The Theory Of Greek Influence On Indian Art - 4

The same is true of the Persepolitan pillars and winged animals of the older Mauryan art. Of internationalism these are eloquent, but by no means of intellectual imitation. India, as the producer of so many of the rare and valuable commodities of the world, was the most international of early countries. The positions of her great merchants, such as was that one who excavated the Chaitya at Karle, may well have transcended those of kings. Amongst the most important of the world's highways were those that joined Babylon and Nineveh to the Deccan and to Pataliputra, or Egypt and Arabia to Ceylon and China. It shows the dignity and international standing of India that she should have used freely the best of the age, undeterred by any premature or artificial sense of national boundaries. If we take one group of winged animals quoted by Grunwedel from Sanchi, there is even a kind of accuracy of scholarship in the way these are given foreign men, as riders, in their own dress and with their heraldic devices, so to speak, of the time. Those who incline to think that because she used Persepolitan pillars, therefore she derived her civilisation from West Asia, have to ignore the whole matrix of the original and individual in which such elements inhere. The pillars of the Chaitya at Karle may go by the name of Persepolitan, but the idea of the Chaitya-hall itself, for which they are utilised, has never been supposed to be anyting but Indian. The pillar with a group of animals on the top of it is not, in truth, adapted to teh structural uses that it serves at Karle. It is the creation of Asia at an age when pillars were conceived as standing free, to act as lnadmars, as vehicles of publication, as memorials of victory, and possibly even as lampstandards. But this use was common to all Asia, including India, and though the Achamenides adorn Persepolis with it in the sixth century before Christ, and Ashoka uses it at Sarnath or at Sanchi in the third, we must remember that the latter is not deliberately copying mouments from a distant site, but is translating into stone a form probably familiar to his people and his age in wood. In the simple Chaityas Nine and Ten, at Ajanta-excavated during the same period as Karle, but by simple monks intent upon thier use, instead of by a great merchant-prince, with his ecclesiastical ostentation-the columns from floor to roof are of unbroken plainness. The result may lose in vividness and sphlendour, but it certainly gains in solemnity and appropriateness. And the extremes of both these purposes, we must remember are of the Indian genius.

Other things being equal, it is to be expected that symbols will emanate from the same sources as ideals. For an instance of this we may look at the European worship of the Madonna. Here it is those churches that create and preach the ideal which are also responsible for the symbolism under which it is conveyed. It would seem indeed as if it were only as the vehicle of the ideal that the symbol could possibly be invented or disseminated. Now if we ask what was the radiating centre for the thought and aspiration of Buddhism, the answer comes back without hesitatoin or dispute-Magadha. The Holy Land of Buddhism was the streach of country between Banaras and Pataliputra. Here the First Council had been held in the year after Buddha's death, at Rajgir. Here at Pataliputra, under Ashoka, was held the great Second Council about teh year 242 B.C. It is quite evident that the lead so well taken by Magaadha, in recognising the importance of Buddhism during the lifetime of its founder, had been signally maintained, and for the Council of Kanishka to assert canonical rank, it must have been attended by numerous and authoritatvie representatives from the monasteries of Magadha, notably that of Nalanda, whose supremacy as the seat of exposition and elucidation was still acknowledged in the time of Hiouen Tsang in the middle of the seventh century of the Christain era. Unless then there should be unimpugnable evidence to the contrary, the rule being that ideals create symbolisms as their vehicle, and the source of Buddhist thought having always been Magadha, we should expect that that country would be responsible amongst other things for the divising and fixing of the image of Buddha. Thata this was the common belief on the matter in teh seventh century, moreover, appears highly probable from the life of Hiouen Tsang, whose biographer and disciple Hwui Li, represents him as bearing back to China, and passing through the country of Takkha or Gandhara on the way, a precious load of books and images, and amongst these first, and evidently most sacred and important, that of Buddha preaching his First Sermon at Banaras, fully described. From this it is clear that in China, in the seventh century at all events, India was regarded as the source of authentic interpretations. To India, and more especially to Magadha, the East turned again and again to refresh and deepen her own inspiration. For final pronouncements men did not look to the schools of the frontier countries and daughter chruches.

Now there are to be found in Bihar, the ancient Magadha, to this day, the vestiges of a long history of Buddhist sculpture in many phases and developments. No one has ever denied to India the pre-Buddhistic existence of secular sculpture of the human form. In front of the Chaitya at Karle (date 129 B.C.) we find integral figures of men and women which may be portraits of kings queens, or of donors and their wives. In the rail of Bharhut we find figures in the round, and abundance of animal representation. And the whole range of Naga-types is common from the earliest times.

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The main theme of my life is to take the message of Sanatana Dharma to every home and pave the way for launching, in a big way, the man-making programme preached and envisaged by great seers like Swami Vivekananda. - Mananeeya Eknathji

विवेकानन्द केन्द्र कन्याकुमारी (Vivekananda Kendra Kanyakumari) Vivekananda Rock Memorial & Vivekananda Kendra : http://www.vivekanandakendra.org Read Article, Magazine, Book @ http://eshop.vivekanandakendra.org/e-granthalaya Cell : +91-941-801-5995, Landline : +91-177-283-5995

. . . Are you Strong? Do you feel Strength? — for I know it is Truth alone that gives Strength. Strength is the medicine for the world's disease . . . This is the great fact: "Strength is LIFE; Weakness is Death."

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The Theory Of Greek Influence On Indian Art - 3

There are two different theories about foreign influence on the Indian art of the Buddhist period. One is that from the beginning Indiahad owed almost everything artistic to external forces. The Ashokan pillars were Persepolitan, the winged animals were Assyrian, the very lotuses and plant-forms were West-Asian. The school which thus almost holds that India has no originality in matters of art, leans its own weight for the sources of her Buddhistic inspiration on the existence in Bactria,ever since the time of Alexander, of Greek artisan colonies. From these what was not communicated thus had been the gift of Persia to the East. These two sources being postulated, we may accept the whole story of India's greatness in matters artistic without doubt and without distress.

The other theory bears more espcially and definitely on the evolution of the statue of Buddha as a sacred image. This, it is held, was not an Indian invention. The idea was first conceived in the country of Gandhara, the contact -point between India and the West. Here, between the beginning of the Christain era and the year A.D. 540, when they were broken up by the tyrant Mihirakula, there was a very rich development of Buddhism in the form of Stupas and monasteries. And the argument fo Grunwedel may be accepted with regard to the number of Ero-classical elements which the art of this Buddhistic development displayed. There is to this day a ghighly artistic population established in the region in question, including as that does Kashmir and the North Punjab, and almost touching  Tiber, and on the other side of Afghanistan and Persia. The fertility of he races who meet at this point, in decorative arts and forms of all kinds, need not be disputed. Now would they ever be slow to absorb new elements that might present themselves in unusal abundance at some well-marked political period. The fact that this would surely happen is only part of their extraordinary artistic ability. The conversion of the country of Kashmir to Buddhism would follow naturally on Buddhistic activity in Gandhara, and this was strong between the first century of the Christain era and A. D.540 even persisted with modified enerygy for a couple of centuries longer, as we can gather through Hiouen Tsang.  We may also accept without cavil the statement that ever since the raid of Alexander there had been an east-word flowing traffic along the ancient trade-routes that connected India with the West. We cannot admit that Alexander created these routes. That had been done silently through the ages that preceeded him by the footsteps of merchants and pilgrims, of traders and scholars and even monks. The fame of Indian philosophy in the West had preceded Alexander. Indian thinkers had long gone, however few and far between, in the wake of Indian merchants. But it is possibly true that before the raid there had been very little compensating back-flow into India. The great geographical unity and distinctness of this country must be held, if so, to account for the phenomenon. India was the terminus of at least one line of international travel in an eastern direction. Undoubtedly the overland route of those days was still more vigorously followed up under the Roman Empire. It was to India with her advanced civilisation that the Roman Empire went for its luxuries, and Pliny lanments the drain of imperial gold for the skills and ivory and gems of the East. The finding of many obviously Greek relics, such as a Silenus, and Heracles with the Nemaean lion, at Mathura, would seem to indicate that the older trade-routes had come in country, on the river Jamuna. But the roads that ended in Gandhara, and brought the influences of classical Europe to bear on Buddhism there, were certainly those which connected it with the old Byzantium and with Rome. Greek art may have spoken at Mathura, but certainly nothing better than the Graeco-Roman ever made itself felt in the north-west. All this represents facts which will be acknowledged. The argument that the artistic capacities of teh Gandharan region in the time of the Roman Empire were the result of a certain ethnic strain, due to Alexander and the Graeco-Bactrian kngdom which succeeded him, is not of a character to be taken very seriously. Garrisons of occupation are not usually accompanied by the representative genius of their home-countries in such force and numbers as to act with this spiritual intensity on strange populations, partly through personal contacts and assumed achievement with what has been accomplished by modern peoples, under similar circumstances and with vastly superior advantages, if we wish to bring the proposition to its own reductio ad absurdum. But in fact it need not be approached so gravely.

The best answer to the suggestion lies in the extraordinary difference between the two forms of art. The art of the Greek world was concerned almost entirely with the human form. The horse, indeed, with the deer, the eagle, and the palm-tree, are not altogether unknown to it. But it is remarkable for the absence of any strong feeling for vegetative beauty, or for the animal world as a whole. Now it is precisely in these two elements that the populations of the Gandharan country were and are to this day strongest. Severe chastity and restraint of the decorative instinct is the mark of Greece. Exuberance is the characteristic, on the other had, of Oriental art. It revels in invention. Its fertility of flower and foliage is unbounded. Being of the nature of high art, it knows indeed how to submit itself to curbing forces. The highest achievement  of the Eastern arts of decoration, whether Chinese or Persian, Tibetan or Kashmirian, or Indian proper, often seems to lie in the supreme temperance and distinction with which they are used. But the power of hydra-headed productivity is there. In Greece and Rome it is altogether lacking. Thus to say that the art of Gandhara was due to elements in the population which were of Hellenic descent is absurd. There was never in it the slightest sign of any wedding of East and West in a single blended product, such as this theory presupposes. We can always pick out the elements in its compositions that are unassimilated of the West, as well as those that are assimilated of the East, and those, thirdly, that are purely local and more and less neutral.

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The main theme of my life is to take the message of Sanatana Dharma to every home and pave the way for launching, in a big way, the man-making programme preached and envisaged by great seers like Swami Vivekananda. - Mananeeya Eknathji

विवेकानन्द केन्द्र कन्याकुमारी (Vivekananda Kendra Kanyakumari) Vivekananda Rock Memorial & Vivekananda Kendra : http://www.vivekanandakendra.org Read Article, Magazine, Book @ http://eshop.vivekanandakendra.org/e-granthalaya Cell : +91-941-801-5995, Landline : +91-177-283-5995

. . . Are you Strong? Do you feel Strength? — for I know it is Truth alone that gives Strength. Strength is the medicine for the world's disease . . . This is the great fact: "Strength is LIFE; Weakness is Death."

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हमें कर्म की प्रतिष्ठा बढ़ानी होंगी। कर्म देवो भव: यह आज हमारा जीवन-सूत्र बनना चाहिए। - भगिनी निवेदिता {पथ और पाथेय : पृ. क्र.१९ }
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The Theory Of Greek Influence On Indian Art - 2

Nothing is clearer at Ajanta, than the existence of two separate and almost divergent ways of treating the Buddha. One of these we see in the Buddha of the Shrines, which represents the moment of the First Sermon at Benares. Buddha is seated on his throne, and Devas are flying into the halo behind his heas. On the predella below his seat are the symbolic animals, and in their midst the Wheel of the Law. The dress of the Master is the Indian Chuddar of fine white muslin. And in some form or other there is always a suggestion of the lotus in the throne, although it may take form of folds of drapery. In all these respects we have a very distinct approach to the type of Buddha which is fixed in our minds as representative of Sarnath and also of Sanchi. The face here is characterised by a much greater masulinity than that of Sarnath-whose ostentatious technical perfection shows it to be a late example of the style -but there are all the same elements in the composition as a whole: the flying Devas, the wheel, the lotus, and the halo; and the dress is of the same fine and barely visible order. In Number Fifteen, especially, a greatly hightened beauty is obtained by the fact that the halo is detached from the head of the figure, thus producing a shadow, which gives an air of life and freedom to the statue. This is only one out of many signs that the type is not rigidly fixed, but is to be seen at Ajanta as at Sanchi or Sarnath itself, playing round a general symbolistic convention. This Buddha is integral to Caves Seven, Eleven, Fifteen, Sixteen, and Seventeen, at any rate, and about the fact that these caves precede Cave Nineteen in date, there can be no doubt. A similar type of Buddha is also integral to the series of CAves numbered Six to One, but since it is probable that these were excavated after Seventeen, we dare not base upon them any argument which might depend upon their being anterior to Nineteen. Therefore, we shall here rely upon the Sarnath Buddha, as found during the evolution of the type, in Caves Eleven to Seventeen only.

With Cave Nineteen we come suddenly upon a new type. Here the Buddha on the great Dagoba is standing in what is now commonly known as the teaching attitude; though in truth the mons and their students who used the Vihara, probably thought of the attitude of the First Sermon as that of the teaching Buddha. Be this as it may, the standing Buddha of the Dagoba is clothed in a choga over and above his muslin underclothing. And this choga is not unlike the garment also to be found on the glod coins of Kanishka. It is in truth a yellow robe, and not merely the yellow cloth, of the Buddhist monk. It is in any case a clear and indubitable sign of the intercourse between Ajanta and the colder regions of the north-western India, and marks the influence of the latter at this particular moment upon the Buddhist symbolism of Central India. This influence is borne out in many ways by subordinate evidence, into which we need not enter at present. The point now is, Had India already owed the idea of the Sarnath Buddha itself to this same stream of north-west influence on her arts?

Ordinarily speaking, we are accustomed to take for granted that an artistic style has arisen more or less in the neighbourhood of the place in which we find it. It requires no argument to convince us that Velasquez was the product of Spain or Titian of Venice. Even if we had not been informed of this we should have assumed it. To this rule, however, India has so far been an exception. The synthetic study of her past suffers from having been largely initiated by foreigners. The modern method has been forced upon the country from outside, and it is diffcult for outsiders to believe that the same thing has not happened before, that it is not indeed somewhat distinctive of Indian development. The German scholar Grunwedel, writing on Buddhist art, reiterates his sincere conviction over and over again that India derives her new impulses from foreign sources. Fergusson, with the prepossessions of his long work for Indian architecture fresh upon him, finds more difficulty in minimising the purely native elements in Buddhist art, and though not untouched, is yet vastly less impressed by the pre-eminence of Gandhara type, when he comes upon them, than are his sucessors. And perhps it is useful to know that neither of these writers is so assured of the negligibility  of the indigenous contributions to Buddhistic symbolism as the lastest of all, Mr.Vincent Smith, in his Early History of India. This is worth mentioning, because it may serve to remind us that even in as matter which has seemed so fixed and determined as this of the Gandharan influence on Buddha types, we really have to deal rather with a strong the cumulative drift of opinion or prejudice or preconception - as we may choose to call it- than with established facts. Vincent Smith is not better able to form an opinion than Fergusson. Indeed he is less fit in many ways; yet his opinion is much more fixed. What the one man threw out as a tentative suggestion ther other uses as if it were an axiom. Evidently even the best of us is apt to believe as he would with, or as he has prepared himself to think, and there is a large fraction of predespositon in every robst conviction. Therefore the formidable concensus of opinion which at present exits on teh origin of Buddhist iconography, does not in the leaset exonerate us from examining carefully the grounds of that opinion. On the contrary, it rather challenges us to do so. Of the three famous names cited, it is precisely that of him who attaches least importance to foreign influences in Buddhist art. And it is the man who knows least of Indian art at first hand, and is presumably most influenced by popular opinion, who delivers it over most cheerfully to a foreign origin and the assumption of native inadequacy and incompetence.
 

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The main theme of my life is to take the message of Sanatana Dharma to every home and pave the way for launching, in a big way, the man-making programme preached and envisaged by great seers like Swami Vivekananda. - Mananeeya Eknathji

विवेकानन्द केन्द्र कन्याकुमारी (Vivekananda Kendra Kanyakumari) Vivekananda Rock Memorial & Vivekananda Kendra : http://www.vivekanandakendra.org Read Article, Magazine, Book @ http://eshop.vivekanandakendra.org/e-granthalaya Cell : +91-941-801-5995, Landline : +91-177-283-5995

. . . Are you Strong? Do you feel Strength? — for I know it is Truth alone that gives Strength. Strength is the medicine for the world's disease . . . This is the great fact: "Strength is LIFE; Weakness is Death."

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The Theory Of Greek Influence On Indian Art - 1

India is at present the target of a great many very depressing theories, coming from a great many different quarters. We are told by doctors that a belief in Nirvana is a symptom of Dyspepsia, by ethnologists that the possession of the higher faculties is not to be claimed by dwellers in the tropics, by historians that empires were never built by brown races, and so on, and so forth. Amongst these partisan-shafts, aimed in the name of condour and truth, none perhaps has been more profoundly discouraging to the Indian people than the theory that even their ancient national art was chiefly based upon loans from foreign sources,"cleverly disguised in native trappings." India is not at present in a condition to treat such views with the light-hearted amusement which is all that they probably deserve. She has too great need, for the moment, of the vision of herself and her own world, as they really are. She needs to behold the organic processes of her own past hsitory, the constructive forces that have flowed through all her being, and from time to time reached nations outside her own boundaries, with gifts of her giving. When she has once seen herself thus,-not as something small and mean and secondary, but-as a dynamic centre of thought and faith and civilisation, originating within herself fountains of inspiration for all the peoples of the world, it will be impossible for her to fall back again into inerrness and unproductiveness. When she realises, not in bombastic words, but in detail, and shining point to shining point, how great and vital has been her past, there can be but one result. She will turn her about to create a future that shall be worthy of it. These facts must be the excuse for further pursuing what will seem to some a very ignoble argument.

So far from the sculpture of Indian Buddhism having been derived from the West, it is my belief that it was the spontaneous creastion of India and the Indian Buddhist mind, itself; that Magadha, the Modern Bihar, was its source and prime centre; and that from this point it radiated in every direction, along with the ideal which it illustrated, to exercise an influence whose extent as yet is harly guessed. That the order of nature was not reversed, in the particular case of Gandhara and Indian art, that the child did not confer life upon its mother, or the remote province determine the nation that had borne it, it is the special object of this study to show. Prof. Grunwedel is acknowledged amongst scholars as the authoritative exponent of the opposite point of view. His book 'Buddhist Art in India' is a precious mine of material bearing on the subject. It appears to me, however, that it would have been impossible for him to have used his material as he has done, had he ever had the opportunity of travelling in the eastern part of India, and realising the marvellous fertility and energy of the religious squence which crowded itself into the the centuries between the life-time of Buddha, and the building of Boro Budor in Java. Buddhism is only the blossom of the Indian genius organised. At each step of its own road, it forces a new development upon the faith of the laity, and as the Hindu out-branching can often be dated, we have sure means of knowing the preceding character of Buddhism. It is when the Buddism of Bihar is turning to the thought of the Mother of the Universe, when Hinduism in Begal is dwelling on the Many armed, that the Gujarati kings of Java erect monasteries and patronise sculpture in which Prajnaparamita is the consort of the Adi-Buddha. This primity of Magadha is, to may own mind, the only possible explanation of the Indian historical developement as a whole. In that development, Gandhara, and the relations of the art of Gandhara to the art of the mother chutch, is only an incident. The importance of that incident, however, to the subsequent Christain art of Europe, is, I begin to suspect, supreme.

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The main theme of my life is to take the message of Sanatana Dharma to every home and pave the way for launching, in a big way, the man-making programme preached and envisaged by great seers like Swami Vivekananda. - Mananeeya Eknathji

विवेकानन्द केन्द्र कन्याकुमारी (Vivekananda Kendra Kanyakumari) Vivekananda Rock Memorial & Vivekananda Kendra : http://www.vivekanandakendra.org Read Article, Magazine, Book @ http://eshop.vivekanandakendra.org/e-granthalaya Cell : +91-941-801-5995, Landline : +91-177-283-5995

. . . Are you Strong? Do you feel Strength? — for I know it is Truth alone that gives Strength. Strength is the medicine for the world's disease . . . This is the great fact: "Strength is LIFE; Weakness is Death."

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Hinayana And Mahayana - 2

Many of the great Chaitya-halls were built between the time of Ashoka and the Christian era, but the Stupas which they contain are simple reliquaries. The Dagaba bears no image, though it is often ornamented with an Ashokan rail. Sculpture was in existence at this early date, but it seems to have been used always as a medium of secular commemoration, as at Karle and Bharhut. The religious symbolism of Buddhistic devotion seems to have been at this period the tree, the Stupa, the rail, the horseshoe ornament, and sometimes a footprint. Nor can we adequately realise the thrill of sympathy and reverence which these austere and simple forms were at that time capable of producing in a susceptible mind.

The recognition of the Bodhisattvas, however, which deal. It really connoted sooner or later the acceptance, more or less entire, of what may be called the Asiatic synthesis. And it too seems to go hand in hand with the worship of the personality of Buddha himself. It was in fact the emergence of a doctrine for which India has ever since been famous. It was an outbreak of the tendency known in Christianity as the religion of the Incarnation, a form of adoration by which Protestant England herself has well-night been torn in twain during the last fifty years. Whether or not Buddhism had before this inculcated the adoration of the Buddha's personality, no one who had read any of the early scriptures can doubt that she was always very ready for such a doctrine. There is a fine sentiment about every mention of the Teacher's name. One can feel the intense sacredness of each of his movements to the early recorder. And the worship of relics, so early as the moment of the Mahanirvana itself, is an evidence not to be set aside. The doctrine of the divinity of Buddha, and his miraculous birth into a world long preparing for his advent, must in the year A.D. 150, have been only the kystone of an arch already built. Here we have the picture of the self-projection in to the sphere of Maya of a soul immeasurably higher and sweeter than those dragged there by their own deeds. It is the theory which reappears in widely separate times and places under the names of Christ, Rama, Krishna, and Chaitanya. Even the Persian Bad would seem to owe the idea that makes him possible to this Indian "superstition," as it has been called.

This was the movement that placed in each new Vihara excavated at Ajanta its Buddha shrine. Whether Seven or Eleven is the older it is difficult to determine, but each contains its image in its shrine. This fact coincides with a further step taken about this time. The ancient abbey with its Bhikshugrihas began to transform itself into a university. Each of these new and more ambitious Vihars is a college as well as a monastery. We are very familiar, from the study of Burma and Japan, with the educational system in which every student is theoretically a novice of the monastery. Something of the same sort is true to this day of Oxford itself. And there can be no doubt that is obtained at Ajanta. It was with this emphsising of the function of the Sangharama as the abode of learning that the image of the great teacher became all important. For organised worship the Chaitya-halls always sufficed. The image in its shrine doubtless received a certain ritualised attention morning and evening - above all, incense was burnt before it-but its main purpose was to keep the students in mind of the great Guru, the divine teacher and ideal, in whose invisible presence every act was to be performed. It is this academic aspect of the life at Ajanta which speaks in the long rows of Viharas dug out within single epochs. Four to One can not be far removed from Seventeen, and this fact can only be accounted for in this way. Of the learning that was imparted in these monastic colleges we read in Hiouen Tsang. From the beginning the texts must have been recited constantly in the abbey-halls. But that secular learning also was sometimes cultivated, we are expressly told in the case of Nalanda, where arithmetic and astronomy were studied, and standard time was kept for the kingdom of Magadha, by means of the state water-clock.

Not all the sculptural developments of Ajanta are Kanishkan. The facade of Cave Nineteen, of some centuries later, shows in a wonderful manner the richness and variety of the elements to which the Mahayana had opened the door. Buddha is there treated not simply as the Guru whose every trace and footstep is sacred, but as a great historic character, to be portrayed in many ways and from many different points of view. He is being crowned. He carries the flag of Dharma. There is a freem in his attitudes and in the arrangement of the adoring figures by whom he is surrounded. At the same time, the recurrence of the chequer-pattern, instead of the Ashokan rail, now forgotten, shows the influence of Gandhara. And so the substitution of grinning faces for lotuses in the horse-shoe ornaments shows the overwhelming of the old purely Indian impulse by foreign influences. And so does the peculiar coat worn by the Buddhas. This garment appears to me rather Chinese or Tartar than West Asian. But it must be said that it is not purely Indian. What is the date of Cave Nineteen? Kanishka was A.D. 520. It is customary to assume that Nineteen is that Gandhakuti or image-house referred to in the inscription on Seventeen. Critics profess to find an affinity of style which groups them together. For my own part I must frankly say that to me this affinity is lacking. I believe the Gandhakuti to mean the image-shrine at the back of at the back of Seventeen itself. A pious founder might well count this and the cave and the cistern three separate works. This inference is confirmed by a reference I find in Hiouen Tsang to a Gandhakuti or hall of perfumes, i.e., doubtless, of incense within a Vihara in the kingdom of Takka. I can not imagine that Nineteen was made y the same hands or at the same time as Seventeen. I think it is considerably later and less conservative, and exclusively Indian. At the same time I think it must be the "great Vihara" of Hiouen Tsang, which he describes as about 100 feet high, while in the midst is a stone figure of Buddha about 70 feet high, and above this a stone canopy of seven stages, towering upwards apparently without any support. Making allowance for faulty translation in regards to terms, which by those who have seen the caves are used with technical regidity, this may offer a fair description of the cave as it would appear to one who saw it in the plenitude of its use and beauty. If this cave were, as I think, excavated about the year A. D. 600, then when the Chinses traveller visited the abbey in the middle of the century it would be the central place of worship and one of the main features of interest at Ajanta. But there is at least one other synchronism of the greatest significance to be observed in reference to Cave Nineteen. This is the affinity of the treatment of Buddha in its sculptures to those of Borobuddor in Java. It is as if the style were only making its first appearance. There is the same idea of costume, and the standing Buddhas have something like the same grace of attitude and gentleness of demeanour, but the process of idealising has not yet been carried to its highest pitch in this kind. There is in the carried to its highest pitch in kind. There is in the Javanesse Buddhas, as revealed in Mr. Havell's photographs of them, an the real remoteness with which these do not quite compete. Yet here is the promise of it. And the great bas-relief on the Stupa in the interior has the same look, is of the same quality. The expedition that colonised Java is said to have left Gujarat in Western Indian early in the seventh century, and this was evidently the conception of fine art that they carried away with them.

In this visit of Hiouen Tsang to the abbey, we have a hint of the marvellous cosmopolitanism which probably characterised its life. It is another way of saying the same thing, that is said with almost equal distinctness, by the Chitya-facade itself. Chinese, Gndharan, Persian, and Ceylonese elements mingle with touches from every part of India itself in teh complexity of this superb edifice. The jewel-like decorations of the columns without remind us of Magadha. The magnificent pillars inside carry the mind to Elephanta and its probably Rajput dynasty. The very ornate carvings of the triforium and the pillar-brackets, were originally plastered and coloured. The Stupa also once blazed with chunam and pigments. The interior must have been in accord, therefore, with the taste of an age that was by no means severe. The Vakataka house must have ruled over an empire in Middle Indian in which civilisation had reached a very high level. It must have been the centre of free and healthy communications with foreign powers. And above all, the old international life of learning must have had full scope in the abbey's hospitality. Buddha and the Bodhisattvas were only the outstanding figures in the divine world which included a constantly-growing number of factors. The little choultry outside is purely Hinduistic in its sculpure, as if to say that the order looked with no unfriendly eye on the less organised religious ideas and affections of the pilgrim householder. A mythological system which is practically identical in Japan, China, and India sheltered itself behind the Mahayana. All the sacred and learned literature of India was by it pur in a position of supremacy. Hiouen Tsang was as careful to pass on to his disciples the comments of Panini on Sanskrit grammar as more strictly theological lore. He was as eager for the explanation of Yoga-the secular science of that age-as for the clearing up of points about relics and shrines. India, in fact, as soon as the Mahayana was formulated, entered on a position of undisputed pre-eminence as the leader and head of the intellectual life of Asia.

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The main theme of my life is to take the message of Sanatana Dharma to every home and pave the way for launching, in a big way, the man-making programme preached and envisaged by great seers like Swami Vivekananda. - Mananeeya Eknathji

विवेकानन्द केन्द्र कन्याकुमारी (Vivekananda Kendra Kanyakumari) Vivekananda Rock Memorial & Vivekananda Kendra : http://www.vivekanandakendra.org Read Article, Magazine, Book @ http://eshop.vivekanandakendra.org/e-granthalaya Cell : +91-941-801-5995, Landline : +91-177-283-5995

. . . Are you Strong? Do you feel Strength? — for I know it is Truth alone that gives Strength. Strength is the medicine for the world's disease . . . This is the great fact: "Strength is LIFE; Weakness is Death."

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Hinayana And Mahayana - 1

Buddhism might well be divided historically by the students into the Rajgir, the Pataliputra, and the the Takshashila periods. Or we mightchoose for the names of our periods those monarchs who were the central figures of each of these epochs. At Rajgir these would be Bimbisara and his son Ajatashatru, at Pataliputra Ashoka, and at Takshashila Kanishka, the second sovereign of the Kushan empire. The epochs thus named would also be coterminous with the dates of the three great Buddhist Councils. No complete history of Buddhism could leave out of account the influence of the great Kanishka. For from his time, as we are informed by the Chinese travellers, dates that great schism of the Mahayana, or Northern Schools, which has carried with it China, Japan, and Tibet, while Burma, Ceylon, and Siam belong to Southern Buddhism, or the Lesser Vehicle.

A great haughtiness divides to this day the adherents of these differet schools. To the Northern School belongs the new recession of the scriptures published by the Council of Kanishka. To the Southern belong the simpler and more ancient works, amongst which are included the three Tripitakas.

The characteristic doctrine of the Mahayana, according to the disciples of Hiouen Tsang in the early eighth century, lies in the veneration of the Bodhisattvas, along with the one earthly and supreme Buddha. The Southern School, or Hinayana, does not profess to invoke the Bodhisattvas. But it is easy to see that under this brief definition there is indicated a wide divergence of attitudes and teaching. Anyone who studies a religious movement which has its origin in an Indian and Hinduistic teacher, is bound to notice two opposite influences which come into play almost simultaneously. First there is the highly abstract and nihilistic character of the personal realisation of the Master himself. No gods, no forms, no rites, and the unreal and phenomenal nature of the world about him, all this is the immediate and strongest impression made on the mind. Heaven must not be thought of, perfection is the only possible goal for the soul. And so on. But at the selfsame moment, by creating a profound sympathy for India, and the Indian way of looking at the world, the door is opened to all sorts of complexities, and the disciple may well end by accepting a thousand things each as unthinkable as the one or two he originally abandoned at the call of a higher truth. This must always be the twofold effect of an Indian teacher of religion on a foreign mind.

This very phenomenon we may which on a geographical scale in the history of Buddhism. Here the Southern countries, served byt he early missions, received a stricter and more personal impress of the deposite of faith actually left to his church by the Master.This system was atheistic, nihilistic, and philosophic in the highest and severest sense. Even in the reign of Ashoka we see the erection of rails, pillars, and Stupas, the glorification of holy places, and the worship of the sacred relics, but never a trace of the multitudinous extraneous elements which were later to be accepted.

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The main theme of my life is to take the message of Sanatana Dharma to every home and pave the way for launching, in a big way, the man-making programme preached and envisaged by great seers like Swami Vivekananda. - Mananeeya Eknathji

विवेकानन्द केन्द्र कन्याकुमारी (Vivekananda Kendra Kanyakumari) Vivekananda Rock Memorial & Vivekananda Kendra : http://www.vivekanandakendra.org Read Article, Magazine, Book @ http://eshop.vivekanandakendra.org/e-granthalaya Cell : +91-941-801-5995, Landline : +91-177-283-5995

. . . Are you Strong? Do you feel Strength? — for I know it is Truth alone that gives Strength. Strength is the medicine for the world's disease . . . This is the great fact: "Strength is LIFE; Weakness is Death."

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The Ancient Abbey Of Ajanta - 7

Outside the fort the city has been walled, and the river, circling within the walls, and the river, circling within the walls, has acted at the gateway of the city as a moat, over which even now stand the ruins of a grand old bridge of three arches. At the end of the road that once crossed this bridge, at what must have been the outer gate of the city, there a buttress-foundation, now treated as a sacred mound, where both Hindu and Mohammedans come to the worship the Mother. The trees that grow on it are the Neem and the Bo, the old Bodhitree, or Ashvettha. At their feet a few stones are red with vermilion, and broken glass bracelets tell of accepted vows.
 
So much for the mingling of historic and pre-historic! All through this countryside we find ourselves we find ourselves close to the remoter origins of Hinduism. It is a land of the worship of Miri-Amma, the Earth-Mother, in her symbols of the Neem and the pointed stone. There are temples of Hanuman, too, here and there. But thought I found a Brahmin chanting the worship of Styanarayana, in his own house, on the full-moon night, I saw no shrines to Shiva or Vishnu. This Bo-tree, on the Ajanta road, ma have sheltered a friars' Dharmashala in Buddhistic ages. Here, at this gate, Hiouen Tsang and his train, in the middle of the seventh century, may have stopped to pay toll, or to rest, on their way to or from the abbey, four miles distant. And the Bo-tree, growing here beside the Neem, may seem to the spirit of the place, with the memories it recalls of the peopled cloisters of twelve hundred years ago, a memento of what is a comparatively recent incident in the long long story of the land!

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The main theme of my life is to take the message of Sanatana Dharma to every home and pave the way for launching, in a big way, the man-making programme preached and envisaged by great seers like Swami Vivekananda. - Mananeeya Eknathji

विवेकानन्द केन्द्र कन्याकुमारी (Vivekananda Kendra Kanyakumari) Vivekananda Rock Memorial & Vivekananda Kendra : http://www.vivekanandakendra.org Read Article, Magazine, Book @ http://eshop.vivekanandakendra.org/e-granthalaya Cell : +91-941-801-5995, Landline : +91-177-283-5995

. . . Are you Strong? Do you feel Strength? — for I know it is Truth alone that gives Strength. Strength is the medicine for the world's disease . . . This is the great fact: "Strength is LIFE; Weakness is Death."

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The Ancient Abbey Of Ajanta - 6

We forget that every age seems modern to itself, and that warm throbbing human life once filled these empty cells, that human love and conviction inspired every line and curve of their contour, and that human thought beat ceaselessly to and fro against their walls and screens, in its search to determine for man the grounds of eternal certainty. But even when we have answered these questions we have yet to answer one other, as pressing ,as important. How did all this activity come to an end? The history of the death of Buddhism in India has yet to be entered upon, in the true spirit of critical enquiry, but when it is undertaken, what vast areas will be found elucidated!

Here, in the neighbourhood of Ajanta, are many features of interest and possible significance. The railway is still forty miles away, and has not yet had time to derange the commercial relations of the grand old market town called Neri, encircled by its battlemented walls. Some eight miles to the north of the caves lies the postal town of Vakod. Is there any connection here with the word Vakataka? Four miles to the south on one side, and again four to the morth on the other, are the towns of Ajanta and Fardapur. Both are seats of Mogul fortification testifying to the strong and independent character of the country from early times. At Ajanta there is a palace and a bridge of some ten arches, with an enclosed pool, below which lie the seven cascades that lead to the monastic ravine.

In the grim old village of Fardapur these is another fort of Aurungzeb, which is now in use as a caravanserai. The whole aspect of the place is ancient and fortress-like, and the mode of building which obtains these throws a sudden light on what must have been the aspect of Rajgir, when Buddha entered it, in the days of Bimbisara five and six centuries before Christ. Every wall has a basis of pebbles and mortar; and upon this are reared blocks of baked earth, shaped like masses of masonry. They are broad at the base, considerably narrower at the top, and the slope from one to the other is slightly concave. Even the delicate brick battlements of the Moguls are built upon an older foundation of rubble wall. A similar mode of shaping earth obtains even so far east, it is said, as teh western districts of Bengal. Undoubtedly it is a method of unkonwn antiquity. The curving slant gives to every cottage the air of a fortification, which indeed it is, and from a mediaeval point of view a fortification of very admirable materials.

Even had the old walls of the fort not been visible under the Mogul battlements, we should have known that the place represented an ancient camp of the people, rather than the mere stronghold of an army of occupation. This is shown, in the first place, by its size. It is, in fact, a walled court or compound, containing a spring of water and a place of worship. Around it are quarters for hundreds of people, and at the gateways and corner-towers residences for officers. A whole population could take refuge here with their women and their cows, against the onset of an army, or the invasion of a tribe. The fact that it could have been worth while for a powerful government like that of Delhi to occupy so large a work at the close of the Deccan wars, in what seems to us now an obscure village, is a wonderful testimony to the strength and hostility which were the expression of thousands years of organised independence.

    ...Sister Nivedita - .From Footfalls of Indian History contd    

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The main theme of my life is to take the message of Sanatana Dharma to every home and pave the way for launching, in a big way, the man-making programme preached and envisaged by great seers like Swami Vivekananda. - Mananeeya Eknathji

विवेकानन्द केन्द्र कन्याकुमारी (Vivekananda Kendra Kanyakumari) Vivekananda Rock Memorial & Vivekananda Kendra : http://www.vivekanandakendra.org Read Article, Magazine, Book @ http://eshop.vivekanandakendra.org/e-granthalaya Cell : +91-941-801-5995, Landline : +91-177-283-5995

. . . Are you Strong? Do you feel Strength? — for I know it is Truth alone that gives Strength. Strength is the medicine for the world's disease . . . This is the great fact: "Strength is LIFE; Weakness is Death."

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The Ancient Abbey Of Ajanta - 5

But we must remember that for command of means the monks depended upon neighbouring kings and cities. It was an act of surpassing merit of excavate caves or adorn Chaitya-halls for religious communities. Kings remitted the taxes of whole villages, which thus became the monastery glebe. Noble men and great ministers devoted vast sums to the making of images, cloisters and shrines. There is an inscription in the Kuda Caves which shows that a whole family of king's officers, including the daughers-in-law, joined to contribute the expenses of the vaious definite items necessary for the making of a Bauddha chapel. In the Karma thus accumulated not one of this loving and obedient group must be left out! Here at Ajanta itself Cave Sixteen is made by a minister of the Vakataka princees known as Varahadeva; Caves Seventeen, Eighteen, and Nineteen by a minister of a tributary soverreign or great noble called Aditya; Cave Twenty by a man of evident wealth and distinction, whose name is Upendra Gupta; and the Chaitya-hall, Cave Twenty-six, by the abbot Buddha Bhadra with the special assitance of hsi subordinate Dharmadatta and his own disciple Bhadra Bandhu.

Throughout the west country it was long fashionable, even for houses that were themselves devoted to Shiva or to Vishnu, to make these benefactions to the Bauddha friars. And as time went on it became customary to add an inscription, with the prayer that the merit of the act might redound to the benefit first of the father and mother of the donor, and then of all living beings-a dedication that is still common amongst certain Buddhist peoples.

From Caves Sixteen and Seventeen, then, it can hardly be doubted that the great power, within whose territory Ajanta lay, was that of the Vakataka princes, whose sway is supposed on other grounds to have covered a large part of Central India, from the end of the third till the middle of the sixth centruies, their dynasty having been powerful enough to take a queen from the family of the great Chandra Gupta of Pataliputra, between A.D. 420 and 490.

Who were these Vakatakas? Where did they regin? What was the nature of their kingdom and their power? The inscription on Cave Sixteen claims that Harisena, the king under whom both it and Seventeen were excavated (A.D. 500 to 520), had conquered amongst other places Ujjain, Orissa, and Koshala. Are we to suppose from this that they were Rajputs reigning in Malwa, that country of which Hiouen Tsang said a century later, that it could only be compared with Magadha, as the home of learning? And were the tributary Asmakas-whose minister Aditya made Seventeen, Eighteen, and Nineteen-a mere local power, confined to the immediate neighbourhood? How urgently the history of India calls for students who will search it out in the light of its geography! An anxious antiquarianism has been very useful in providing a few data and starting -points for real work. But the day has come when we are able to realise that, except as the great stream of the Indian story carries it, even Ajanta has little value. We must know how it stood related to the life of its period; what it did for the world; who loved and served it; what joy they drew from it; and a thousand other truths about that living past which surrounded it birth. No one has yet troubled to depict the social conditions out of which it grew. Yet this is the very thing that we must know. The network of strong cities that must have surrounded every focus of ecclesiastical power and learning is non-existent as yet in the notional imagination. Yet only a detailed study of the whole countryside can give us the real clue to the development of sites like Ajanta.

    ...Sister Nivedita - .From Footfalls of Indian History contd    

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The main theme of my life is to take the message of Sanatana Dharma to every home and pave the way for launching, in a big way, the man-making programme preached and envisaged by great seers like Swami Vivekananda. - Mananeeya Eknathji

विवेकानन्द केन्द्र कन्याकुमारी (Vivekananda Kendra Kanyakumari) Vivekananda Rock Memorial & Vivekananda Kendra : http://www.vivekanandakendra.org Read Article, Magazine, Book @ http://eshop.vivekanandakendra.org/e-granthalaya Cell : +91-941-801-5995, Landline : +91-177-283-5995

. . . Are you Strong? Do you feel Strength? — for I know it is Truth alone that gives Strength. Strength is the medicine for the world's disease . . . This is the great fact: "Strength is LIFE; Weakness is Death."

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The Ancient Abbey Of Ajanta - 3

But a style creates a tradition, which persists long after the original reason for it has disappeared. Thus the horseshoe ornament and the Ashokan rail become a mannerism at Ajanta, diverging constantly further and further from their true intention; and by these progressive changes we can make a rough estimate of the ages of the caves. In Nine and Twelve they are used with obvious sincerity, reflecting the conceptions of their age, in the same way that the early printers of Europe laboured to make their machine-printed books look as if they had been written by hand. On Viharas Eight and Thirteen they do not occur at all. Evidently the founders were too early or too poor to indulge in such elaboration. Chaitya Number Ten had a timer front, which has fallen away and leaves no trace of its image or likeness, save in the panels sculptured in the rocks on either side. But these horse-shoe ornaments do not altogether cease till after Cave Nineteen. At first they are frankly windows in house fronts. over the cell-doors and run round the walls connecting one with another in simple dignity. In Caves Six, Seven and Fifteen we find the spaces filled with lotus patterns, and the semicircular opening no longer has a definite meaning. They are no longer windows. They are now only decorative. On the facade of Cave Nineteen foreign influences art at work. A horrible vulgarity has come over the workmen, strictly comparable to the degrading effect of European taste on Indian crafts today. Each of these once beautiful outlines is now filled with a hideous grinning face, altogether meaningless.. From the chequer-work which recurs here again and again (an ornament common amongst the Gandhara sculptures in the Calcutta collection), it is clear that these influences have come from the north-west. They are possibly Greek, as transmitted through Persia. There had been a great rapprochement between India and perisa in the course of the fifth century, and nowwhere is the crude secularising effect of the West on Indian taste better illustrated.

Yet nowwhere is the sober, synthetising power of the Indian intellect more visible. In spite of its eclecticism of detail, and daring romanticism in the treatment of sacred subjects, Nineteen at Ajanta remains one of the architectural triumphs of the world. It is the very flowering-point of a great civic life. The strong porch, brought forward on two solid pillars, suggests the presence and words of the leaders of men; the side-galleries, their supporters and attendants; while on the sill of the great window behind we have room and background for the anointing of a king or the lying -in-state of the dead.

We are accustomed to think of the hotels de ville of Belgium as the crown of the world's communal architecture. But Belgium has nothing, for simple unity and mastery, to compare with this. It dominates a small court, from which a false step would precipitate one down a steep Khud. Obviously the style was not invented for such a position. Here, as at a thousand other points, Ajanta merely reflects the life of India during one of the greatest periods of her history. Cave Nineteen remains, carved in imperishable rock, when all the buildings of its day have disappeared, a memorial of the splendour and restraint of Indian cities during the ages of the Gupta rule.

    ...Sister Nivedita - .From Footfalls of Indian History contd    

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The main theme of my life is to take the message of Sanatana Dharma to every home and pave the way for launching, in a big way, the man-making programme preached and envisaged by great seers like Swami Vivekananda. - Mananeeya Eknathji

विवेकानन्द केन्द्र कन्याकुमारी (Vivekananda Kendra Kanyakumari) Vivekananda Rock Memorial & Vivekananda Kendra : http://www.vivekanandakendra.org Read Article, Magazine, Book @ http://eshop.vivekanandakendra.org/e-granthalaya Cell : +91-941-801-5995, Landline : +91-177-283-5995

. . . Are you Strong? Do you feel Strength? — for I know it is Truth alone that gives Strength. Strength is the medicine for the world's disease . . . This is the great fact: "Strength is LIFE; Weakness is Death."

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The Ancient Abbey Of Ajanta - 2

Sixteen and Seventeen have inscriptions which, it is said, render them the heart of the matter; for they were built during or soon after the lifetime of the great Gupta, Maharaja Deva (Chandragupta 2, Vikramaditya, A.D. 375 to 413), by a sovereign who had married his daughter. And Caves Five to One were probably undertaken immediately after.

In any case, it is the first group, Caves Eight to Thirteen, that for hundreds of years formed the whole glory of Ajanta. Eight and Thirteen may probably have been natural caverns occupied tentatively long before the time of Ashoka by a handful of monks. Those were days in which kings rich cities, and great landowners could scarcely perform a work of greater merit than hewing out caves for the residence of monks. In course of time, therefore, thes natural recesses in the rock (which we imagine to have been the motive and starting-point) were transformed into simple monasteries by first enlarging the centre and then cutting tiny cells each with its two stone beds and low doorway, round the space, which thus acted as quadrangle or courtyard. Number Thirteen has, in addition to these, a small earthen verandah in front. Number Eight has not even this. It seems probable that the occupation began from two points more or less simultaneously, and afterwards worked inwards, for how else are we to explain the fact that Nine and Ten, standing side by side, are both Chaityas?

We imagine too that the first settlement was early, when faith was strong, and the living impress of the Great Teacher was yet fresh. For how else can we account for the strength that clung to the bare rocks by the torrent-side with such pertinacity, decade after decade? Were they some band of wandering teachers, we wonder, those first monks, appointed to preach in the countries on the Southern Road, a mission sent to the powerful empire of Ujjain, or an offshoot perhaps from the mother-communities at Bhilsa and Sanchi? In any case, the caves were valuable to them as headquarters during the wet season, when all begging friars are supposed to assemble for the time in some fixed dwelling-place; and during their absence as a body, for eight or nine months at a time, the work of excavation must have gone forward. Little did they dream of how well-starred were both the spot they had chosen and the day of their advent! WE can see, what they could not, close on twelve hundred years of development and gathering fame, the learning they were to send out; the beauty they were to build up; the kings who would delight to honour them; and roads from the far ends of the earth, all meeting on their threshold. Hiouen Tsang came here, in the middle of the seventh century after Christ, and speaks of the place as "a Sangharama constructed in a dark valley. Its lofty halls and deep side-aisles stretch through the face of the rocks. Storey above storey, they are backed by the crag and face the valley". It is evident here that the English translator-not having in his own mind the thing his author was describing-has rendered the text inaccurately. If we read, "it lofty Chaityas and deep Viharas at their sides", the statement immediately becomes luminous. Similarly, when later we are told that the great Vihara is about 100 feet high, and the stone figure of Buddha in the middle 70 feet high, while above is aa conopy of seven stages, towering upwards, apparently without support, it is evident that the great Chinese  traveller is speaking of no Vihara, but of the principal Chaitya of his own day(Nineteen or Twenty-Six?), and that the stone figure he describes is really the Dagoba it contains.

The first royal patronage extended to Ajanta must have been given at or soon after the time of Ashoka, when the Chaitya known as Cave Nine and the Vihara numbered Twelve were built. Every one who takes up the study of ancient sites in India finds his own indications of age. At Sanchi the gradual modifications in the pictorial treatment of the Ashokan rail give us a chronological scale which enables us to distinguish with absolute certainty no less than four different periods of building and sculpture. Here at Ajanta the time -unit that serves us from the first is the Chaitya-facade ornament taken in conjunction with the Ashokan rail. It would appear that the domestic architecture of the age was characterised by the rounded roof which we still see in the rocky caves of Ajanta; by the Ashokan rail, used as the front of a verandah; and by the horse-shoe window, breaking the line of the roof, or mansard. Now the instinct of cave makers was to make their fronts as closely as possible resemble the outsides of the buildings of their period.

    ...Sister Nivedita - .From Footfalls of Indian History contd    

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The main theme of my life is to take the message of Sanatana Dharma to every home and pave the way for launching, in a big way, the man-making programme preached and envisaged by great seers like Swami Vivekananda. - Mananeeya Eknathji

विवेकानन्द केन्द्र कन्याकुमारी (Vivekananda Kendra Kanyakumari) Vivekananda Rock Memorial & Vivekananda Kendra : http://www.vivekanandakendra.org Read Article, Magazine, Book @ http://eshop.vivekanandakendra.org/e-granthalaya Cell : +91-941-801-5995, Landline : +91-177-283-5995

. . . Are you Strong? Do you feel Strength? — for I know it is Truth alone that gives Strength. Strength is the medicine for the world's disease . . . This is the great fact: "Strength is LIFE; Weakness is Death."

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