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Nearer home, the
uncovering of all those wonderful sculptures and pieces of stupa
railings at Sanghol — not far from Chandigarh — made us all sit
up, take notice, and wonder. The stories of this reclaiming of human
heritage are endless: the Altamira caves, the great complex at Ajanta,
the Dead Sea scrolls, the Rosetta stone, Dun-huang. Some of the
capillaries that connect us with our past keep lying hidden for
centuries, and then, one day — sometimes by pure chance, sometimes
after years of planned effort — we see them laid bare, breathing as
it were.
In 1996, workers doing levelling work in a school’s sports ground in the town of Qingzhou in China — the place is located in the Shandong province, a peninsula which juts out like a camel’s long neck and head into the sea, half-way between Shanghai and Beijing — found lying in a pit two metres deep something like 400 pieces, carved mostly of limestone. Some of them small, other large, they were all parts of superbly carved figures of the Buddha — Shakyamuni himself — and of Bodhisattvas. The news of the chance
find spread like fire and hordes of archaeologists descended upon the
scene. The discovery was hailed as comparable to that of the great
cave temples early in the 20th century. Work like putting the pieces
together, making sense of fragments, brushing and cleaning, proceeded
at great pace and, within three short years, in 1999, in fact, an
exhibition of a selection of these sculptures was held in Beijing for
an awestruck string of visitors to see. (Do compare this,
incidentally, at the snail’s pace at which we do things in our own
land: discoveries hidden away for years, reports of excavations not
published or published after decades; wrangles and quarrels about
credit dragging things and people down, among other things.) Decisions
were then quickly taken to ‘travel’ the exhibition, as they say in
museum circles, and, from Beijing, it went first to Shanghai and Hong
Kong, and then on to selected places in Japan and the United States.
More recently, the exhibition consisting of 33 selected pieces, now
acknowledged as masterly works, toured Europe. ‘The Return of the
Buddha’ is how it was titled. Wherever it was shown, catalogues came
out, bringing scholarship on the subject together, each expert
bringing his own thoughts to bear upon the great finds. A benchmark,
so to speak, was created.
Some facts, as different
from speculations, were duly noted. The earliest date, found on one of
the pieces, was 529; there was a piece that was dated 1026. It was
clearly established through this that the pieces belonged to different
periods of Chinese history, the earliest going back to the Wei
dynasty, and the latest to the Northern Song. But even more important
was the fact that a number of these sculptures were vividly pigmented,
and bore traces of gilding, leading to the widespread question: were
originally all temple figures in China in polychromy —
painted with different pigments — unlike those in early Europe:
Greece and Rome, for instance, which were bare, whether in marble or
schist. A question that, incidentally, has not been definitively
answered yet. But the traces of colour and gold on these pieces were
undeniable.
Some of the pieces that
the dig threw up were truly breathtaking in their quality: the Buddha
turned completely inwards, heavy-lidded eyes all but barely open;
standing like a monk begging for alms; holding the right hand in abhaya,
shedding grace; seated on a high pedestal, one broken arm
supporting the chin, the right leg raised and placed flat across the
lap resting on the left leg which rests on the ground, in paryanka
stance; standing flanked by two Bodhisattva figures in a ‘mandorla’
formation — almond-like space created by intersecting circles. But
what took my breath away is the sixth century tall, standing figure
with the head, the arms, the feet all missing, but carved with
exquisite skill, the surface remarkably smooth, every depression and
protuberance incredibly subtly articulated; to see the image from a
slight distance is to get the sensation of a sacred figure being
lustrated with milk — one of the panchamritasnana-s, as in
South Indian temples — the figure shimmering behind a sheet of milk
ceaselessly being poured over it.
Among the essays that introduce and discuss the discovery, there are, almost naturally, profuse references to the Indian connection. How the image of the Buddha came to be conceived and realised in India — more than 500 years after the great teacher had passed away, one needs to remember — how images and texts were sourced from India by Chinese scholars and travellers; the manner in which these objects travelled across long, very long, distances to serve as models; the debates and discussions about the new arrivals in Chinese circles, royal or scholarly. It is all extremely fascinating, especially in light of the fact that so much was fully documented in Chinese records. There are factual details in these records but also notes on traditional accounts preserved for centuries. There is, for instance, the tradition according to which the first Buddha image was brought to China soon after the middle of the first century. It was at the behest of Emperor Ming of the Han Dynasty, who had a dream in which he saw a ‘divine figure’ (shenren, in Chinese). ‘The body of the figure gleamed like gold, and behind its head there was a halo resembling a shining sun". The advisers of the emperor, analysing this ‘strange apparition’, told him that ‘far away in the west there was a deity known there as Buddha who resembled the figure the emperor had seen in his dream’ What followed can easily be reconstructed. An image was brought in from India; displayed on the ‘Terrace of Cooling Freshness’; widely copied; and piously worshipped. The power that lies in dreams and the things they can trigger?
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