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

473
capital" so often found in modern wood buildings.'
16. R. E. M. Wheeler, 'Iran and India in Pre-Islamic
Times', Ancient India, No. 4, July 1947-January
1948, plate xxix B.
17. In addition to the example from Parkham, the
museum at Muttra also contains a fragment of a yaksha
statue from Baroda that originally must have been
more than twelve feet high. Two other yaksha figures
found near Patna are in the Indian Museum at Calcutta.
Female figures in the same style include a
colossal yakshi from Didarganj in the Patna Museum
from Besnagar in
and another image of the same deity
Calcutta. They are all illustrated in Bachhofer's Early
Indian Sculpture and in N. R. Ray's Maurya and Sunga
Art (Calcutta, 1945). The latter author seriously
questions the dating of these figures in the Maurya
Period and prefers to assign them to the Sunga Period
{Maurya and Sunga Art, 48 ff.). The dating of all these
statues in Maurya times rests on the somewhat insecure
basis of their generally archaic quality and the
presence of the same Maurya polish found on the
Asokan columns.
73. 18. It has been suggested that possibly the yaksha
was worshipped as the protective deity of a guild.
The inscription may contain the name of the yaksha,
i.e. Manibhadra.
75. 19. The figure of a female divinity from Didarganj
has, like the so-called Maurya yakshas, been a subject
of considerable controversy. Actually, only the fact
that it was found near Patna, the Maurya capital, and
the fact that the stone has the same high polish of the
Asokan columns lend any conviction to a dating in the
Maurya Period. From the point of view of stylistic
development, the statue is actually in advance of any
of the figure sculpture, not only of the Maurya but
also of the Sunga Period (185-27 B.C.). The closest
comparison is with the representations of yakshis on
the gateways of the stupa at Sanchi, which were carved
in the closing decades of the first century B.C. : for this
reason its analysis is postponed to the chapter on the
Early Andhra Period.
chapter 6
77. 1. It should be suggested as a possibility that, just
as in the funeral customs of people in all parts of the
ancient world, the burial place was intended to simulate
the surroundings of the deceased in life, the
domical forms of both the rock-cut Vedic tombs and
the earliest tumuli may have been conscious replicas
of the shape of the Vedic hut. This does not of course
exclude the possibility that over and beyond its practical
function the form of the original hut, the cave,
and the burial mound was also a symbolical or magic
reconstruction of the imagined shape of the sky, like
a dome covering the earth.
79. 2. Mahapurusa or Prajapati was that great being
whose body comprised the universe and who, by the
sacrifice and division of that body at the beginning of
the world, brought all things to birth.
82. 3. These yaksha guardians are the ancestors of the
Guardian Kings of Far Eastern art.
86. 4. The concept of the Cakravartin stems from the
ancient Babylonian idea of the Universal King.
88. 5. The French scholar Philippe Stern would date
the Jaggayyapeta relief as late as the first century A.D.
He describes the crudity of this relief as 'un archaisme
de maladresse' and explains this style by the remoteness
of the site and the lack of sculptural precedent in
Eastern India. (Cf. P. Stern, 'Les ivoires de Begram
et Part de l'lnde', in J. Hackin, Xouvelles recherches
archeologiques a Begram, Paris, 1954, p. 45.)
6. 'Airavata' means, literally, 'lightning-cloud'.
90. 7. Some of the reliefs on the uprights, such as that
of a yakshi climbing into her tree, are much more fully
modelled and suggestive of the figure's existing in
space than anything found at Bharhut and Sanchi.
Indeed, the sensuous definition of the form and its
articulation seem but a step removed from the work of
the Kushan Period. See Bachhofer, History, plate 34.
8. Certainly even in primitive Buddhism, Sakyamuni
had come to be identified with the sun-god, and
his nativity likened to the rising of another sun. For
a full discussion of this iconography see my article,
'Buddha and the Sun-god', Zalmoxis, I
(1938), 69-84.
91. 9. In its most practical explanation this symbolism
connotes the old gods doing homage to the Buddha.
Indra's bringing of the straws has a deeper metaphysical
interpretation, in that it offers a correspondence
between the spreading of the sacrificial straw on the
Vedic altar, to be kindled by the fire god, and the Bodhisattva's
sitting on the grass to rise enlightened to
the skies, like the fiery column of Vedic sacrifice.
92. 10. Although there is some dispute about the
precise meaning of this iconography, it seems clear
that such representations of Lakshmi as the present
example came to symbolize the birth of Buddha.
Lakshmi, who was the very personification of existence
and maternity, was by association identified with
Maya, the mother of Buddha.
11. ML N. Deshpande, 'The Rock-Cut Caves of
Pitalkhora in the Deccan', Ancient India, xv (1959),
66-94.
CHAPTER 7
97. i. \. R. Ray, Maurya and Sunga Art, 73.
99. 2. A. K. Coomaraswamy, Yaksas (Smithsonian
Institution, Washington, D.C., 1928), 33. A number