Footnotes

A SCHIST RELIEF PANEL OF BUDDHA ENTERING RAJAGRIHA
ANCIENT REGION OF GANDHARA, CIRCA 2ND CENTURY

犍陀羅 約二世紀 片岩佛陀入王舍城圖石碑

Published:
Mario Bussagli, L'Arte del Gandhara, Torino, 1984, p. 142, nos. 2 & 3.
Isao Kurita, Gandhara Art, Vol. I, Tokyo, 1990, p. 267, no. 558.
Flore de Marchant, Analyse des œuvres narratives du Gandhâra de la collection de Marteau, Vol. I, Louvain-La-Neuve, 1999, no. 1, fig. 13.

Provenance:
With Claude de Marteau, Brussels, by 1970s

Once adorning a Gandharan shrine or stupa, and created to educate the faithful about the Buddha's life, this panel tells the story of the Enlightened One's celebrated arrival at the local capital of Rajagriha. In the backdrop just before the Buddha, a crenelated rampart represents the city walls. An early disciple, possibly Ananda, sporting a monk's shaved head and robe, joins him on the far right, preceded by Buddhism's primary protector deity, Vajrapani—a Zeus-like bearded man holding a thunderbolt (vajra) with a deliberate frontal gaze. Motioning toward the left, one of two courtiers guides the Buddha to meet Rajagriha's king while embellishing the path with fistfuls of petals from an oversized basin.

Another panel representing this scene in a private Japanese collection is published in Kurita, Gandharan Art, Vol. I, 2003, p. 96, no. 181. Discussing a third in the Lahore Museum, Ingholt recounts the episode: "After having proven his miraculous powers at Uruvilva, the Buddha turns to the near-by capital of the Magadha province, Rajagriha. It was the king of this land, Bimbisara, who according to legend, had visited the Buddha shortly after the Renunciation, expressing his wish to become a disciple when Siddhartha had obtained the Enlightenment. On the arrival of the Buddha in Rajagriha the king immediately called on the illustrious visitor and invited him to dinner the next day. The Buddha accepted." (Ingholt, Gandharan Art in Pakistan, 1957, p. 73, no. 90).

Aesthetically, the fluid movement exhibited throughout the present panel, the portrayal of the Buddha's ushnisha with a high profile, and each figure's alert eyes and thoroughly pleated garments redolent of Indo-Parthian sculpture, are all characteristics of friezes stemming from Swat Valley, depicted similarly by another in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1998.491).