584 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1963 



which are beyond the control even of traditional iconography or 

 what the art historian is pleased to call influences. As Langdon 

 Warner has so well expressed it : "Dealing directly with the artist's 

 Formal Cause and original conception is quite apart from dealing 

 with influences, where the artist either copies externals or is so close 

 in the grip of his tradition that his spiritual stimulus is controlled 

 by traditional shapes. The critic's difficulty is that he often has to 

 deal with material produced under mixed conditions : direct original 

 imagination clothed in traditional shapes." 



A valuable lesson in what influences really are can be learned in 

 studying the vicissitudes of the Udayana Buddha type. Tlie famous 

 sandalwood image was, according to legend, made in the lifetime of 

 Sakyamuni for the king of Udayana. The original Udayana Buddha 

 in art was, judging from existing copies, an image of the Gandhara 

 school which the latter adopted as the legendary effigy of Sakyamuni. 

 The story has the earmarks of a pious fabrication designed to popu- 

 larize and to justify the worship of the first and very foreign images 

 of Buddha with the "rippling" folds of their Koman togas. Copies 

 were known in China in Hsiian-tsang's time and continued to be made 

 in Japan through the Kamakura Period ; the type survives in Tibet and 

 Nepal to the present day. On the grossly humanistic concept of the 

 Gandharan original, the artist of the dark and mystic figure that we 

 see today in the shrine at Seiryoji has produced something abstract 

 and enormously ghostly. The general lines of the robe of a Gandhara 

 image are there; we recognize them as superficially related, but in the 

 Japanese statue the folds are worked into rhytlims that greatly ag- 

 grandize the figure and convey the feeling of the universal character 

 of drapery structure — not the particular attempt to show the surface 

 appearance of a special robe. In the same way the formalization 

 of the realism of the Koman dress in the early Christian images of 

 Christ and the reduction of the sensuous beauty of the Apollo head 

 to a bland mask of serenity in these and the Gandhara Buddhas im- 

 part a ghostly character that was not present in the humanistic 

 originals. 



Finally, it must be emphasized that no matter how large the stylistic 

 factor may loom in such problems of art history, more significant still 

 in traditional art is the concept that determined the form : in tracing 

 down the history of the content and in analyzing it we shall come 

 closer to truth than in a pursuit of such will-o'-the-wisps as "influ- 

 ences" so often turn out to be. In the origin of the dominating idea 

 we shall find in part the explanation of the form as well. The bio- 

 logical expansion of the cosmos described Vv^ith both faith and the 

 authority of science by Pere Teilhard is only an ordering of concej)ts 

 of the metaphysical structure of the universe embodied in the texts 



