Seated Buddha from Gandhara
Kushan dynasty, second to third century
A Buddha sits cross legged in grey stone, hands folded in his lap in meditation, wrapped in a heavy robe whose folds are carved as deep parallel ridges falling from the shoulders. The face is oval and calm, with a straight nose, a moustache, wavy hair gathered into a topknot and a halo behind the head. If the pose is Indian, the face and the drapery could belong to a Greek or Roman statue, and that mixture is what makes the art of Gandhara so striking. This is the Buddha as he was first shown in human form.
Gandhara was a region around Peshawar in what is now Pakistan, where Greek settlers left by Alexander's campaigns, Persian and Indian traditions and Roman trade all met. Under the Kushan kings of the second and third centuries its sculptors carved thousands of Buddhas in the local dark schist. Look at the treatment of the robe, modelled on the Roman toga with its naturalistic folds, and at the halo, which comes from Western sun gods. The topknot began as a Greek hairstyle and later became the ushnisha, the bump of wisdom on the Buddha's head.
The museum's Gandharan sculptures were collected in the early twentieth century, when Japanese scholars and monks were tracing the route by which Buddhism travelled from India through Central Asia and China to Japan. They are displayed on the ground floor of the Toyokan alongside Indian stone carving, and they form a natural starting point for the Asian galleries: from this seated figure the path leads upstairs through Chinese Buddhist sculpture and on to the Japanese images in the Honkan and the Horyuji gallery. The route of the religion becomes visible in stone.
Did You Know? The Buddha's wavy hair and moustache come from Greek and Roman art, brought to the region by Alexander's successors.
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