The art and architecture of India - Buddhist, Hindu, Jain (Art Ebook)

[02 THE EARLY CLASSIC PERIODS
and space become one in depicting the heroic
legends. In the relief under discussion the Departure
is presented in the usual symbolical
fashion, with his footprints establishing the
Buddha's presence and the form of the horse
Kanthaka repeated several times relating the
progress of the flight from his father's palace.
The precision of the carving of this and other
panels tends to confirm the inscription on the
western gateway that the sculpture was the
work of ivory-carvers from the nearby town of
Bhilsa.
We may select as typical of the reliefs of the
torana pillars the panels of the outer face of the
eastern portal. Most interesting of these is the
scene of the Conversion of the Kasyapa Clan, in
which the Buddha confounded these heretics by
performing the miracle of walking upon the
waters [47]. His actual presence is indicated
only by a kind of plinth or plank floating on the
river. The Kasyapas are shown twice, once in a
boat ready to rescue Sakyamuni, and once again
drawing in the form of incised lines. There is no
intent to establish any space beyond the plane
of the main figures and accessories and the background
plane behind them. Although there is a
slight modelling of individual forms so that they
have some substance beyond a mere silhouette,
the conception of the relief seems almost to be
in terms of drawing rather than sculpture, with
no suggestion of the illusionistic depth that we
find in later periods of Indian art. If the Sanchi
reliefs in certain details reveal a kind of intuitive
naturalism in the recording of plant and
animal forms, it is because they are the productions
of a religion in which the humanity of the
founder and his kinship with all nature were
still stressed. For people whose real faith rested
in large part on the worship of the Dravidian
nature-spirits and the barely disguised folktales
that were the Jatakas, the validity of the
real world could not be suppressed. Here is a
reflexion of 'an attitude to life in which any
dualism between spirit and matter, or between
the mystic and the sensuous, is inconceivable'. 4
on the shore reverencing the Buddha at the successful
conclusion of the miracle. If this relief in
certain aspects reminds us of Egyptian or wes-
a
Everywhere the early Indian sculptor displays
loving awareness of the material world that
tern Asiatic prototypes, it is simply because, as
has been pointed out before, Indian art perpetuated
the ideals of all those ancient traditional
societies in which the artist's aim was the
communication of a theme in its most readily
apprehensible form. In accordance with this
conceptual method of presentation, every element
of the composition is portrayed from its
most characteristic point of view, without regard
to its position in space and time, so that, whereas
the river is shown from above and its waves are
indicated by parallel rippling lines, the trees on
the banks are shown in profile and, to indicate
their species, the leaves are enormously enlarged
within these ideographic contours. It will be
noted that in this, as in other reliefs at Sanchi,
the emphasis is entirely on the delineation of the
various elements of the composition in terms of
shadows reinforcing the outlines and interior
surrounds him. The varieties of trees, flowers,
birds, and beasts are not recorded from the
point of view of a naturalist bound to catch the
precise texture and structure of these forms
based on scientific observation and dissection,
but rather - and this could be a definition of the
conceptual point of view in art - are these accessories
of the natural world set down as the artist
knew them or remembered them, revealing with
the selective intensity of the memory image the
most characteristic aspect of the growth and
articulation of specific plants or animals. Landscape
as such does not exist. The curtain before
which the dramas, religious and popular, are
played - the green prison of the jungle, the
towering peaks - is reduced to the barest essentials
abbreviated as a stage design is, in order to
set off, and not distract from, the activities of the
actors. By the same method we have already