Gandhara Carved the Buddha in Grey Schist With Wavy Hair and a Heavy Robe, Mathura Carved Him in Spotted Red Sandstone, and Museums Date Both Schools to the Kushan Centuries

The National Museum in New Delhi says the Buddha was shown in human form for the first time during the Kushana period. Before that, its gallery text says, artists showed him through symbols such as the Bodhi tree and the lotus. The museum gives the main centres of Kushana art as Gandhara, in the north-west, and Mathura, in Uttar Pradesh, and says each developed its own style between the 1st and 3rd centuries CE.

The two styles are easy to tell apart in a museum case. The same text says Mathura artists used locally available spotted red sandstone, while Gandharan artists chose the local greyish schist. It calls Mathura art indigenous and says Gandharan art evolved under Greco-Roman influence. Museums that hold the images date them across two or three centuries. Britannica calls Gandhara’s role in the evolution of the Buddha image a point of considerable disagreement among scholars, and says it now seems clear that each school developed its own Buddha independently, about the 1st century CE.

A tree, a wheel, an empty seat

The earlier phase is called aniconic, meaning without a human image. UNESCO describes the Buddhist monuments at Sanchi in Madhya Pradesh as among the oldest and most mature examples of aniconic art in India, and says the sculpture there shows the Buddha through symbols. UNESCO dates the sanctuary’s beginning to the reign of Ashoka in the 3rd century BCE, the stupa’s enlargement to the Shunga dynasty (184 to 72 BCE) and the ornamenting of its four gateways to the Satavahana dynasty in the 1st century CE. tuput’s pieces on the Sanchi stupa and Ashoka cover the monument and its founder.

The Indian Museum in Kolkata holds the other great early site. Its Bharhut gallery has the red sandstone railings of the Bharhut stupa and the only surviving eastern gateway, which the museum says Alexander Cunningham excavated in 1873. The panels show Jataka tales, which are stories of the Buddha’s earlier births, and scenes from his life. One panel on the museum’s list is titled Worship of the Bodhi Tree and dated to about the 2nd to 1st century BCE. The Met’s audio guide for its Gandharan bronze says the Buddha’s presence was shown abstractly, using symbols, before the first human images.

Gandhara: where the Buddha met a Greek profile

Gandhara is the ancient name for a region of north-west Pakistan, and the Met’s Heilbrunn essay by Kurt Behrendt says Alexander and the Indo-Greek kings who followed him introduced classical traditions that stayed part of its artistic vocabulary for seven centuries. Gandharan control of the mountain passes on the trade routes made the region rich, and Behrendt says its wealthy elites became some of the most powerful Buddhist patrons in South Asia. He notes that Buddhism probably arrived by the 3rd century BCE but received significant local patronage only from the 1st century CE.

Taxila, in what is now Pakistan’s Rawalpindi district, shows the mix on the ground. UNESCO says Sirkap, founded in the mid-2nd century BCE, was laid out on the Hellenistic grid and shows strong Western classical influence, and that the Kushans destroyed it in the 1st century. The same listing names Dharmarajika, Mohra Moradu and Jaulian among the Buddhist sites in the valley and says Taxila reached its height between the 1st and 5th centuries. tuput’s account of Takshashila deals with the city as a seat of learning.

The Peshawar valley supplied much of the sculpture. The Kyoto National Museum places its Gandharan Buddha head in the present-day Peshawar region and says the people there had long believed in Buddhism when Greek culture arrived. The Indian Museum’s Gandhara gallery shows reliefs from Mardan, Jamalgarhi, Loriyan Tangai and Sahri-Bahlol and spans about the 1st century BCE to the 4th century CE.

Behrendt says most of the great Gandharan monasteries were founded in the 2nd century CE under kings such as Kanishka, and that stupas were decorated with reliefs of the Buddha’s life before independent images took over. The Met’s Kushan essay adds that Kanishka ruled from two capitals, Purushapura (now Peshawar) and Mathura, so the two schools worked under the same emperor. tuput’s piece on Kanishka deals with his reign and its dating.

What a Gandharan Buddha looks like

Museum labels describe the figure in similar terms. The National Museum’s standing schist Buddha, a 133 cm image it dates to the 2nd century CE, is called typically Gandhara in style, with long flowing drapery set loosely on the body in heavy schematic folds. The robe covers both shoulders, an urna mark (a dot between the brows) sits on the forehead and the wavy hair is gathered in a top-knot.

The British Museum’s seated Buddha from Jamalgarhi, dated 2nd to 3rd century and made of schist, has hair rising in dense strands into the usnisha, the bump on the crown of a Buddha’s head. The museum’s catalogue entry describes a round to oval head, a circular urna, long narrow eyes and an over-robe on both shoulders in thick rounded folds.

Cleveland’s standing Buddha, dated 150 to 200 CE, is described as placid in expression, with thick wavy hair and a heavy robe like a toga, and the museum says Gandharan artists were among the first to show him this way. The Kyoto head has lightly curled hair, a long nose and sharply cut features that the museum calls characteristic of late Greek sculpture, while the meditating eyes, the museum says, emphasize the Buddhist concept of enlightenment. Britannica goes further and says the Gandhara school gave the Buddha a youthful Apollo-like face and dress like that on Roman imperial statues.

The Met’s bronze seated Buddha, dated 1st to mid-2nd century, wears a moustache, which the museum’s audio guide calls a sign of princely status found only on early Buddhas. The guide adds that one scholar derived its spiked halo from portraits of the Roman emperor Nero in the guise of the Sun god. The museum’s label says the hairstyle, robes and treatment of the body reflect contact with classical traditions.

Mathura: red sandstone and an Indian Buddha

The Government Museum at Mathura was founded in 1874 by F. S. Growse, then the district collector, and was first called the Curzon Museum of Archaeology. The Ministry of Culture’s Parampara Project, quoting the Directory of Cultural Organisations in India, says the museum holds the richest and most important collection of Mathura sculpture, dated from the 3rd century BCE to the 12th century CE, which reached its height under the Kushan and Gupta emperors.

The University of Vienna’s art history database lists red sandstone Buddhas from the museum, among them a standing Buddha from Govind Nagar that it dates to the early Kushan period. It also files under Mathura a seated Buddha of red sandstone with white spots from Ahichchhatra in Uttar Pradesh, now in the National Museum in New Delhi, and dates it to 110 CE.

The National Museum’s text says Mathura artists supplied images to every faith practised in and around the city and to distant places, while Gandharan artists worked mostly on Buddhist subjects. Cleveland’s seated Shakyamuni of about 120 CE shows what the Mathura Buddha looked like at that stage. He sits on an altar under the Bodhi tree with a coiled topknot and elongated earlobes, which the museum says refer to his life as a prince in a turban and heavy earrings. A solar disk like a halo is behind his head, and lions on the throne stand for the spread of his teaching in all four directions.

Mathura carvers also took up the Gandharan robe. Cleveland’s seated Buddha of the 200s CE is described as Mathura’s reworking of the Greco-Roman drapery popular in Gandhara, because its makers preferred, in the museum’s words, “a more otherworldly, abstracted rendition of the folds”. The museum says this gave the figure a powerful, superhuman energy.

Two schools, many dates

The dates on museum labels differ. The Met dates its bronze Gandharan Buddha to the 1st to mid-2nd century and calls it probably one of the earliest iconic images of the Buddha from Gandhara. The National Museum dates its schist Buddha to the 2nd century CE, the Kyoto museum puts its head in the late 2nd century, Cleveland dates its standing Buddha to 150 to 200 CE and the British Museum gives the 2nd to 3rd century.

Britannica dates the Gandhara style itself from about the 1st century BCE to the 7th century CE, with stucco used increasingly after the 3rd century, and says the schools of Gandhara and Mathura influenced each other. For Mathura the dates run from the University of Vienna’s early Kushan standing Buddha, through the National Museum’s 110 CE and Cleveland’s c. 120 CE, to the 200s CE for Cleveland’s drapery-heavy seated Buddha.

Where the major works are held

The National Museum in New Delhi holds the standing Gandhara Buddha (87.1153) and, per the Vienna catalogue, the Ahichchhatra Buddha in the Mathura manner. The Indian Museum in Kolkata holds the Bharhut railings and its Gandhara reliefs. The Government Museum at Mathura holds the city’s own Kushan Buddhas, including the Govind Nagar standing figure.

Abroad, the British Museum acquired its 95 cm Jamalgarhi Buddha in 1895 and lists it as on display. The Metropolitan Museum’s 16.8 cm bronze seated Buddha came as a gift in 2003. Cleveland’s schist standing Buddha is 119.7 cm tall and its Mathura seated Shakyamuni is 51.4 cm. The Kyoto National Museum’s Gandharan head is 31.6 cm high.