The Greek Origin of the Buddhist Image?

For much of the last century it was believed that it was the Greeks who, in the late centuries BC, carved the first image of the Buddha; and that it was Alexander the Great -- the most prodigious propagandist in antiquity -- who, by his conquest of Afghanistan, bequeathed the Greek heritage of art as propaganda to India and to Buddhism. The Gandharan Buddhas, with their strange blend of Greek forms and Buddhist philosophy, was long viewed as conclusive evidence for the truth of this theory.

But a Greek origin for the Buddhist image is no longer persuasive. Indian prototypes, particularly those originating near Sarnath in the lower Gangetic plain, that owe nothing to Gandharan models, are now recognized as the origin of the Buddhist image. Moreover, the whole Greek concept of art as propaganda -- based as it is on the notion of art as an imitation of nature -- is now understood as a red herring. Buddhists do not regard their art as an imitation, nor as an image; and the assumption to the contrary has long caused the Western world to look at Buddhist art through Greek eyes.

And just as the Buddhist icon had indigenous prototypes, so the ideological need to create an image of the Buddha sprang from particular intellectual and religious problems of the sort that never troubled Alexander, or any other Greek.

The problem may be simply stated. In order to apply karmic laws to explain the ineluctability of Buddha s Enlightenment, a dogma arose gradually over the course of the centuries following the Buddha s nirvana according to which every Buddha-to-be (bodhisattva) in the cosmic past gained his conception of Enlightenment from a living Buddha that he had met personally. Otherwise, it was impossible to explain how the notion of Enlightenment could ever arise.

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