Buddhist Art of Gandhara In the Ashmolean Museum
Buddhist Art of Gandhara In the Ashmolean Museum
David Jongeward
ISBN: 9781910807224
Publisher: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Size: 9.5 in x 11.75 in
Pages: 336
Illustrations: 250 color, 40 b&w
Hardcover
• Features many Gandharan objects never published before and all-new photography
..The complete catalog of a great museum's Buddhist sculpture collection and related art of the historic Gandhara region.
Buddhist art produced in the early Christian era is among the most sublime the world has ever created.
This publication contains all of the Buddhist art of the Gandhara region housed in the stupendous collections of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. These are largely unpublished works. The Gandhara (now the Bamiyan in East Afghanistan, Bactria, the Hindu Kush, and the Punjab region of northwest India) was a major center of Buddhist culture; the area facilitated the transmission of Buddhism and its art from India via the Silk Road to Central Asia, China, and the Far East..
Religion and art travel and change with circumstances. This was as true historically as it is today. Buddhism actually reached Gandhara in the third century B.C.E. In the first century A.D. its dominion grew. Cross-cultural influences are evident in Buddhas showing the impact of Alexander the Great's travels as well as the Indian Mauryan dynasty, the Parthians, and finally the Central Asian Kushan Empire -- each of whom conquered the region in their time and impacted on what was created. (In 80 A.D. Kushans wrested control of Gandhara from the Scytho-Parthians. Their main city, Sirsukh, became a mecca for pilgrims from Central Asia and China and Gandhara art and architecture was in its golden age.)
Siddhartha Gautama was born into a royal family during the 6th or 5th century B.C. in present-day Nepal. As an adult, Siddhartha attained Enlightenment. Called the Buddha – the ‘Enlighted One’ – he taught for the rest of his life about compassion and the path to freedom from cyclic existence. After his death, his pupils continued to spread his teachings but it was not until the early centuries A.D, that he was represented in sculpture. The first visual representations of the great teacher were his feet.
As elsewhere in India, the sacred relics of the Buddha were enshrined in domed stupas or reliquary mounds. By the Gandhara period, the devotional and popular form of Buddhism, the Mahayana or ‘the Great Vehicle, had developed. Artists crafted images of Bodhisattvas or future Buddhas, who in their compassion have renounced final enlightenment until every being in the universe attains nirvana.