Stanley K. Abe: Inside the Wonder House: Buddhist Art and the West

1. Wonder House

- Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim (1901): to illustrate how Greco-Buddhist art was being viewed from the subject position of an Anglo-Indian.

- The “natives” call the Lahore Museum “the Wonder House”.

- Three important aspects about the museum:

1. It was built by the colonial rulers, which is beyond native experience or expertise. The most part of the exhibits are Greco-Buddhist sculptures, showing the taste for the art of the classical West

2. The contents are available solely through the effort of the colonial administration, which collected and preserved the art in the museum

3. These sculptures were made in the distant past, which are superior to what natives are capable of producing in the present.

- Buddhist art serves to mark the cultural heights of the past against the impoverishment of the present day

- British superiority is shown by their ability to recollect the artworks and reorganize them in a western scientific way in the museum

- The curator, with the aids of European books, and his training of an art historian, was able to transform the Buddhist art as a known version to the western audience. However, this was made only possible by controlling and excluding the native presence, their history and voice, from the discourse of art history.

- Scholars used more or less the same way in the creation of the discourse of Greco-Buddhist Art.

2. Greco-Buddhist art

- Originally related to the eastern conquests of the Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic settlement in the border of India. eg. Bactria

- Reasons for the enthusiasm for the collection of antiquities such as Gandharan art:

1. Extend classical archaeology into India

2. Reinforce the political authority of the West over India

- Related with the British colonial expansion In India

- Soon after British annexation of the Punjab in 1849

- W. Jackson, Vice-President of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, described two heads as having Greek and Hindu features respectively

- 1852, a large group of sculpture from Gandharan was identified a having Greek and Buddhist characteristics

- 1870, C. W. Leitner, an educational administrator and archaeological enthusiast from Lahore, brought a collection of Gandharan sculpture to Europe and used the term “Graeco-Buddhist “ to name these works.

- Regarded by many scholars as a new page in the history of Greek art, which secured the source of western influence in the discourse of Greece and Hellenism.

- Supported by scholar like Vincent Smith, who proposed that there are two periods of Western influence on Gandhara.

- Early period: Greek; main school: Roman in inspiration.

- The term “Romano-Buddhist” seems to be more

- He discovered many Roman counterparts of these Gandharan sculptures e.g. Birth of Sakyamuni = Apollo’s birth; Parinirvana = Greek banquet scenes

-The author criticized it as a colonial discourse, in which Western influence was always self-evident.

- Gandharan art = new page in the history of Greek art, but inferior copies

- Smith: “only echoes of the second rate Roman art of the third and fourth countries” and “never Greek enough in its inability to match the achievements of the classical West”

- Discourse of Western power and authority that incorporated the aesthetic and cultural into the ideology of late nineteenth-century European colonialism

- Leitner’ s effort to incorporate this Buddhist art as a natural part of a Universal History in which East-West exchange was thought to be symmetrical and naturally beneficial

- But he is similar to Smith by trying to incorporate India into the schemes of Western schemes of Western knowledge.

- 1900, Alfred Foucher’ s L’art Greco-bouddhique du Gandhara

- He argued that the Greek element was absorbed by Buddhist art is a scheme of gradual decline.

- Joined the discourse of Western colonial discovery by naming and reproducing the artworks for the Western audience.

3. The Origin of the Buddha Image

- Question about the role of Hellenism in the development of Indian Buddhist art

- Late 19th Century, it was understood that in early Buddhist art there was no representations of the Buddha in human form but only “aniconic”, which are symbols to represent Sakyamuni, e.g. his footprint or the wheel of Dharma.

- James Fergusson suggested that the idea of making a Buddha image in anthropomorphic form was inspired by the tradition of Greek image making.

- Alfred Foucher identified that the Gandharan sculpture as the oldest images of the Buddha.

- He also confirmed that Greek blood must be responsible for making such sculptures.

- Ananda Coomaraswamy criticized that he was to “flatter the prejudices of European Students and to offend the susceptibilities of Indians”

- He believed that “precedents for the Buddha image were available in pre-Gandharan Indian artistic traditions including Jain and Buddhist art from sites such as Mathura”

- He received his education in the West

- Said that “Indian (and Japanese) scholars have shown a singular humility, and timidity, in their ready acceptance of all the results of European scholarship”.

- The discourse around the origin of the Buddha image was highly charged with issues of colonialism and race

- Western influence = progress; Native = stagnation.

4. In Pursuit of Greco-Buddhist Art

- Aurel Stein: the most successful archaeologist to explore the vast region between Gandhara and the borders of China.

- 1896, he was allowed to visit Swat district, where he expressed his joy at standing on “classical” soil.

- Random digging was abundant in this region that it was impossible for him to suggest chronological schemes that supported the claim for a Greek origin of the Buddha image

- 1898, he proposed to the British Indian government for the founding at his 1st Central Asian expedition

- Britain was then competing with Russia in that region; the author hinted the complex relationship between scholarship and politics.

- 1900, with the aid of the colonial government, Stein was able to explore south of Khotan.

- One of his goals is to secure Western authority over the texts and other antiquities that had been appearing in piecemeal fashion during the 1890s

- His findings would be handed over to the British government for the British Museum like Greek art

- To show how far into Central Asia that classical art of the West had penetrated

- At Miran, he discovered the name of a painter “Tita”, which he thought to be a sort of Roman Eurasian.

- At Dunhuang, he found “the faithful preservation of the face, pose, and drapery as developed by Greco-Buddhist art “.

- Stein’s most important contribution to the discourse of Greco-Buddhist art was the documentation of its unbroken trail from Gandhra to China.

- Even if the influence of Greco-Buddhist art on Indian art was being doubted, schlolars could still use his findings to support the argument that Gandharan art is the “basis for all subsequent Buddhist art in Central and East Asia”.

- eg. Fenollosa’s Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art.