of the sandstone torso.

b) ≥Unicorn≤ seal, Mohenjo-Daro

The vast majority of the seals, as many as two thirds of them, have the fantastic ox-like being, the archaeologists called ≥unicorns,≤ because of its prominent single horns. The ≥unicorns≤ are all males with the distinctive shoulder markings seen here. They are always shown facing to the viewerπs right in estampage, and with their heads over a rounded, two part form shown here. Whether this structure represents an altar, an incense burner, or a manger is not at all clear. What distinguishes these images from each other is the ideographs at the top.

c) Lord of beasts

A very few seals, numbering less than two dozen, contain human figures, some with scenes of more than one figure. This one, we may call the Lord of Beasts, appears on three seals.[4] This is the largest-known seal, at one at three-eighths inches square, and it is also one of the richest in imagery. At its center sits a figure in an unusual symmetrical posture: arms across the knees and legs crossed at the ankles. The figure seems to be naked, with exposed, erect genitals and a three pronged headdress. Some see three faces. A similar figure with a three-pronged headdress appears in several other seals and small objects. The figure is seated on a low platform and surrounded by animals. Reading clockwise, above, we see a rhinoceros, a water buffalo, a tiger, a human, and an elephant. Below the dais is a deer or antelope with its head turned backwards, apparently mirrored by a second, opposed deer or antelope, whose horns have escaped break in the corner. With this symmetrical posture and the erect genitals, we once again seem to have imagery associated with later practices of yoga.

Because of the consistency and maintenance over long periods of time of many of its cultural forms, archaeologists have tended to read the Indus Civilization as one ruled by a ritual social order rather than the sort of military elites found among the other chalcolithic civilizations. Unlike the others, the Indus Valley Civilization has left no record of military violence or destruction, either in its visual imagery or in the archaeological record. Nor is there any other evidence of one army overcoming another to gain state control Rather there is a record of elaborately evolved cultural forms spread over a wide area and maintained gradual development over an exceptionally extended period of time. And then it was gradually abandoned. Over the century between 1900 and 1800 BCE the Indus civilizationπs urban centers, of craft production and international trade were slowly abandoned, while the village agricultural base that supported them continued without major alteration. Whether this was the result of immense climatic changes relating to the deforestation of the region, or of tectonic plate shifts that resulted in a shift of the entire Makran coast line and the disappearance of the Hakkra river that once paralleled the Indus, both of which have left a record in the regions geology, or possibly the result of a disease or some other cultural calamity, the high cultural urban phase of the Indus Valley Civilization came to a gradual end and only its rural base continued.

The Vedic Arya

Some time between 1200 and 1000 BCE a group of Indo-European speakers living in the Punjab (five rivers) region, that feeds into the Indus, gathered into a more or less final recension the 1028 hymns that have come down to us as the Rig Veda (knowledge). These people, calling themselves Arya (noble), described themselves as pastoral and agricultural, living in small village settlements and warring over land and cattle with others living in the same manner, whom they call Dasas. Before the Indus Valley Civilization was archaeologically recovered, in second quarter of the twentieth century, the Vedic Arya were believed to be the earliest South Asian culture. They themselves had no memory at all of the urban civilization that had flourished three-quarters of a millenium before. The social world described in the Veda and the subsequent literature based upon it became the model passed down by the Brahmanical priests of the ideology, as the root of later South Asian elite culture.[5]

Though the continuity of material culture ãin ceramic fabrics, farming methods and the likeã shows the Arya to be largely the descendants of the Indus Valley Civilization and contemporaneous cultures of the region, the ideology recorded in their texts show some striking divergenceπs. If linguistic models are correct and the Indo-European Sanskrit of the earliest Vedas separated from the forms found further west ãin the Avesta of Iran, the Hitites of Anatolia and the Greeksã came during the second millenium, the culture of the Vedic Arya is the product of the coming together of imported Indo-European ideology and the culture of the earlier inhabitants, developed in the meeting of the two on South Asian soil. Unquestionably there were major changes from the Indus Civilization. The bull, so prominent in the visual imagery of the Indus Civilization, was replaced by the cow, as the animal most favored by the Brahmanical literature. Royalty and major class distinction, that is impossible to distinguish in the housing of the Indus Civilization cities and villages, become a major preoccupation of the Brahmanπs texts. The horses that draw the warriors carts into battle are a prime subject of the Brahmans, though none existed in South Asia during the Indus Valley period. Yogic practices, apparently existing in the Indus Valley period did not appear in Vedic texts until the very last ones, many centuries after the first Vedas

Though it left a vast archaeological record in pot shards, bones and domestic refuse, and an equally vast liturgical literature, to describe its fire sacrifice rituals, the period of Arya development is almost totally devoid of visual imagery. What pictures they made and structures they built were in perishable materials that have left little record. What we have is descriptions of religious practices and lore that form the åold testamentπ for the historical religions and practices that followed. The idealized world depicted in these texts revolves around the rituals of the Brahmans and the kingship of the Ksatriyas, which was dependent upon Brahman rituals for legitimation.

The most important of those structures described in the Vedic literature are the altars for the public fire sacrifices to the Vedic deities, that were models for later temple ceremonies and the deities of the quite varied religious practices we now lump together under the title of Hinduism, and the social structure we call the caste system. The Brahmans developed a racialized social system, announced in the Rig Veda, in which society was divided into segregated occupational communities that married and interacted according to strict rules. The Vedic model included four castesã Brahman priests, ruling warriors, house holders, and servantsãplus those beyond caste, the Dasas who didnπt believe in the Brahmanπs Gods. Later Hinduism, developed largely in the Common Era, has followed much of that same model, with the number of occupations and castes greatly expanded.

The Buddhists

The earliest, and for long the only, art made in permanent materials comes not from the Brahmanical tradition, but from the heterodox counter-traditions created out of them. Buddhism and Jainism were the most important of these. Why Brahmanical structures we kept in perishable materials we do no know, but because they were for so long, we will begin by looking at the art of these others. Buddhism and Jainism were developed out of the Upanishadic philosophical speculation of the latest Vedic literature, when the Ksatriya, royal or warrior classes reacted, against the Brahmanπs claim to ritual control over the forces of nature in the Vedic pantheon, with metaphysical speculation about the nature of the universe and the human spirit, to create a religion based on morality and the psychology of human interaction as contrasted to a Vedic vision they was anchored in mechanical ritual and material power.

The Buddhists, whose art we will be considering at length, accepted the Brahmanπs vision of a universe in eternal cycles of creation and devolution, in which individual [souls] lived through endless cycles of reincarnation from which salvation was not rebirth into an eternal heaven ãthat was the goal of west Asian and European religionã but release from eternal cycles of rebirth. In the later Brahmanical religion this freedom from rebirth is called moksha (release); in Buddhism it is called nirvana (extinction). The Buddhists sought their release by rejecting caste and family for monastic brotherhoods, within which they practiced systems of yogic meditation to reach super mundane mental states by which they could transcend the natural human inclinations that bound the individuals to lives of material and psychic desire and rebirth.

According to the Brahmanical vision the quality of oneπs rebirth was inevitably tied to the actions (karma) of oneπs previous life, so that one was born into a better or worse caste and social reality dependent upon oneπs adherence to caste norms in their previous life. The most important thing for Brahmanical religion was to follow oneπs caste dharma (reality or duty), to live only by the occupation and rules of the circle of the families one was born into. However much one may hate the idea of war and killing even oneπs relatives, as the God Krishna says in a famous passage in the Bhagavad Gita, if one is a warrior ones dharma is to fight.

The Buddhists rejected caste rather thoroughly, refusing to recognize it at all for those who joined the sangha, the Buddhist monastic brotherhood. The Buddhists also refused the Brahmanπs claim for the truth of the ancient Vedas, and the value of Brahmans rituals. They didnπt reject the existence of the Brahmanical deities. They simply noted that within the Brahmanical universe these Gods themselves came into existence and passed away with the cycles, and that they could not help one in escaping the eternal cycles of rebirth and suffering.

A central element of the Brahmanical belief system rejected by the Buddhists was the permanence of the soul, that was reborn from life to life. The Buddhists held that there was no eternal soul but only the individualπs moment to moment desire to continue that bound personality together in this life and propelled some misunderstood effects of that personality into the future. The Buddhists were among those Indians whose speculation produced the concept of the zero and the decimal system, based upon the idea of an empty place holder. We call our numbers Arabic because it was the Arabs who brought them to Europe from India. The Buddhist concept of the individual personality is very much like this empty place holder, which serves its purpose without having a permanent existence.

The Second Urbanization

Visual imagery in permanent materials and a monumental scale return to South Asia in the third century BCE with the growth of cities and the development of crafts, trade and writing that go with them. The growth of urban centers led to the creation of regional states and the emergence of South Asiaπs first multi-regional state, the Mauryan empire (321- 185 BCE). The third emperor of the Mauryan dynasty, Ashoka Maurya (r. 272-231) who called himself in his inscriptions Priadarshi (Beloved of the Gods), is also remembered as the model Buddhist monarch. In his own records as well as those of Buddhist tradition, Ashoka is remembered for his revulsion at the slaughter he caused by his conquest of Orissa, in far eastern India, following which he renounced violence as a means of rule and claimed to have turned to the Buddhaπs dharma as a better path,

C The Lion-Capitaled Standard, 8π, Maurya Dynasty, c 272-231 BCE., Vaishali

For our study of monumental arts, Ashokaπs major contribution is his patronage of the development of art in stone, with a series of column standards with symbolic capitals. The sandstone dharmacakra-lion capital, dug up at Sarnath in 1905, comes from the top of one of these fifty foot polished sandstone columns, upon which there is a long inscription dictated in the name of the Emperor. It is message to the Buddhist sangha in which the emperor, claiming to be a Buddhist bhikkhu (monk) himself, warns against schism that will divide the community. Because here, as in many of his many other important public inscriptions, it is stated that this statement should be put on pillars where they already stand, as well as pillars erected for the purpose, we recognize that he has not invented the form. Indeed there already existed a Brahmanical tradition of Indra stambhas.

What we have in the Ashokan animal pillar standard seems to be an Ashokan-Buddhist use of an existing form and possibly the rendering of that tradition into stone. The fully developed nature of that tradition from its inception in stone can be taken to indicate that it was already well developed in perishable materials such as wood and plaster.[6] With the exception of the dharmachakra-lion pillar type, considered next, the genre consists of single animals capitals such as this one from Vaishali in Bihar.

3 Dharmachakra-Lion capital, 8π, Maurya, 272-231 BCE. Sarnath

The Sarnath lion capital offers us a brilliant heraldic image of four addorsed lions, facing in the four directions, standing over an abacus an elaborate abacus and bell capital. On the abacus there are wheels beneath each of the lion torsos and animals apparently representing the four directions, in between: a bull, a horse, a lion and an elephant. Though it is no longer visible, there was a great wheel, in the shape depicted on the abacus, that originally stood over the lions heads.

This combination of four lions holding up a wheel is depicted in reliefs on a number of Buddhist monuments and duplicated at the site of Sanchi. What we donπt know is whether it was intended to refer to the Buddha ãwhose message, the texts tell us, was to echo through the world like the lionπs roarã or to the emperor himself. The wheels of the pillar may be interpreted to refer to the Buddhaπs dharma, which was regularly represented by a dharma cakra (wheel of the law), or the emperorπs status which was that of a cakra vartin (universal ruler).

Unlike the single animal capitals, the dharmacakra-lion capitals share aspects of their imagery with the art of Persia. Though they didnπt have animal capitaled standards, the Persians, in their palace at Persepolis, did employ monumental polished sandstone pillars with saddle capitals that included paired lions with precisely the features we see at Sarnath. Many of the particular details of the heraldic lion we see portrayed are found earlier at Persepolis and elsewhere in the Achaemenid empire, destroyed by Alexander half a century earlier. As in Harappan times, the nearest large scale neighboring civilization to South Asia lay on the Iranian plateau.

* Persepolitan lion capital

What we see are two distinct versions of a shared imagery, like shared terms in different visual languages. Persian lion capitals come in saddleback pairs for architectural use on fluted pillars. None of the other animals appearing on Persian saddle capitals appear in India, with the exception of the ox, which is distinctly different. The case of the heraldic lions is unquestionably so close it must be the result of conscious sharing. The lion faces and foreparts are essentially interchangeable. The bell capital form found in both places ãwith its spaghetti molding, snaking around angled wedgesã is also clearly shared, though in that case in clearly distinct variants. Do we have Persian stone workers bringing their craft to an Indian client?

The rigid heraldic formality of the lion with its repeated hair tufts fits well into art of Achaemenid Persepolis. The presence of the more typically-Indian, naturalistic animals circling on the abacus below, tells us that there was at this time in India a style of a different sort that didnπt exist in Persia. Among the two dozen other Ashokan or Mauryan animal capitals, none except the duplicate of this one, found at Sanchi, carries a shared animal imagery. The possibility that it was Persia stone workers who brought the technique to India is a very good one; the heraldic lions of the Sarnath capital seem to indicate this, and to suggest that they brought some of their design traditions along as well.

The British Orientalists, who studied the Ashokan pillars in the 19th and early 20th century, interpreted them to indicate a dependence of Indian culture on foreign sources, much in the mold of their claim that India could not continue without Britainπs colonial presence to guide it. More recent interpreters find the sharing important evidence of cultural connections, but not dependence. The mature development of the naturalistic style of the other animals found on Ashokan pillars, and the quite consistent variant of the bell capital and unfluted pillar are evidence of the continuity of a well developed style already in existence when the South Asian sharing of with Persian heraldic forms occurred.

4 Entrance facade, Lomas Rishi, , Maurya, late third century, Barabar Hills

The rock cut sanctuaries of the Buddhistsπ rivals, the Ajivaka sect, at the Barabar Hills include the Lomas Rishi cave, with its finely cut entrance doorway. The inscription inside the doorway attributes the patronage to Ashokaπs grandson Bimbisara. Cut into the side of a whale back of granite, we have recorded in stone a precise copy of contemporaneous wood and thatch construction. The design represents a slightly peaked arch constructed of thatched leaves over a wooden frame. The two uprights stand at a slight angle in from vertical, connected by three interior arches, with a curving roof over prominent rafters. Between the bolts of the lower arches march pairs of elephants emerging from a pair of crocodilian makaras. Between the upper arches is a lattice screen. Beneath is a doorway repeating the slight angle of the outer pillars both in the outline of the passageway and in the lean of the passage face, back from vertical.

The precision of the reproduction of the wood joinery forms in the stone suggests that the wooden structure copied may have had particular prestige. The Sanskrit word used to describe the finely cut, interlocking wooden technique seen here is sandhi (joinery). It is the same word used to define the particularly prestigeous aspect of Sanskrit language, the highly refined joinery of prefixes, roots, and suffixes the distinguish the elite language of the religious texts and court language from the vernacular of common discourse. The architectural imagery of the contemporary and later reliefs shows two classes of structures, comparable to these two classes of language, a vernacular of mud and wattle and an elite form of refined joinery carpentry, which we shall see as in the monumental tradition.

5 Great Stupa, c 10 BCE - 10 CE, Early Andhra, Sanchi

Among the Buddhistπs most important monumental creations were the solid mound-shaped funerary memorials to the Buddhaπs nirvana they called dhatu garbha (relic chambers), caitya (piles) or stupa (peaks). There is an early Buddhist text in which the Shakyamuni (the historical Buddha), responds to the question about what to do with his[7] remains, that if they could place them in a mound at a crossroads, as was common for other important beings of the time. The Buddhists constructed stupas not only over the remains of Shakyamuni, which were divided up after his cremation, but at the sites of important events of his life, and over objects closely associated with him.

We also need to remember that Siddhartha was not the only being to reach enlightenment. A great many monks of the Buddhist sangha were believed to have reached enlightenment in the first five hundred years after the historical Buddhaπs enlightenment. There were thus a good many stupas to be found throughout India, and eventually throughout Asia. Most, of course, were supposed to house fragmentary relics of Sakyamuni, as was most likely the case of the Great Stupa at Sanchi. The other monumental stupa at the site held remains of eight of Shakyamuniπs most respected deciples. A somewhat smaller, but highly decorated, one nearby contained relics of his two most respected deciples. There were dozens of smaller stupas there.

Sanchi is located in central India. The Sri Lankan chronicles relate that Ashokaπs son Mahendra visited the site on his way to bring Buddhism to Sri Lanka. Sanchi was a sangharama, a monetary site with monks living quarters (vihara) as well as stupas, monumental pillars and eventually a number of temples, for worshipping the Buddha in a figurative form. It was located, like most Buddhist monastic sites safely beyond the secular distractions of the local urban settlement, but along a major trade route and within distance of lay settlements, where the monks could go on their daily rounds to beg for food.

6 Plan and Section, Great Stupa, 120π diameter Sanchi

With the exception of its central-planned layout, the stupa is quite different from the funerary memorials of other Indo-European cultures. The stupa is a solid mound faced with stone, brick or plaster. In the more elaborate examples, they are circled by a joinery railing. Originally constructed in Ashokan times, the Sanchi stupa was enlarged to its current size, of about 120 feet in diameter, and provided with a vedika railing, by the end of the first century BCE, when the torana (gateway) were erected.

Sanchi shows the early Buddhist stupa in its full development, with a harmika (upper railed space) and a chattra (parasol) at its peak and surrounding railings. The chattra are symbols of royalty. The triple chattra here may refer to the conventional Indian concept of the universe as the three worlds. Some texts call the shaft supporting the chattra a yasti, and consider it a symbol for the axis of the universe. The mound is thus regularly treated as a representation of Meru, the world mountain at the center of the universe. Sanchiπs Great Stupa also has an Ashokan pillar overlooking it on the south, that is a close duplicate of the lion-capitaled, inscribed pillar found at Sarnath.

In typical Indian fashion, the stupa incorporates several distinct layers of imagery within a single form. If it is a reliquary mound, and so significant of the Buddhaπs total passing away through the nirvana that is the goal of early Buddhism, the presence of an actual relic makes it at the same time a symbol for the Buddha itself. The main ritual use of the stupa occurs in the devoteeπs circumambulation of the relics, by which they gain spiritual merit by subordinating themselves to the relicπs significance. With the mound built around the parasol-toped world axis yasti, the devotee circumambulates the universe at the same time that they circle the Buddha and its nirvana. Similar rituals of circumabulation are common in Brahmanical ceremonial and throughout the Indo-European world, showing up in the marriage ceremonies of Hindus and Orthodox Christians and in the ritual of the Catholic church as well.

An important thing to remember about early Buddhist worship, is that it was not a path recommended for the members of the bhikshu sangha. The monksπ practice, like their garb and renouncing, monastic lives, were carefully modeled upon the practice of Shakyamuni. That was yogic meditation on the metaphysical path toward enlightenment. It was the for the lay Buddhists, the upasaka and upasika that stupas for worship were constructed. Among the many oaths required of the monk were commitments against singing or presenting garlands to stupas. Thus the presence of stupas at monastic sites were, like the daily begging rounds, a means of bringing about the meeting between the lay and the monastic Buddhists that was a necessity for Buddhism to flourish.

For lay Buddhists support of the the monks was, like worship at a stupa, meritorious, indeed support for monks was a form of worship. In this Buddhists were following a variation of the practice of particular reverence for Brahmans, as the performers of the sacrifice and highest caste, among Brahmanical Hindus.

7 Eastern gateway, Great Stupa, c 10 BCE - 10 CE, Early

Andhra, Sanchi

The railings that surround stupa on the ground level perform two functions. On one hand the perform the practical task of separating the stupaπs ritual space from the mundane space that surrounds it. On the other its adds a prestigeous outer joinery, which is further enhanced with decorated by elaborate gateways. As the railing separates the mundane from the elevated, so the gateways mark the site of passage between mundane world of sensuous reality beyond the stupa and the austerity of the ritual circumambulatory path, within which lies the enshrined relic of the faith. At Sanchi the joinery railing is severely plain. The only marks upon it are the inscriptions naming the donors of each piece and those to whom they dedicate the merit for their donation. The torana (gateway arches), are located on arms extended out from the structure force those entering to turn to first to their left and then to their right to enter.

The toranaπs form appears to be derived from the gateway of the cattle corral, the three raised crossbars match the three bars of the fence below, that they would fit against when lowered to close the gate.[8] In this ritual form the uprights and cross bars are covered with three sorts of classes of imagery: simple decorations; narrative reliefs depicting tales from Buddhist lore; and the images of figures symbolically present at the site.

The narrative panels on the vertical uprights are simply framed by decorative repetitions of lotus rhizomes or miniature railing motifs, but the developed horizontal panels are represented as if they were scroll paintings, hung on the structure. These panels emerge from spirals, rolled out for displayed on the beam ends, as we know the story tellers of the time did to illustrate their tales. In some cases a curving diagonal from the spiral seems to depict the scrollsπ turning from one plane to the next.[9]

D The Buddhaπs Enlightenment, North Torana, middle crossbar, c 10 BCE - 10 CE, Sanchi

A closer look at the central cross bar on the inside of the north torana shows us the story of Shakyamuniπs enlightenment in three, simultaneous scenes. On the left we see a single-barred torana leading to a slab beneath the Bodhi (enlightenment) tree, under which the wandering Siddhartha, seated in meditation, attained the state of perfected consciousness that rendered him a Buddha. Coming through the torana is the maid servant sent to bring a meal to the Yaksha (spirit) of the tree, who found the Buddha there and offered him his first meal after his success. In the middle we see the seated Mara (the ≥destroyer≤) the demon who tried to distract Siddhartha from his meditation. To the right are his demon cohorts beyond him we see Maraπs demon cohorts who showered the Buddha with noise and arrows and all manner of distractions, including a dancing girl.

What is distinctly missing from the scene is the image of the Buddha, who for the first five centuries or so, following the enlightenment, was never depicted, but only symbolized by devices like the empty seat here beneath the tree. This aniconic phase of Buddhism is both striking and not explicitly explained. It appears to be the result of an attempt to not recall, concretely, the being who has transcended material reality by achieving the total extinction (nirvana). There is a similar verbal gesture in the most common manner of referring to that being as the tathagata, literally the one who has passed this way, and even in all the other names, like even the term buddha, which is not a name but a description, ≥the one who was enlightened (or awakened).≤ The idea of the empty place holder is illustrated by the slab under the tree.

8 Yakshi, Eastern gateway, Great Stupa, c 10 BCE - 10 CE, Sanchi

The third sort imagery we find on the stupa is seen in the mostly freestanding figures who represent beings in attendance at the site. We can see horse and elephant riders, fantastic animals and Yakshas standing upon and between the crossbars. Below, inside the uprights stand relief doorguardians. The most prominent of these attending figures are the Yakshi, leaning on trees, as actual bracket supports of the lowest crossbars on each side. Most of these have been lost due to the wear of time, vandalism and museum collections, but the one on the east torana remains in situ. Her ample and sensuous form represents the sensuous reality of the world that the Buddhist must overcome to reach enlightenment, that they accomplish symbolically every time they pass through the torana to enter the pradakshina (circumambulatory) path.

The Yakshi on the east torana signifies the fecundity of the natural world. She is posed in a form with a long iconographic and structural history. It is called the salabhanjika pose, where a young woman holds onto a tree branch, kicking back at its trunk and sending it into blossom, and it is found on bracket figures of every Indian sect over the next thousand years. Buddhist in particular are likely to recall that it was in the pose of holding onto a tree limb that Mayadevi gave birth to the future Shakyamuni.

In this case we see the Yakshi leaning out from the upright holding with one arm around a lower branch and the upper hand grasping the branch of a mango tree. Its characteristic leaves and bunches of ripe mangoes form a rich relief pattern above her head. The figure itself is sculpt in even deeper, nearly fullround relief. She is shown with legs encased in anklets and full thighs. Her waist is circled by a thick belt, composed of rows of beads. Her belly has a slight bulge, above which are fully rounded breasts. The S curve of her arms, reaching from the treeπs upper limb across to the trunk, signals a tonic rhythm repeated below in her crossed legs. There is a careful balance struck here between the full roundness of the relief and the planer-slab of the composition.

The performance is a strongly characteristic of the site and the Early Andhra period, mixing a love of rippling surface textures with a few strong masses. The rugged patterns of the anklets, belts, necklaces and plaits in the hair and the slab-like pose with its strong outline, are both repeated in the rhythmical and planar mass of the tree. The view from the back and the side emphasize both the flatness of the whole and the plasticity of the relief against it. The hard straight lines of the mango leaves, or the Yakshiπs hair against her back, all make this ≥archaic≤ geometry clear.

E Sangarama layout, c 100 BCE, Bhaja

The rock-cut sangharama at Bhaja overlooks a major trade route from the west coast trading ports to the Deccan plateau, and north into the Ganga valley. This is still a major route today. It is located half-way up to the top of the ghats, well above the road and out of the commercial traffic, but still accessible to the travelers whose material support was necessary for the monks survival. The layout of Bhaja reveals the basic structures of every sangharama, rectangular vihara dormitories of individual cells for the monks, and the central stupa shrine for the lay visitors who created and maintained the site.

Monks were allowed no labor. Their dharma required them to spend their day in meditation upon the Buddhaπs enlightenment, leading to their own enlightenment. Indeed they were classed into the four stages of Arhatship, that marked their growth toward perfect awakening. Even if all did not reach full awakening, this was still the goal of all. Meanwhile the only practical activity allowed them was the daily round of begging before mid-day, during which they might impart some wisdom and encouragement to the lay folk from whom they gathered their daily sustenance. Lay Buddhists by contrast led normal domestic, working lives gathering merit, for a better birth and potentially the strength to become monks themselves at some future moment. They could gather merit mainly by following the moral values prescribed by the monks and the texts, by support of the monks and the sangha, and by worship of the monks and the relics of the most successful monks, the Buddhas.

Thus the creation of a vihara of cells for monks to reside in, like the creation of a stupa to circumambulate or a hall to house a stupa were meritorious acts. Like the different altars of the Brahmanπs different sacrifices, the Buddhists evolved quite distinctive geometric forms for their different structures. Viharas were rectilinear, tending to square, and gathered in sets around an open court. Chaitya griha, halls, were elongated and apsidal at the rear, to resonate the round form of the stupa, contained within them. Most often they had an interior colonnade to set off nearer and further approaches to the stupa.

10 Section and Plan, Chaitya hall, 120 CE, Karli

A section and plan of the chaitya hall at Karli, overlooking the same trade route from across the valley, shows the same sort of chaitya hall two centuries later. The major differences between are a good example of the development of traditional art in India, and how much it is like traditional art anywhere else in the world. Over time the essential forms are maintained and developed as each new generation works to continue the tradition and at the same time refine its meaning and usages. The chaitya griha at Karli is larger than Bhaja and planned with more elaboration. Where Bhajaπs chaitya was given a structural facade after itπs forms were carved from the mountainside, the excavators at Karli were able to keep a stone facade as they cut into the cliff. Where Bhaja had a colonnade of plain octagonal pillars around its hall, Karliπs pillars stand in handsome pot shaped bases and carry bell shaped capitals with complex animal and human-couple capitals above.

By maintaining a facade in stone, the excavators at Karli were able to construct what all the monument builders of our study, in all cultures, are interested in: things that will last for centuries in the fine forms of their creation, to maintain the prestige of their traditions and their creators. As at Bhaja, Karliπs design included metal and wood elements that are more vulnerable to degradation than the living stone of the cliff. Thus though Bhajaπs teakwood arches have survived, the chattra of its stupa and the brick and wood of its facade have been totally lost. At Karli, by contrast, we have the full five story facade that surrounds its entrance, intact on the inside of its entrance porch, and a great lion-capitaled standard in front. Like the temples of the classical Mediterranean, the chaitya at Karli is designed around simple basic proportions. The diameter of the stupa is half the width of the hall within the colonnade, and a third the diameter of the hall outside. The width of hall is equal to its height and a third the interior length of the hall.

9 Interior, Chaitya hall, 120 CE, Karli

The view within shows the richness of the effect. The elaborate columns with their double capitals and attending couples march muscularly down the hall under teak beams, still set in the ceiling. The giant rock-cut sculpture here reproduces more common structures built of perishable materials that have since disappeared. At the end of the hall we see the structure it was created to house, the domed-cylinder of the stupa, with its two levels marked by railing reliefs, its dome and harmika above, and even its teak chattra intact. A memory of the hallπs origins survive in the colonnadeπs shift to plain octagonal pillars behind the stupa, the better to show its form.

E Facade, Chaitya hall, facade, 120 CE, Karli

The stone facade at Karli holds onto the arched tunnel vault that defines its interior, with a great arched chandrasala (moon hall) window, partly detailed in teak and partly in stone. There is a carefully enunciated attempt here to preserve the actual details of the wood joinery that is the basis of this architecture in the structural design being preserved here in stone.

11 Couple, Chaitya hall, facade, 120 CE, Karli

Up in the facade at Karli, we find the figures attending at the site. The mithuna (couples) seated on elephants, horses and fantastic animals in the capitals of the interior, are performing the same function. The couple we see fit into the curving triangular frames at the bottom of the great window are among those attending the stupa. They easily remind us of similar figures fit with equally enjoyable finesse into the distinctive architectural forms, in the squashed-triangles of the Greek pediment and the semicircular arch of the Romanesque tympanum. The simplified, rhythmic convexities of anatomical forms here are possibly fuller than those we saw at Sanchi, but otherwise not much different.

The figures here are donor couples or mithuna (couples). Indeed they are symbolic of the male and female necessary for creation[10] The donatory inscriptions of the monument indicate some royal patrons but mostly lay commercial patrons. These figures do represent the lay followers of the Buddha. Most of the home towns given for these donors are locatable places up and down the west coast. Some are Yavanas (Ionians ?), descendants of the Hellenistic Greeks, active in the commercial world of western India and inhabiting cities in the Indus region, called Gandhara. Where the followers of the Brahmans were encouraged never to leave the regions under Brahmanical rule, Buddhist could travel freely and became ancient Indiaπs international traders. One did not need to be born a Buddhist to become a follower of the Buddha. This was quite different from the requirement of birth in a Brahmanical caste to participate in the Brahmanical faiths.

Once again, however, we have found a major Buddhist monument without a trace of the Buddhaπs form. Certainly the stupa representing the Buddhaπs nirvana represents the Buddha, but just as certainly there was a reluctance to offer any image of the Buddhaπs human form.

14 Enlightenment Buddha Preaching, 2nd century, Mathura, 2π 3≤

This situation did change during the first century of the common era when images of the Buddha begin to appear in three different regional styles. Though there has been controversy over where the first images of the Buddha were produced in stone, there has never been any controversy over the iconographic form of the Buddhaπs image. The Buddha was pictured to look like the monks, seen throughout the Buddhist world, since their charge was to model their appearance as well as their practice on Shakyamuni. The monks wore a robe quilted out of rags to signify their status. It was a poncho like covering with a hole in the center from which emerged their head, shoulder and right arm. Beneath the robe was an inner skirt. Their hair was regularly shaved back. The only difference between the monksπ appearance and the Buddhaπs was the set of lankshana (transcendent signs) cited by texts as indications of the special powers the Buddha gained through enlightenment.

The north version of the Buddha image was seen most prominently at the great art and religious center of Mathura, located about ninety miles or so south of the modern capital of Delhi on the River Jamuna, one of the largest tributaries of the Ganga. The Enlightenment Buddha seen here comes from the Katra mound at Mathura and is one of a series of closely related images produced from the same workshop or within the same tradition. The work is in the white spotted red sandstone common throughout this region. We see the Buddha seated on a lion throne in a posture the texts call padmasana, the lotus pose, with feet locked, cross-legged, one above the other. This a yogic pose, and expressing the yogic practices that were the basis of the monkπs practice. Though trance was not an absolute necessity to reach enlightenment, it was the only recommended path, the one followed Shakyamuni.

Here we see Shakyamuni, his right hand raised in a mudra (hand gesture) called abhaya (fear not), indicating that he is addressing his worshippers, and his left hand held palm down on his knee, bhumisparsha, calling the earth to witness, that his five hundred perfected births give him the authority to reach enlightenment. We can see how the robe leaves the right shoulder free. The light cloth reveals the shape of a fleshy body beneath and the cord of the inner skirt around his belly. The folds are gathered over the left arm and across the ankles, spreading out below. His feet are bare, but marked with auspicious signs, like his upraised palm. There is a raised whorl upon his head, called an ushnisha (top knot), representing his enhanced cosmic consciousness. There is a mole between his eyes, called the urna, with a similar connotation. His ears are elongated from the wearing of heavy earrings, when he was a prince, but empty now to symbolize his renunciation of worldly possessions.

Behind him stand two smaller figures in elite secular, rather than monastic, garb. They carry fly whisks. Their diminished scale indicates their subordinate status. Behind the Buddhaπs head is a halo, marked by a scalloped edge, indicating its effulgence of light. This is a device found in the Mediterranean Christian art as well, which seems in both cases to trace to Iranian uses that go back to the 6th century BCE. Above heavenly beings fly in gesturing in reverence, with garlands and flowers. Behind we see the branches and spade shaped leaves of the pipal tree, beneath which the Buddha reached its enlightenment.

The style of Mathura is of a fairly fleshy figure in a light cotton wrapped so tightly against the body of the Buddha the anatomical features show through, as if it were transparent. The globular head is composed of almost geometric convexities. The eyes are smaller globes within the slight concavities of the surrounding sockets, one hard-edged form nestled within another. The eye brows are slim spaghetti ridges. The cheeks and chin emerge more softly, but as prominently.

The continuity of the visual form seen here, with what has preceded it in South Asia is particularly striking. The yogic pose and the animals beneath the throne may be seen on the Lord of Beasts seal of the Indus Valley Civilization. The choice of the Pipal tree also echoes a the most important vegetal form found in the imagery of the Indus Civilization.

The inscription on the edge of the throne says that the image was dedicated by Amoha-asi, a Buddhist nun, ≥for the welfare and happiness of all sentient beings.≤ Susan Huntington points out that this is a clear expression of Mahayana sentiment, seen on many images, ≥based on the belief that merit (punya) need not be earned by an individual but can be transferred to [them] by another who has gained it through various means.≤[11]

As we have no explanation, in the voluminous Buddhist textual tradition, for there being no images of the Buddha during the first half-millenium or so after the enlightenment, there was no explanation for the arrival of the Buddhaπs image either. Nor did the Buddhists produce the sort of shilpa or agama (artisan and ritual) texts that the Brahmanical Hindus did, to explain their imagery and the proper methods for its manufacture and interpretation. What we know of the imagery we have gleaned from oblique references in other sorts of texts. So total is this lack of interest, we cannot help but speculate that the traditions of image making were distinct from the traditions monastic practice and theology.

What we can say is that the icon worship that such images connote are the result of the Bhakti theological movement that swept across South Asia from the first century BCE on, bringing us Mahayana Buddhism, the second major Buddhist path, that begins to emerge as a distinct theology and practice at this time. Though the worship of images of the Buddha is not an exclusively Mahayana practice, it has a relevance in Mahayana that it lacks in the earlier Buddhist traditions. These early traditions, called pejoratively Hinayana, the lesser path, by the Mahayanists, are best preserved in the Theravada texts of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. There the Buddha is considered to be a human being who reached enlightenment. It is in the Theravada texts that the Buddha dismisses the idea of worshipping Gods, because Gods canπt help one toward nirvana. Theravada texts refer to the Brahmanical Gods of the Vedic tradition as great beings who recognize enlightenment and the dharma preached by the Buddha as superior to themselves. They also make the point, most absolutely, that once nirvana is reached there is nothing left of a being to be prayed to.

Mahayana, the Buddhism calling itself the Great Path , is by contrast a theistic tradition, in which the Buddha is considered a cosmic being responsible for the maintenance of the world and those within it, a being that manifests itself from time to time as a Buddha to awaken people to the true nature of reality. Even when Buddha images begin to appear in Sri Lanka, the longest lived center of Theravada, the only icon that appears is the Buddha. By contrast Mahayana goes well beyond the Buddha, to elaborate its vast pantheon of deities and quasi-deities.

At the same historical moment that omnipotent and omnipresent theistic deities are being espoused by the Mithraists and Christians of Western Asia and the Mediterranean region, and by the Bhakti phase of Brahmanical religion in South Asia, the Mahayana Buddhists espouse theirs. And like the others they call upon their deity as a savior with which the devotee is to have an emotional personal commitment. This is a major jump from practical exchanges between Brahmans and their Gods, for the benefit of those who can afford them, in the Vedic cult and from the psychological triumph of individual yogic and philosophical rationalism that drive early Buddhism.

13 Seated Buddha in meditating Gandhara

The other early Buddhist style illustrated in our text comes from Gandhara in the Indus region, with strong evidence of the ties there to the culture there to the Hellenistic colonies and trade routes linking South Asia to West Asia and the Mediterranean. Gandhara, which was the southern most satrapy of the Persian empire and the furthest link in Alexanderπs chain of pillaging raids that preceded the founding of the Mauryan empire, was home of a continuing international Hellenistic culture, some of which is distinctly visible in this image. Like nearly all Gandharan art the work is in dark (gray to bluish) slate. It is a finer grained and softer stone than Mathuraπs and so capable of taking finer detail and sharper lines. What we see here is a figure of the Buddha in a yogic pose. The mudra of the hands together in the lap indicates it is in meditation, which goes with the half-closed eyes . Typical of Gandharan Buddhas, the robe covers both shoulders and appears, because of the deeper folds, to be of a heavier cloth. Both of these features likely represent the woolen cloth more appropriate to the colder Gandharan region. Again we have the round face topped by the short cropped hair, the ushnisha, the urna, and the elongated, empty earlobes.

What the two images have in common is their Buddhist imagery; what differentiates them is their different local stone fabrics and visual styles. While the Mathura style has a history in earlier Buddhist and pre-Buddhist imagery in that region, the Gandharan style incorporates Hellenistic traits such as the deeper drapery folds, and far more interest in empirical anatomy as seen in the Mediterranean regionãa feature more visible in other works than in this one.

G Bodhisattva (MFA), Second century Gandhara

The major figure that distinguishes Mahayana Buddhism from, its predecessor was the Bodhisattva, an almost perfectly enlightened being, on the verge of total enlightenment and so nirvana, that holds himself back from that final step in order to remain in this world and help lead other beings to enlightenment. In contrast to Theravada with its four stage Arhat path to personal enlightenment, Mahayana monks proceeded along a ten stage Bodhisattva path dedicated to the enlightenment of others as well as themselves. Unlike early Buddhismπs focus on the monk as the oneπs who could attain enlightenment, Mahayanaπs Bodhisattvas were depicted as lay figures, not the life-renouncers of the Sangha.

Thus Bodhisattva are quite easy to distinguish from Buddhas, since they are dressed like wealthy princes rather begging monastics. We can see that in the example here, where the figure wears a north Indian dhoti, wrapped around his waist and a rich swath of cloth across his shoulder, revealing most of his amply bejeweled chest. Unlike the Buddhaπs shaven head, the Bodhisattva has long sensuous locks and mustaches and wears heavy earrings. There are armlets so important that one on his left arm is poked up through his shawl. There is even a string of amulet cases passing under his right arm in the location where upper caste Hindus wear their sacred thread. He wears sandals. The drapery of Gandhara is revealing of what lies beneath as that of Mathura, but the folds are much deeper and piled one on another with deep undercutting where the figures arms shift it away from the body.

And then there are the Hellenistic connections. The rich torks on this Bodhisattvaπs chest are shared with images of the classical world, as is the more empirically correct anatomy. It has been suggested regularly by European and American specialists that the bow loop on this figureπs head is a borrowing from the Greek korybolos knot seen on the Apollo Belvedere (Intro-7 in Gardner). Other than the fact that both are bows, there is actually no connection and since tying of the hair in a knot was a practical necessity of turban-wearing north Indians down to the present day, it is more likely the product of contemorary practice than an exotic borrowing.

H Bimaran Reliquary, first century, Afghanistan

The Bimaran Reliquary, now in the British Museum, displays another imagery shared across the Hellenistic world, the inhabited arcade, which we have seen in a later Roman sarcophagus (e.g. 10-62). Within the arcade are figures of Buddhas being worshipped by the Vedic Gods Brahma and Indra. What may interest us most here, in a survey of world art, is form of these arches. The South Asian arch is pointed in outline. This is not true of the inside, where it is a definite half-round, but on its exterior where it rises to a peak giving the exterior curve a distinctive ogival form. This combination is subtly true of the Lomas Risi facade we have seen already.[12]

15 Buddha Preaching the First Sermon, 5π3≤, 5th century, Sarnath

If we skip ahead to the Gupta period (c 320- 500) we can see how the Buddhaπs image developed in style over time. The Buddha Preaching the First Sermon from Sarnath, is a particularly important image, coming as it does from the Perfumed Chamber of the temple on the site where the Buddha Shakyamuni was supposed to have preached his sermon, or as the Buddhistπs said: put the wheel of the law into motion. It has become, since its excavation in 1905, the most reproduced image of the Buddha in India and beyond. In the fifth century, when this image was created, Sarnath had become a center of Buddhist artistic production of equal importance to Mathura.

Sarnath Gupta images are known for this sweet somewhat pointed, round, smiling face, suave form and elegant details. All in all this is a model example of the continuity of traditional form. The iconological elements are no different than the earliest works, and yet the stylistic variation is distinctive of this one moment. Compared to the Enlightenment Buddha from Mathuraπs Katra mound, the Sarnath Buddha is taller and slimmer, less fleshy and a bit less archaically angular. The head is still composed largely of convexities, but now they are more blended and less geometrically elemental. The half-closed eyes, signifying meditation, bulge less starkly from the brow and cheeks, with elegantly detailed lids. The lips emerge less distinctly from the jaw. The face holds together as a whole rather than separating into geometric elements. The snail curls of the hair-do form a rippling covering for the head, including an ushnisha that rises more gently and less starkly separate. The effect is more naturalistic and yet still idealistically removed from the earthly plane.

The robe covering both shoulders, clings tightly to a more abstract, less fleshy body. The way the folds cross the wrists, disappear beneath the crossed feet and emerge to cross the legs and fan out on the cushion below is quite handsome. The hands are held together, fingers barely touching, in the mudra of turning the wheel of the law, that signifies the first sermon. This image marks the moment at which the Buddhaπs decision to share the dharma begins to take concrete shape. Of Buddhism two great focuses, jnana (wisdom) leading to the arhatπs enlightenment and nirvana was the focus of Theravada. But now in Mahayana karuna (compassion) takes the center stage and the Buddhaπs commitment to bring others to enlightenment to all. The Sarnath Buddhas sweet approachable expression may signify this goal most effectively the earlier, more abstract images.

The image sits upon a throne supported by fantastic lions. Behind him looms a wonderful halo, the plane circle around the Buddhaπs head bordered with a string of pearls and a broad band of the Gupta periodπs characteristically lush lotus rhizome foliage. There is a pearl course beyond this and then a fine scallop, the vestigial survival of the larger scallops of the Mathura style of three centuries before. Here too a pair of heavenly figures fly in, to shower the Buddha with flowers. Below the throne is a second scene that adds the context of the event. At the center of the panel is the dharma chakra (wheel of the law) seen edge-on, flanked by a pair of kneeling deer, indicating the location of the scene, the deer park at Sarnath. If the image of the Buddha carries on the formula of the Buddha seated in a yogic posture that goes back to Mathura, the pair of opposed deer beneath the figure in the yogic posture takes us back to the Lord of Beasts seal from the Indus Valley period, where we have the same combination of forms. This doesnπt mean that the Buddhaπs image, or even Buddhist yoga, have been around unchanged for the three thousand years that may separate these images, but it does show a continuity of formal patterns that has been sustained for that length of time.

Five of the tiny figures with their hands held in anjali, the clasped mudra of worship or respect, are the ascetics who hearing the sermon joined with him to form the sangha. The sixth is a woman accompanied by a child, likely the donor who paid for the creation of the piece. This Buddha, carved in a highly raised relief, nearly free from the slab behind, was placed on an altar within a sanctum, to be worshipped as a source of merit in the Mahayana Buddhist path toward enlightenment.

J Ajanta Sangharama, 1st cent. BCE through the 5th cent. CE

At Ajanta in the northwest corner of the Deccan plateau has survived a set of thirty rock-cut Buddhist shrines spanning chronologically from the first century before the common era to the end of the fifth century, and preserving the most extensive remains of painting found anywhere in South Asia before the Medieval period.

* Interior Cave I, c 500 CE, Ajanta

If we begin before the First Sermon Buddha in the latest viharaπs sanctum, we can see how the stone at Ajanta was fully painted, sculpture as well as the walls. Backing out of the sanctum we see how it was set behind a pillared entrance porch. Backing further, into the courtyard at the center we look through the colonnade at the wall into which the cells of the monks that line the hall are sunk. In the cell we can see the Buddha in the shrine, seated over the deer and ascetics listening to the First Sermon. Outside on the walls flanking the sanctum we can see the monumental painted images of great Bodhisattva and hosts attending the event and amplifying it to a cosmic, Mahayana dimension.

The painted Bodhisattva are paired. Vajrapani, symbolic of wisdom and the enlightenment leans away to the Buddhaπs proper right, while Padmapani, symbolic of compassion, bends in a complementary mirroring pose away to its right.

12 Bodhisattva Padmapani, Cave I, c 500 CE, Ajanta

As compared to the wall painting of the Roman empire, what we see here is less spatially naturalistic but more lush in its encrustation of details. The figure of Padmapani (the being who carries the lotus) stands in a triple-bent pose, his head tilted toward the Buddha in the shrine and down toward living viewer standing in front. Beneath his golden crown we see the same sweet face and simplified body of Gupta Sarnath. There is an indication of mass here in the darkening of the contours toward the edges and the addition of white highlights on the most raised features, such as the ridge of the brow and nose. Though it is difficult to photograph and so difficult to read the figure is surrounded by a host of accompanying figures and landscape motifs including rocks and plants.

The goal of the sceneπs painters seems less to create the sort of rationally readable naturalistic space we find at the Villa of Mysteries (10-15) or the Villa Livia (10-17), than to create an ambiguously sensuous cosmos, where the difference between our space and that of the walls. The physical situation of these Bodhisattva is 120 feet from the light, deep in the side of the rock cliff, lit by the flickering light of oil lamps, in the spaces between the monkπs cells and the plastic but similarly painted image of the Buddha in the sanctum. The metaphysical situation of the Bodhisattva is their bridging between the sanctum image of the Buddha and the living Bodhisattva monks who occupied surrounding cells of the vihara.

K Stupa of Interior Cave XIX, c 475 CE, Ajanta

The last image we will look at, to give our view of the Gupta an architectural aspect will be the interior of one of the later caitya grihaπs at Ajanta. Cave XIX was created near the end of the fifth century and shows the where the Mahayana Buddhists took the earlier imagery of the memorial reliquary mound. The stupa of Cave XIX continues the tradition of the cylindrical drum carrying a dome and harmika under a set of chattras within the apsidal tunnel vault, with a multiplication and an elaboration of each of its major elements.

Most significantly the stupa now carries an elaborate frame, projected from its front in which we see the image of the Buddha. Whether we are meant to consider this a view of the Buddha as symbolically equivalent to the stupa or a view of the Buddha symbolically within the stupa, there is a clear equivalence between the two iconic symbols. What was in early Buddhism a symbol of the nirvana and the Awakened oneπs complete passing away through nirvana, is here a Mahayana evocation of the cosmic Buddhaπs universal immanence.

The surrounding interior as a clerestory of alternating images of seated and standing Buddhas, over pillar bracket-capitals, each carrying a seated Buddha. This offers us a view of the Mahayana cosmogony, in which countless Buddhas inhabit the universe, each teaching its dharma in a separate Buddha field, all gathered here around the Buddha of this field.

L The Colossal Buddha, Bamiyan, Afghanistan, 4th -5th cent.

The most spectacular image of the Buddha known was the great standing image of the Buddha at Bamiyan in Afghanistan, near where the trade routes running from China to the Mediterranean are met from are met by the routes coming north from India. It was along these routes that Buddhism was spread across Central Asia to China by the art of South Asia blends into the art of Central Asia to the east and the Iranian plateau to the west.

There were over a hundred Buddhist sanctuaries cut into the mile and a half of cliff face between the two great Buddhas that anchored the vast site of Bamiyan. The 175 foot Buddha at the western end of the cliff was the most spectacular. Carved out of the living rock of the cliff, it was finished with plaster details built up over ropes, plugged into the stone, to create the folds in the Buddhaπs robe. The style is developed out of the forms of Gandhara seemed here more flattened-out and softly rounded, like the Gupta images of India to the south.

The Chinese Buddhist pilgrims, who came to India in search of the texts and images and teaching of the Buddhaπs homeland commented on the golden splendor of this image. It is the one that destroyed by iconoclasts in the year 2000.

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[1] This work is called the ≥Priest-king≤ in our volume, is a misleading, if picturesque, title, for which there is no basis. My calling the work ≥Limestone≤ on the handout in class has been superseded since 1999 by reanalysis of the stone. The date of 2500-1700 BC, in the book, has been superceded in the most recent decadeπs carbon 14 testing.

[2] I say untranslated. Actually the script has been translated nearly a dozen times, but with no onewilling to recognize or accept anyone elseπs system.

[3] The one major animal of later times they never depcited was the horse, the major animal of the Vedic Arya, domesticated in central asia and imported into India only many centuries later.

[4] I am calling it the Master of Beastes rather than ≥Buffalo Man≤ because the horns are, despite theri curves, different from those seen on the waterbufallo in the scele itself. If they were intended specifically as waterbuffalo horns they would more likely be like those of the waterbuffalo.

[5]There is a continuing controversey over the relation of the Vedic Arya both later Indic cilivilizations and the cultures of Europe, growing out of the conquest and colonization of South Asia by the British between the mid-18 and mid-20 centrury. The British and Americans archaeoogists, who were the first excavators and interpretors of the Indus Civilization, thought that the Arya were blond, light-skinned invaders from the ≥west,≤ who had, like themselves, conquered the indigenous peoples of the subcontinent, whom they supposed to be the dark skined Dravidian speaking peoples who have in recorded times occupied the southern most part of the subcontinent. This popular thesis, joined to the 19th and 20th centuries race theory, superimposed on the Brahmanπs racial-caste system, produced an interpretation of Indian culture as one founded by an invading Arya raceπs conflict with an indigenous Dravidian one. Though this has been disproven and abandoned by scholars, it has continued to flourish in popular thought and the survey literature.

[6] It was the conviction of John Irwin, the traditions most recent scholar, that it was practiced in metal, (Burlington:...)

[7] It was the Buddhistπs beliefs that a fully enlightened being ceased to have gender. Once enlightened they referred to Buddhaπs as it, rather than a gendered pronoun like ≥he≤ or possessive like ≥his.≤ When it does not sound too awkward I shall attempt to honor this principal.

[8] The fence has three cross bars called suci (needles) that fit into the upright thaba. The uppermost bar is called the ushnisha, or capstone. As the thaba hold up the suci, the ushnisha connects the thaba.

[9] In Brahmanical lore a spiral called pranava is the symbol of the metaphysical symbol Om, out of which the alternative realities of the world are produced.

[10] Calling them ≥loving couples≤ as our volume does, is too suggestive of the intentionally erotic images that come in later times than of those here.

[11] Huntington 152 + note.

[12] most significantly this is true of the aedicula on the Gandharan shrine of the double eagle at Taxila. See Harle 55.