his disciples; and long before the Mahāyānist school broke away from the primitive traditions of Buddhism, and sanctioned the worship of the Great Teacher as the Divine Ruler of the universe, Indian idealism must have formed the impression which the painters and sculptors of the Kushān court in Gandhara, about the beginning of the Christian era, tried to shape. Their Buddhas and Bodhisattvas are obviously the gods of the Greek and Roman pantheon adapted to an Indian nivran. The Gandharan sculptures in modern museums show how imperfectly these Hellenistic artists realised the true Buddhist ideal. It was left to the Indian mystics who followed them to put into artistic form what they saw in their visions of the Blessed One in the Tushitā heavens, or when He deigned to listen to their prayers and descended to earth to show His divine form to them, as the Devas of old revealed themselves to the Vedic Rishis.
For the two central ideas which run through all Buddhist iconography are as certainly derived from an ancient Indo-Aryan tradition as are the stūpa and the sikhara, to which they are closely related. In the first the Buddha is conceived as the Great Guru, the Muni[1] who by the power of Yoga has obtained full insight into all the mysteries of the universe and has become the teacher of the law. He is the Buddhist counterpart of the Brahman Mahā-Yogi, Siva, worshipped through the jnāna-marga, the Path of Knowledge. In the second he is a King, the Supreme Head of the Sangha regarded as a universal Church. The Bodhisattva is the ideal Kshatriya King of the Mahābhārata who has learnt to subdue himself, so that he may dispense divine justice and become God's Vicegerent on earth. But he fights only with spiritual
- ↑ Monk.
