580 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1963 



iconographical as well as artistic reasons. Here again the compari- 

 sons will be between examples from Gandliara and early Christian 

 art (pis. 5 and 6). 



From what we know of the movement of artistic influences in the 

 late Antique world, it is unlikely that the arcade-and-figure motif 

 originated in Gandliara and spread from there to the West. The 

 synthetic character of art in the twilight of the classic world is such 

 that probably the truth lies in all the proposed explanations for the 

 appearance of the concept in India ; that is, it is derived ultimately 

 from the fagades with engaged orders in the Roman w^orld, and more 

 specifically from the form as developed on early Christian sarcophagi 

 through the collaboration of Syrian workmen, who, as will be ex- 

 plained below, saw the appropriateness of this funerary architecture 

 to the needs of the Buddhist church of Gandliara. Since the de- 

 veloped form of the homme-arcade is unknown before the Asiatic 

 sarcophagi of the late second century A.D., it would be impossible to 

 suppose that any occurrence of the type in Gandliara is prior to this 

 date. 



In studying the photographs of the Gandhara stilpas with their 

 multiple images of Buddhas under arcades we are faced with another 

 problem of an iconographical nature. It is not without importance 

 for the stylistic aspects of the question : anyone seriously investigat- 

 ing the religious art of the East is bound to ask himself first of all 

 whether the work of art he is examining was made for the expression 

 of a definite concept that determined its form. In this case, one is 

 bound to ask whether the repeated figures of the Buddha, each one 

 nearly identical to its neighbor, were made as parts of a whole repre- 

 senting the miraculous appearance of the Buddha in many places at 

 one time, as in the Great Miracle of SravastI and in the transcendental 

 sections of the Lotus Sutra {Saddharma Pundarika) , or whether these 

 are merely repeated effigies of Salcyamuni duplicated for the merit 

 believed to accrue from the making of statues of the Great Teacher. 

 From what we know of Buddhism in Gandliara there is little evidence 

 that the sculpture of this region was dedicated to Mahayana Bud- 

 dhism: the only bodhisattva recognizable in Gandhara art is 

 Maitreya ; insofar as we know, the mystic Buddhas of Mahayana are 

 unknown, and only Sakyamuni and his mortal predecessors, the 

 manusi Buddhas, are carved in the sanctuaries of northwestern India. 

 More often than not, the number of statues seems determined solely 

 by the dimensions of the space to be filled, but since the individual 

 figures are differentiated from one another, it may be that they are 

 either Sakyamuni at various moments of his career, or Sakyamuni 

 and the Buddhas of the Past who were worshipped in Gandhara. 



The story related by Hsiian-tsang about the double-bodied Buddha 

 at the great stupa of Kanislika at Peshawar furnishes us a clue to the 



