RELIGIOUS ART EAST AND WEST — ROWLAND 583 



mologies known to man, traditions of magic, craft, and ritual — which, 

 although no longer completely understood in later periods, still de- 

 termined the forms proper to religious concepts — from the orientation 

 of the temple to the least of the symbols decorating the footprints 

 of Buddlia. For the centuries of faith these remain in a way apart 

 from change except insofar as they are variously interpreted in the 

 stylistic form language accidental to different places and periods. 

 This latter problem is a separate one which is no less significant in 

 weighing the — for us — final value of the icon in the history of art. 



This problem is separate and different because such "aesthetic" 

 or antiquarian considerations never entered the mind of a craftsman 

 working in a tradition before the rise of the individual "artist" in 

 the modem sense of the term. In the great periods of Asiatic art, 

 before the breakdown of tradition in craft and religion, the geometry 

 of the images of Buddha, the particular concepts that necessitated 

 their particular form, the method and purpose of making and wor- 

 shiping icons remained very much the same as did the teclmical 

 training and spiritual approach of the actual craftsman. In later 

 periods the primordial secrets of the time-and-space mechanism of 

 the cosmos, the reasons for the images being as they were — abstract 

 and beyond nature — were remembered only dimly by the majority 

 or else they were repeated only as formulas not truly understood; 

 but even in later centuries in India, China, and Japan there were men 

 by whom the ancient mysteries were still understood in all the awful 

 clarity of their original meaning, and to these the survival of the 

 ancient traditions is due. In periods like our own time when tradition 

 is almost synonymous with superstition, such concepts as the Tree 

 of Life suggest only a design in a modem "Numdah" rug, and no 

 explanation beyond technical inadequacy is deemed necessary for the 

 attenuated proportions of the early icons of Christ and Buddha. In 

 the period with which we are concerned, enough of these traditions 

 were still alive all over Asia to account for the seeming identity in 

 "style" — the identity is really as much in "content." It must be 

 pointed out that, in Asiatic art, comparisons of details according to 

 the systems of modern scientific art history, although revealing to 

 a certain degree, are actually useless and beside the point in such a 

 unified, traditional art as that of Asia in which the artist never emerges 

 completely as an individual, but is dedicated to expressing communal 

 ideas, not his own personality. The language of his expression is 

 based on certain forms which, by common consent through genera- 

 tions of artistic practice, have been conceived as proper to revealing 

 the essential nature of the divinities for the edification of the believers. 

 The likenesses and differences in physical type in such things as detail 

 in ornaments are due to racial likenesses and differences and ideals 



