DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.45392#0412
Buddha & the Gospel of Buddhism
“ Beauty is nothing to me, neither the beauty of the body,
nor that that comes of dress.1
“ If a Brother or Sister sees various colours, such as
wreaths, dressed images, dolls, clothes, woodwork, plaster-
ing, paintings, jewellery, ivory-work, strings, leaf-cutting,
they should not, for the sake of pleasing the eye, go where
they will see these colours and forms.”2
Sisters were forbidden to look on ‘ conversation pictures ’
or love scenes; while the Brethren were only permitted
to have painted on the monastery walls or the walls of
their cave retreats the representation of wreaths and
creepers, never of men and women. The hedonistic
foundation of these injunctions is very clearly revealed in
a passage of the later Visuddhi Magga—for the Hmayana
maintains the puritanical tradition to the end, with only
slight concession in admitting the figure of the Buddha
himself—in a passage where ‘ painters and musicians ’ are
classed with ‘ perfumers, cooks, elixir-producing physicians
and other like persons who furnish us with objects of
sense.’
‘ Early Buddhist ’ A rt
It is only in the third and second centuries B.c. that we
find the Buddhists patronizing craftsmen and employing
art for edifying ends. From what has already been said,
however, it will be well understood that there had not
yet come into being any truly Buddhist or idealistic
Brahmanical religious art, and thus it is that Early
Buddhist art is really the popular Indian art of the time
1 Infinitely remote from a modern view, which was also current in
Mediaeval India, that ‘ the secret of all art . . . lies in the faculty of
Self-oblivion.’—Riciotto Canudo, Music as a Religion of the Future.
2 Dasa Dhammika Sutta.
324
“ Beauty is nothing to me, neither the beauty of the body,
nor that that comes of dress.1
“ If a Brother or Sister sees various colours, such as
wreaths, dressed images, dolls, clothes, woodwork, plaster-
ing, paintings, jewellery, ivory-work, strings, leaf-cutting,
they should not, for the sake of pleasing the eye, go where
they will see these colours and forms.”2
Sisters were forbidden to look on ‘ conversation pictures ’
or love scenes; while the Brethren were only permitted
to have painted on the monastery walls or the walls of
their cave retreats the representation of wreaths and
creepers, never of men and women. The hedonistic
foundation of these injunctions is very clearly revealed in
a passage of the later Visuddhi Magga—for the Hmayana
maintains the puritanical tradition to the end, with only
slight concession in admitting the figure of the Buddha
himself—in a passage where ‘ painters and musicians ’ are
classed with ‘ perfumers, cooks, elixir-producing physicians
and other like persons who furnish us with objects of
sense.’
‘ Early Buddhist ’ A rt
It is only in the third and second centuries B.c. that we
find the Buddhists patronizing craftsmen and employing
art for edifying ends. From what has already been said,
however, it will be well understood that there had not
yet come into being any truly Buddhist or idealistic
Brahmanical religious art, and thus it is that Early
Buddhist art is really the popular Indian art of the time
1 Infinitely remote from a modern view, which was also current in
Mediaeval India, that ‘ the secret of all art . . . lies in the faculty of
Self-oblivion.’—Riciotto Canudo, Music as a Religion of the Future.
2 Dasa Dhammika Sutta.
324