hold and tribal deities in them long before Mahāyāna Buddhism gave them its sanction. But Aryan sculpture of the pure Vedic tradition was perhaps almost exclusively made of the various sacrificial woods particularised in the Ramayana,[1] which could not long resist the attacks of insects and other destructive influences of the Indian climate. In the land of the five rivers, the Panjab, where the first Aryan settlements were located, the constant shifting of the river beds would in course of time completely obliterate the towns and villages built upon their banks; and as bathing was an indispensable part of Aryan religious ritual, we may assume that the earliest settlements were always located on the banks of the sacred rivers. Fresco-painting on mud wall and sculpture in wood are the most fugitive of historical records in India, so it is not surprising that no vestiges of their existence before Asoka's time have been discovered. But there is no good reason for supposing that the Indo-Aryans were less proficient in the fine arts than any other section of the Aryan family.
Fragmentary though the record is, it would take many volumes to illustrate fully the variations in the two original types of Buddha images, for Buddhist culture spread itself all over Asia, bringing with it wherever it went the traditions of Indian sculpture and painting. In Java, which was colonised from India early in the Christian era, the best period of Indian sculpture is very fully represented, both in its Buddhist and Brahmanical aspect, for the island escaped the iconoclastic rage of the Muhammadans which desolated the temples and monasteries of India. Two fine examples of the Bodhisattva type from Java are given in Pl. LVII. The first is a finely inspired
- ↑ See Ideals of Indian Art, by the Author, p. 10.
