Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Abe: Inside the Wonder House: Buddhist Art and the West
1. Wonder House
2. The contents are available solely through the effort of the colonial
administration, which collected and preserved the art in the museum
3. These sculptures were made in the distant past, which are superior to
what natives are capable of producing in the present.
- Buddhist art serves to mark the cultural heights of the past against the
impoverishment of the present day
- The curator, with the aids of European books, and his training of an art
historian, was able to transform the Buddhist art as a known version to the
western audience. However, this was made only possible by controlling
and excluding the native presence, their history and voice, from the
discourse of art history.
- Scholars used more or less the same way in the creation of the discourse
of Greco-Buddhist Art.
2. Greco-Buddhist art
- Originally related to the eastern conquests of the Alexander the Great and
the Hellenistic settlement in the border of India. eg. Bactria
- 1852, a large group of sculpture from Gandharan was identified a having Greek
and Buddhist characteristics
- Regarded by many scholars as a new page in the history of Greek art, which
secured the source of western influence in the discourse of Greece and
Hellenism.
- Supported by scholar like Vincent Smith, who proposed that there are two
periods of Western influence on Gandhara.
- Gandharan art = new page in the history of Greek art, but inferior copies
- Smith: “only echoes of the second rate Roman art of the third and fourth
countries” and “never Greek enough in its inability to match the achievements of
the classical West”
- Discourse of Western power and authority that incorporated the aesthetic and
cultural into the ideology of late nineteenth-century European colonialism
- He argued that the Greek element was absorbed by Buddhist art is a scheme of
gradual decline.
- Late 19th Century, it was understood that in early Buddhist art there was no
representations of the Buddha in human form but only “aniconic”, which
are symbols to represent Sakyamuni, e.g. his footprint or the wheel of
Dharma.
- He also confirmed that Greek blood must be responsible for making such
sculptures.
- He believed that “precedents for the Buddha image were available in pre-
Gandharan Indian artistic traditions including Jain and Buddhist art from
sites such as Mathura”
- Said that “Indian (and Japanese) scholars have shown a singular humility,
and timidity, in their ready acceptance of all the results of European
scholarship”.
- The discourse around the origin of the Buddha image was highly charged
with issues of colonialism and race
- Aurel Stein: the most successful archaeologist to explore the vast region
between Gandhara and the borders of China.
- 1896, he was allowed to visit Swat district, where he expressed his joy at
standing on “classical” soil.
- Random digging was abundant in this region that it was impossible for him
to suggest chronological schemes that supported the claim for a Greek
origin of the Buddha image
- 1898, he proposed to the British Indian government for the founding at his
1st Central Asian expedition
- Britain was then competing with Russia in that region; the author hinted
the complex relationship between scholarship and politics.
- 1900, with the aid of the colonial government, Stein was able to explore
south of Khotan.
- One of his goals is to secure Western authority over the texts and other
antiquities that had been appearing in piecemeal fashion during the 1890s
- His findings would be handed over to the British government for the British
Museum like Greek art
- To show how far into Central Asia that classical art of the West had
penetrated