Our Oriental Heritage

by Will Durant

  We shall be helped in understanding Oriental painting if we remember, first, that it seeks to represent not things but feelings, and not to represent but to suggest; that it depends not on color but on line; that it aims to create esthetic and religious emotion rather than to reproduce reality; that it is interested in the “soul” or “spirit” of men and things, rather than in their material forms. Try as we will, however, we shall hardly find in Indian painting the technical development, or range and depth of significance, that characterize the pictorial art of China and Japan. Certain Hindus explain this very fancifully: painting decayed among them, they tell us, because it was too easy, it was not a sufficiently laborious gift to offer to the gods.39 Perhaps pictures, so mortally frail and transitory, did not quite satisfy the craving of the Hindu for some lasting embodiment of his chosen deity. Slowly, as Buddhism reconciled itself to imagery, and the Brahmanic shrines increased and multiplied, painting was replaced by statuary, color and line by lasting stone.

  IV. SCULPTURE

  Primitive—Buddhist—Gandhara—Gupta—“Colonial”—Estimate

  We cannot trace the history of Indian sculpture from the statuettes of Mohenjo-daro to the age of Ashoka, but we may suspect that this is a gap in our knowledge rather than in the art. Perhaps India, temporarily impoverished by the Aryan invasions, reverted from stone to wood for its statuary; or perhaps the Aryans were too intent upon war to care for art. The oldest stone figures surviving in India go back only to Ashoka; but these show a skill so highly developed that we cannot doubt that the art had then behind it many centuries in growth.40 Buddhism set up definite obstacles to both painting and statuary in its aversion to idolatry and secular imagery: Buddha forbade “imaginative drawings painted in figures of men and women”;41 and under this almost Mosaic prohibition pictorial and plastic art suffered in India as it had done in Judea and was to do in Islam. Gradually this Puritanism seems to have relaxed as Buddhism yielded its austerity and partook more and more of the Dravidian passion for symbol and myth. When the art of carving appears again (ca. 200 B.C.), in the stone bas-reliefs on the “rails” enclosing the Buddhist “stupas” or burial mounds at Bodh-gaya and Bharhut, it is as a component part of an architectural design rather than as an independent art; and to the end of its history Indian sculpture remained for the most part an accessory to architecture, and preferred relief to carving in the round.* In the Jain temples at Mathura, and the Buddhist shrines at Amaravati and Ajanta, this art of relief reached a high point of perfection. The rail at Amaravati, says a learned authority, “is the most voluptuous and the most delicate flower of Indian sculpture.”42

  Meanwhile, in the province of Gandhara in northwestern India, another type of sculpture was developing under the patronage of the Kushan kings. This mysterious dynasty, which came suddenly out of the north—probably from Hellenized Bactria—brought with it a tendency to imitate Greek forms. The Mahayana Buddhism that captured the council of Kanishka opened the way by rescinding the prohibition of imagery. Under the tutelage of Greek instructors Hindu sculpture took on for a time a smooth Hellenistic face; Buddha was transformed into the likeness of Apollo, and became an aspirant to Olympus; drapery began to flow about Hindu deities and saints in the style of Pheidias’ pediments, and pious Bodhisattwas rubbed elbows with jolly drunken Sileni.43 Idealized and almost effeminate representations of the Master and his disciples were offset with horrible examples of decadent Greek realism, like the starving Buddha of Lahore, in which every rib and tendon is shown underneath a feminine face with ladylike coiffure and masculine beard.44 This Greco-Buddhist art impressed Yuan Chwang, and through him and later pilgrims found its way into China, Korea and Japan;45 but it had little influence upon the sculptural forms and methods of India itself. When, after some centuries of flourishing activity, the Gandhara school passed away, Indian art came to life again under Hindu rulers, took up the traditions left by the native artists of Bharhut, Amaravati and Mathura, and paid scant attention to the Greek interlude at Gandhara.

  Sculpture, like nearly everything else in India, prospered under the Gupta line. Buddhism had now forgotten its hostility to images; and a reinvigorated Brahmanism encouraged symbolism and the adornment of religion with every art. The Mathura Museum holds a highly finished stone Buddha, with meditative eyes, sensual lips, too graceful a form, and clumsy Cubist feet. The Sarnath Museum has another stone Buddha, in the seated pose that was destined to dominate Buddhist sculpture; here the effect of peaceful contemplation and a pious kindliness is perfectly revealed. At Karachi is a small bronze Brahma, scandalously like Voltaire.46

  Everywhere in India, in the millennium before the coming of the Moslems, the art of the sculptor, though limited as well as inspired by its subservience to architecture and religion, produced masterpieces. The pretty statue of Vishnu from Sultanpur,47 the finely chiseled statue of Padmapani,48 the gigantic three-faced Shiva (commonly called “Trimurti”) carved in deep relief in the caves at Elephanta,49 the almost Praxitelean stone statue worshiped at Nokkas as the goddess Rukmini,50 the graceful dancing Shiva, or Nataraja, cast in bronze by the Chola artist-artisans of Tanjore,51 the lovely stone deer of Mamallapuram,52 and the handsome Shiva of Perur53—these are evidences of the spread of the carver’s art into every province of India.

  The same motives and methods crossed the frontiers of India proper, and produced masterpieces from Turkestan and Cambodia to Java and Ceylon. The student will find examples in the stone head, apparently of a boy, dug up from the sands of Khotan by Sir Aurel Stein’s expedition;54 the head of Buddha from Siam;55 the Egyptianly fine “Harihara” of Cambodia;56 the magnificent bronzes of Java;57 the Gandhara-like head of Shiva from Prambanam;58 the supremely beautiful female figure (“Prajnaparamita”) now in the Leyden Museum; the perfect Bodhisattwa in the Glyptothek at Copenhagen;59 the calm and powerful Buddha,60 and the finely chiseled Avalokiteshvara (“The Lord who looks down with pity upon all men”),61 both from the great Javanese temple of Borobudur; or the massive primitive Buddha,62 and the lovely “moonstone” doorstep,63 of Anuradhapura in Ceylon. This dull list of works that must have cost the blood of many men in many centuries will suggest the influence of Hindu genius on the cultural colonies of India.

  We find it hard to like this sculpture at first sight; only profound and modest minds can leave their environment behind them when they travel. We should have to be Hindus, or citizens of those countries that accepted the cultural leadership of India, to understand the symbolism of these statues, the complex functions and superhuman powers denoted by these multiple arms and legs, the terrible realism of these fanciful figures, expressing the Hindu sense of supernatural forces irrationally creative, irrationally fertile and irrationally destructive. It shocks us to find that everybody in Hindu villages is thin, and everybody in Hindu sculpture is fat; we forget that the statues are mostly of gods, who received the first fruits of the land. We are disconcerted on discovering that the Hindus colored their statuary, whereby we reveal our unawareness of the fact that the Greeks did likewise, and that something of the classic nobility of the Pheidian deities is due to the accidental disappearance of their paint. We are displeased at the comparative paucity of female figures in the Indian gallery; we mourn over the subjection of women which this seems to indicate, and never reflect that the cult of the nude female is not the indispensable basis of plastic art, that the profoundest beauty of woman may be more in motherhood than in youth, more in Demeter than in Aphrodite. Or we forget that the sculptor carved not what he dreamed of so much as what the priests laid down; that every art, in India, belonged to religion rather than to art, and was the handmaiden of theology. Or we take too seriously figures intended by the sculptor to be caricatures, or jests, or ogres designed to frighten away evil spirits; if we turn away from them in horror we merely attest the fulfilment of their aim.

  Nevertheless, the sculpture of India never quite acquired the grace of her literature, or the sublimity of her architecture, or the depth of h
er philosophy; it mirrored chiefly the confused and uncertain insight of her religions. It excelled the sculpture of China and Japan, but it never equaled the cold perfection of Egyptian statuary, or the living and tempting beauty of Greek marble. To understand even its assumptions we should have to renew in our hearts the earnest and trusting piety of medieval days. In truth we ask too much of sculpture, as of painting, in India; we judge them as if they had been there, as here, independent arts, when in truth we have artificially isolated them for treatment according to our traditional rubrics and norms. If we could see them as the Hindu knows them, as integrated parts of the unsurpassed architecture of his country, we should have made some modest beginning towards understanding Indian art.

  V. ARCHITECTURE

  1. Hindu Architecture

  Before Ashoka—Ashokan—Buddhist—Jain—The masterpieces of the north—Their destruction—The southern style-Monolithic temples—Structural temples

  Nothing remains of Indian architecture before Ashoka’s time. We have the brick ruins of Mohenjo-daro, but apparently the buildings of Vedic and Buddhist India were of wood, and Ashoka seems to have been the first to use stone for architectural purposes.64 We hear, in the literature, of seven-storied structures,65 and of palaces of some magnificence, but not a trace of them survives. Megasthenes describes the imperial residences of Chandragupta as superior to anything in Persia except Persepolis, on whose model they seem to have been designed.66 This Persian influence persisted till Ashoka’s time; it appears in the ground-plan of his palace, which corresponded with the “Hall of a Hundred Columns” at Persepolis;67 and it shows again in the fine pillar of Ashoka at Lauriya, crowned with a lion-capital.

  With the conversion of Ashoka to Buddhism, Indian architecture began to throw off this alien influence, and to take its inspiration and it symbols from the new religion. The transition is evident in the great capital which is all that now remains of another Ashokan pillar, at Sarnath;68 here, in a composition of astonishing perfection, ranked by Sir John Marshall as equal to “anything of its kind in the ancient world,”69 we have four powerful lions, standing back to back on guard, and thoroughly Persian in form and countenance; but beneath them is a frieze of well-carved figures including so Indian a favorite as the elephant, and so Indian a symbol as the Buddhist Wheel of the Law; and under the frieze is a great stone lotus, formerly mistaken for a Persian bell-capital, but now accepted as the most ancient, universal and characteristic of all the symbols in Indian art.70 Represented upright, with the petals turned down and the pistil or seed-vessel showing, it stood for the womb of the world; or, as one of the fairest of nature’s manifestations, it served as the throne of a god. The lotus or water-lily symbol migrated with Buddhism, and permeated the art of China and Japan. A like form, used as a design for windows and doors, became the “horseshoe arch” of Ashokan vaults and domes, originally derived from the “covered wagon” curvature of Bengali thatched roofs supported by rods of bent bamboo.71

  The religious architecture of Buddhist days has left us a few ruined temples and a large number of “topes” and “rails.” The “tope” or “stupa” was in early days a burial mound; under Buddhism it became a memorial shrine, usually housing the relics of a Buddhist saint. Most often the tope took the form of a dome of brick, crowned with a spire, and surrounded with a stone rail carved with bas-reliefs. One of the oldest topes is at Bharhut; but the reliefs there are primitively coarse. The most ornate of the extant rails is at Amaravati; here 17,000 square feet were covered with minute reliefs of a workmanship so excellent that Fergusson judged this rail to be “probably the most remarkable monument in India.”72 The best known of the stupas is the Sanchi tope, one of a group at Bhilsa in Bhopal. The stone gates apparently imitate ancient wooden forms, and anticipate the pailus or toriis that usually mark the approach to the temples of the Far East. Every foot of space on pillars, capitals, crosspieces and supports is cut into a wilderness of plant, animal, human and divine forms. On a pillar of the eastern gateway is a delicate carving of a perennial Buddhist symbol—the Bodhi-tree, scene of the Master’s enlightenment; on the same gateway, gracefully spanning a bracket, is a sensuous goddess (a Yakshi) with heavy limbs, full hips, slim waist, and abounding breasts.73

  While the dead saints slept in the topes, the living monks cut into the mountain rocks temples where they might live in isolation, sloth and peace, secure from the elements and from the glare and heat of the sun. We may judge the strength of the religious impulse in India by noting that over twelve hundred of these cave-temples remain of the many thousands that were built in the early centuries of our era, partly for Jains and Brahmans, but mostly for Buddhist communities. Often the entrance of these viharas (monasteries) was a simple portal in the form of a “horseshoe” or lotus arch; sometimes, as at Nasik, it was an ornate façade of strong columns, animal capitals, and patiently carved architrave; often it was adorned with pillars, stone screens or porticoes of admirable design.74 The interior included a chaitya or assembly hall, with colonnades dividing nave from aisles, cells for the monks on either side, and an altar, bearing relics, at the inner end.* One of the oldest of these cave-temples, and perhaps the finest now surviving, is at Karle, between Poona and Bombay; here Hinayana Buddhism achieved its chef-d’œuvre.

  The caves at Ajanta, besides being the hiding-place of the greatest of Buddhist paintings, rank with Karle as examples of that composite art, half architecture and half sculpture, which characterizes the temples of India. Caves I and II have spacious assembly halls whose ceilings, cut and painted in sober yet elegant designs, are held up by powerful fluted pillars square at the base, round at the top, ornamented with flowery bands, and crowned with majestic capitals;75 Cave XIX is distinguished by a façade richly decorated with adipose statuary and complex bas-reliefs;76 in Cave XXVI gigantic columns rise to a frieze crowded with figures which only the greatest religious and artistic zeal could have carved in such detail.77 Ajanta can hardly be refused the title of one of the major works in the history of art.

  Of other Buddhist temples still existing in India the most impressive is the great tower at Bodh-gaya, significant for its thoroughly Gothic arches, and yet dating, apparently, back to the first century A.D.78 All in all, the remains of Buddhist architecture are fragmentary, and their glory is more sculptural than structural; a lingering Puritanism, perhaps, kept them externally forbidding and bare. The Jains gave a more concentrated devotion to architecture, and during the eleventh and twelfth centuries their temples were the finest in India. They did not create a style of their own, being content to copy at first (as at Elura) the Buddhist plan of excavating temples in the mountain rocks, then the Vishnu or Shiva type of temples rising usually in a walled group upon a hill. These, too, were externally simple, but inwardly complex and rich—a happy symbol of the modest life. Piety placed statue after statue of Jain heroes in these shrines, until in the group at Shatrunjaya Fergusson counted 6449 figures.79

  The Jain temple at Aihole is built almost in Greek style, with rectangular form, external colonnades, a portico, and a cell or central chamber within.80 At Khajuraho Jains, Vaishnavites and Shivaites, as if to illustrate Hindu tolerance, built in close proximity some twenty-eight temples; among them the almost perfect Temple of Parshwanath81 rises in cone upon cone to a majestic height, and shelters on its carved surfaces a veritable city of Jain saints. On Mt. Abu, lifted four thousand feet above the desert, the Jains built many temples, of which two survivors, the temples of Vimala and Tejahpala, are the greatest achievement of this sect in the field of art. The dome of the Tejahpala shrine is one of those overwhelming experiences which doom all writing about art to impotence and futility.82 The Temple of Vimala, built entirely of white marble, is a maze of irregular pillars, joined with fanciful brackets to a more simple carved entablature; above is a marble dome too opulent in statuary, but carved into a stone lacework of moving magnificence, “finished,” says Fergusson, “with a delicacy of detail and appropriateness of ornament w
hich is probably unsurpassed by any similar example to be found anywhere else. Those introduced by the Gothic architects in Henry VII’s Chapel at Westminster, or at Oxford, are coarse and clumsy in comparison.”83

  In these Jain temples, and their contemporaries, we see the transition from the circular form of the Buddhist shrine to the tower style of medieval India. The nave, or pillar-enclosed interior, of the assembly hall is taken outdoors, and made into a mandapam or porch; behind this is the cell; and above the cell rises, in successively receding levels, the carved and complicated tower. It was on this plan that the Hindu temples of the north were built. The most impressive of these is the group at Bhuvaneshwara, in the province of Orissa; and the finest of the group is the Rajarani Temple erected to Vishnu in the eleventh century A.D. It is a gigantic tower formed of juxtaposed semicircular pillars covered with statuary and surmounted by receding layers of stone, the whole inward-curving tower ending in a great circular crown and a spire. Nearby is the Lingaraja Temple, larger than the Rajarani, but not so beautiful; nevertheless every inch of the surface has felt the sculptor’s chisel, so that the cost of the carving has been reckoned at three times the cost of the structure.84 The Hindu expressed his piety not merely by the imposing grandeur of his temples, but by their patiently worked detail; nothing was too good for the god.