Theme & Gentle Variations

According to legend, the first statue of the Buddha was done during his own lifetime. He had "arrived at complete Enlightenment* and ascended into Heaven to preach the Law for the benefit of his mother," but after about three months he returned to earth to find that his friend Udayana, King of Kausambi, an ancient realm in India, had ordered a statue made of him in sandalwood.

When Buddha approached the statue, "the carved figure arose and saluted the Lord of the World. The Lord then graciously addressed it and said, The work expected of you is to toil in the conversion of unbelievers and to lead future ages in the way of religion.' "

There have been thousands and thousands of Buddha statues since, but their work has not been to serve religion alone. For much of the Orient, the Buddha has been the dominating theme for artists, and to a large extent, the evolution of the Buddha image reveals the development of Eastern art itself.

The Hunger of the Faithful. No one knows more about that evolution than Professor Benjamin Rowland Jr. of Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, and a year ago he began organizing the first exhibition ever held on the theme. For Asia House in Manhattan, he gathered 70 exquisite pieces from collections all over the world, covering ten major cultures over 1,900 years. The show (see next two pages) is a perfect blend of art and scholarship.

Legend to the contrary, says Rowland, no statue of Buddha was made for centuries after his death because it was believed that he had passed into a realm of invisibility and could be represented only by such symbols as an empty throne for his Enlightenment or a great wheel for his first preaching. But eventually, the faithful came to hunger for something closer to the Buddha, and the great procession of images began.

This delay, ironically, caused the first Buddhas to be made on Roman models. The earliest known figures date from the 1st century and come from the ancient Indian region of Gandhara. The Gandhara artists were imported from the thriving cities of the Near East, and when faced with the problem of inventing a Buddha image, they fell back on the Greek and Roman image of Apollo dressed in a kind of Roman toga. They probably borrowed the halo from the traditional Iranian sun disk that symbolized the heavenly light of Ahura Mazdah. For Buddha's ushnisha--the bump on the top of his head that housed a sort of extra brain that grew as a result of his Enlightenment--they substituted a topknot of extra hair.

The Oval of an Egg. In time, India's artists developed their own canons for the image. Since Buddha was more than human, they did not follow human anatomy but devised a complex series of mathematical formulas for each part of Buddha's body. In the case of life-size Buddhas, for example, they authorized so many finger-widths from hairline to eyebrows, so many more from brows to nose, so many from nose to chin. In some areas, Buddha's features were made to resemble some perfect form in nature. His head had to be a perfect oval like the egg, his eyes were to be curved like lotus petals, his lips to have the fullness of the mango. As Buddhism spread, every new artist took his cue from such traditions, even to the extent of making exact copies of what had , gone before. But the creative spirit could not be bound: each civilization added something of its own.

The large limestone figure from China follows to some extent Indian canons, but the Indians rarely achieved such pure simplicity. In the same century, other Chinese artists forgot about India altogether, flattened the body so that only the benign, almost effeminate, face and gesturing hands seem to be three-dimensional. The Nepalese modeled their work after India, but they gave it a sense of rhythm that was entirely new. The Japanese took inspiration from China, but to a greater extent tried to suggest a sense of power by inflating the face and body. The Thai Buddhas are attenuated and often topped by a crown--figures as delicate as the Japanese are sturdy. But for all these variations, the essential theme remains the same: an image of infinite wisdom whose inward-looking eyes see everything and whose smallest gesture --were the statue to come alive as did the one in the Udayana legend--might be enough to solve any problem.

* Buddha is Sanskrit for "enlightened."

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