At the press opening of works beyond beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art “Trees and Snakes: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BC to 400 AD” Five red-robed monks chant the Pali blessing, which is the equivalent of ocean silence. Surrounding ancient sculptures projected a different visual music. Forest birds sang, mythical creatures roared, demigods and human statues clapped their hands, and danced like some kind of raucous summer party.
Less obvious, there were other contrasts in the opening. Given the monumental brilliance of each sculpture, deeply chiseled out of the darkness, it would be hard to guess that it took more than a decade of logistics and diplomacy to bring together more than 50 sculptures on loan from India for the first time, a difficult and always interim process. We haven’t seen Indian antiquities on this scale in an American museum in years, and it says something about the curator’s struggle to see it again in the near future.
So when John Guy, curator of South and Southeast Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, stepped into the microphone to thank visiting Indian museum directors, his words had a special ring to them. They were the ones who basically allowed this show to take place.
Buddhism itself, in its basic form, is a forgiving faith, offering us countless ways to save our souls, including the practice of generosity. At the same time, it is a belief in ethical absoluteness, the main belief of which is “to stop killing our comrades, all living things, and the earth, which has its own consciousness.”
The exhibition then opens with an image of the Earth, a spirit-driven image of nature that gradually came to be seen and understood by the human-to-be-Buddha.
The man was, in many ways, always a worldly man. He was born Siddhartha Gautama, a prince, in what is now Nepal, near the border with India, in the 5th century BC. In his youth he was a well-known sensualist with a penchant for wine, women and singing, but his melancholic nature made him obsessed with the facts of mortality and its misery. In a shock of disappointment, he completely changed his life and set out on a journey to become a begging aspirant, one of many aspirants of various aims and persuasions who were roaming India at the time.
And as soon as I stepped outside, I found myself in a spiritually charged region, a region recognized and worshiped by grassroots nature worshipers. He learned that trees have souls. The bird spoke wisdom. Flowers were seasonless, and serpents had protective powers. Imaginary creatures such as crocodiles, tigers, and fish were as common as pets in this world. and grotesque and ornate, malignant and benign masses of male (called yaksha) and female (called yakshi) nature spirits ruled.
It was in this environment that Prince Siddhartha transitioned into Buddhahood and found the peace he sought. He was in his thirties and already had some followers. By the time he died at the age of 80, he had much more. By then, Buddhism had become a “thing”, a way, a belief. And importantly for art, it was destined to become a monument-building institution.
Those first monuments were of a specific type. These stupas, known as stupas, were based on traditional South Asian funerary signs and were domes filled with baked bricks and earth, in which relics of the Buddha (initially cremated ashes) were embedded.
Stupas are a recurring visual theme in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibitions. A towering abstract walk-in his version is a pivotal feature of Patrick Heron’s charismatic exhibition design. (Enter this stupa to find a 3rd-century BC reliquary, made up of crystal fragments, tiny pearls, and gilt florets arranged in glowing mandalas.)
The show begins with a sculptural depiction of a stupa embossed in limestone panels. Dating from the 1st century AD, it was once attached to the face of a long-extinct stupa in Amaravati (now Andhra Pradesh) in southern India. Although the area was never visited by Buddha, it is where some of the most magnificent monuments to Buddha were created and is the origin of most of the work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art show.
The surfaces of the panels are engraved with features of the natural and supernatural worlds that Siddhartha, the Buddha, came to know. A majestic serpent deity guards the balustrade gate of the pagoda. Large umbrella-shaped trees cover the dome. And in an extraordinary relief nearby, the spirits of nature with serious faces and stuffed bodies appear to materialize like mist from stone.
Scenes of communal worship taking place in stupas can be found in other reliefs in various parts of northern and southern India that practice animism. Multiple figures kneeling, waving, praying, flying – there is no real distinction between the natural and the supernatural – such a gathering may, and probably was, look pretty wild. Early Buddhist public devotions had an air of jamboree, similar to that practiced by animistic nature worship. In addition to ceremonies and processions, there were undoubtedly food vendors, incense vendors and street performers on the corners, just as in India today. These events were about liveliness, prosperity, prosperity—heaven, but they were also very much about the earth.
One figure rarely seen participating in such a sensory brawl is the image of Buddha himself. For reasons that have historically been the subject of much speculation, he has long since appeared in works of art only in the form of symbols such as an empty throne, a pillar of fire, a wheel (representing his teachings), a pair of footprints, or the stupa itself. And this is also true when the subject depicted was a scene from his own life, as is often the case.
It is as if it would be a blasphemy and a disgrace to return to the body after his hard-earned relief from mortal fears. The indescribable was his great reward, the testimony of the Buddha, and he encouraged all of us to earn it.
Of course, salvation, like art, is a universal concept, only the details and dimensions differ from place to place. And while the particular setting of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibitions is India, curator John Guy, who also oversaw its superlative catalog, is careful to avoid the impression that early South Indian Buddhism and culture was a landlocked phenomenon.
In a gallery entitled ‘Buddhist Art in a Global Environment’, he concisely illustrates the longstanding give-and-take between the subcontinent and the Mediterranean world through two exquisite high-end trade items. One of his is a bronze Roman copy made in the 1st century AD of a Greek figurine of the sea god Poseidon that was found in western India in the 1940s along with other Roman items and preserved in a museum there. Another of his perfectly fine works, also from the 1st century AD, is an ivory statuette of a naked and strikingly seductive yakshi, or courtesan. It was carved in South India and was found in the ruins of Pompeii in 1938.
By the time these works left their homeland, the sculpture of a single figure, bearing traces of Western models, had already had a long-lasting influence on the Buddhist art of northern India, political and religious centers such as Gandhara, as a prestigious style. It wasn’t until the 3rd to his 4th century that its flavor shifted south, perhaps spurring an increase in commercial maritime trade between Greater Rome and the subcontinent.
Then the Buddha himself began to appear there in a physical body. Carved and cast, free-standing and circular, often wearing robes with toga-style cuts and drapes, the statue now became the main focus of worship in shrines centered around monasteries. It replaced the serpent deities and tree spirits strategically adapted from the old nature worship and incorporated part of the intangible symbol that had once taken the place of the Buddha: the Dharma Wheel.
A few independent Indians transform the final gallery of the show, teasingly titled “The Revelation of the Buddha,” into a chapel of sorts. And it is visually clear that a page has been turned, both in the story of the exhibition and in the history of Buddhism itself.
By the time the most recent of these single-digit iconography was produced in the late 5th to 6th century AD, the map of Buddhism was changing. By that time, the religion had spread to Southeast Asia and China. It came to Japan in the 6th to 7th century. And the heyday of India gradually died down. A new evangelical form of Hinduism surpassed popularity. Then Islam entered and surrounded Buddhism. By the 12th century, remnants of it remained in India. After that it was mostly gone.
If you didn’t know this fate, it would be hard to guess from the glorious, vibrant, and dynamic early Indian Buddhist art shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And in the light of the time this art was made, it would have been difficult to predict today’s global disaster caused by humans, who have turned out to be the most dangerous invasive species on Earth. The free-standing Buddha statue in the final gallery of the show has a self-contained, expressively majestic, and contemporary look. But coming to them, like New Yorkers on the subway, after passing through a room filled with images of humans and gods, body after body, whose bodies are so closely woven into landscapes of trees, flowers and birds that “self-contained,” “imperative,” and “modern” feel more like a duty than a virtue.
Trees and Snakes: Early Buddhist Art from India, 200 BC to 400 AD
Through November 13, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., (212) 535-7710. Metmuseum.org.
