At the press opening for the Metropolitan Museum’s extraordinarily beautiful Tree & Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BCE-400 CE, five red-robed monks sang Pali blessings, the vocal equivalent of oceanic stillness. The ancient sculptures around them projected a different, visual music: forest birds sang, mythical creatures roared, and semi-divine and human figures clapped their hands and danced as if at a riotous summer party.
There were also other contrasts at the opening, less obvious. Given the monumental glow of the sculptures, each lit up to reveal one deeply carved out of the darkness, you probably wouldn’t think of the difficult, ever-careful process – logistical and diplomatic, spanning a decade – that went into bringing them together, with more than 50 on loan from India for the first time. It says something about that curatorial battle that we haven’t seen such a display of ancient art from India on this scale in years in an American museum, and it probably won’t happen again anytime soon.
So when the Met’s Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art, John Guy, stepped behind the microphone to thank a group of visiting Indian museum directors, his words resonated particularly well. These were the people who basically authorized this show.
Buddhism itself, in its fundamental form, is a faith that gives permission and offers us countless ways to save our souls, including through generosity. At the same time, it is a belief of ethical absolutes, the main of which is: stop killing – your fellow human beings, that is, all living things, and the Earth, which has a consciousness of its own.
And it is with images of the earth – of nature driven by spirits, as it was gradually seen and understood by the man who would become the Buddha – that the exhibition begins.
The man was always a worldly in many ways. He was born to a prince, Siddhartha Gautama, in the fifth century BCE in what is now Nepal, near the border with India. As a young person he was a familiar type, a wine-women-and-song sensualist, but one with a depressive streak that left him fixated on the fact of mortality and its misery. In a shock of despondency, he completely changed his life, set out and became a beggar-seeker, one of many, with different aims and beliefs, roaming India at that time.
And once there, he quickly became aware that he was in spiritually charged terrain, one that was observed and revered by grassroots nature cults. Trees, he learned, had souls; birds spoke wisdom; flowers were seasonless and snakes had protective powers. In this world, fantastic creatures – part crocodile, part tiger, part fish – were as common as pets. And populations of nature spirits, male (called yakshas) and female (called yakshis), grotesque and beautiful, malevolent and benign, ruled.
It was in this environment that Prince Siddhartha made the transition to the Buddha and found the peace he sought. He was in his thirties and already had some followers. By the time he died, at age 80, he had many more. By then, Buddhism had become a “thing,” a path, a belief. And importantly for the art, it was on its way to becoming a monumental institution.
Those first monuments were of a certain type. Known as stupas, and based on traditional South Asian tombstones, they were domes of baked brick and compressed earth in which relics of the Buddha – initially cremated ashes – were embedded.
The stupa is a recurring visual theme in the Met exhibit. A towering abstract walk-in version of one is a crucial feature of Patrick Herron’s charismatic exhibition design. (Enter this stupa and you’ll find a third-century B.C. reliquary composed of rock crystal chips, tiny pearls, and gold leaf roses arranged in a radiant mandala pattern.)
And a sculptural depiction of a stupa, carved in relief on a limestone panel, opens the show. Dating back to the 1st century AD, it was once attached to the surface of a genuine, now long-vanished stupa at Amaravati in South India (in what is now the state of Andhra Pradesh), an area the Buddha never visited, but one that has produced some of the greatest memorials to him, and the origin of most of the works in the Met show.
Carved into the surface of the panel are features of the natural-meets-supernatural world that Siddhartha-becoming-Buddha came to know. A majestically rising serpent god guards the railing gate of the stupa. A large umbrella-shaped tree shades its dome. And in an extraordinary relief nearby, a nature spirit with a serious face and a plush body seems to materialize as mist from the stone.
Other reliefs from various locations in northern and southern animistic India show scenes of communal worship at stupas. With multiple figures kneeling and waving and praying and flying – no real division between natural and supernatural here – these gatherings can look pretty wild, and they probably were. Early Buddhist public devotion, such as that practiced by animistic cults of nature, had a jamboree atmosphere. In addition to rituals and processions, there were undoubtedly food vendors, incense vendors, and street performers, as there are today in India. These occasions were about exuberance, abundance, plurality – about heaven, yes, but also very much about earth.
One figure you rarely, if ever, see participating in this sensual battle is that of the Buddha himself. For reasons that have been the subject of much historical speculation, early and for a long time he only appeared in art in the form of symbols: an empty throne, a flaming column, a wheel (representing his teachings), a pair of footprints, or the stupa itself. And this was true even when the subject depicted was, as is very often the case, a scene from his own life.
It is as if, after his deliverance from the fear of mortality, which he had worked very hard for, to return him to his corporeal form would be sacrilege and disgrace. Ineffability was his great reward, a badge of Buddhahood, and he urged all of us to try to earn it.
Salvation, of course, like art, is a universal concept, differing only in detail and dimension from place to place. And while the Met exhibit’s particular milieu is India, the curator, John Guy, who also oversaw the superlative catalogue, is careful to avoid the impression that early South Indian Buddhism and early culture were contained phenomena.
In a gallery titled “Buddhist Art in a Global Setting,” he succinctly demonstrates, through two exquisite luxury commodities, the longstanding give and take between the subcontinent and the Mediterranean world. One piece is a 1st-century AD bronze Roman copy of a Greek statuette of the sea god Poseidon, discovered in a jumble of other Roman artifacts in the 1940s in western India and preserved in a museum there. The other absolutely stunning work, also from the first century, is an ivory statuette representing a completely naked and strikingly seductive yakshi or courtesan. It was carved in South India and found in 1938 in the ruins of Pompeii.
By the time these pieces had made their journey from home, sculpture, with traces of Western models, had long influenced, as a prestigious style, Buddhist art in North India, in political and religious centers such as Gandhara. Only later, in the third and fourth centuries, perhaps stimulated by a revival of commercial sea trade between Greater Rome and the subcontinent, did taste for it move south.
And when that happened, the Buddha himself also began to appear there in bodily form. Carved and molded, freestanding and in the round, often dressed in robes that had a toga-like cut and drape, this image became the primary focus of worship in shrines, now centered in monasteries. It replaced the serpent gods and tree spirits strategically adopted from the ancient nature cults, and it included some incorporeal symbols – the dharma wheel – that had once taken the place of the Buddha.
Several free-standing Indian figures transform the final room of the show, teasingly titled “The Buddha Revealed,” into a chapel of sorts. And it is visually clear that a page has been turned, both in the story of the exhibition and in the history of Buddhism itself.
By the time the last of these one-digit icons was created in the late fifth to sixth centuries CE, the map of Buddhism was changing. By that time, the religion was widespread in Southeast Asia and China. It would arrive in Japan in the sixth or seventh century. And his heyday in India gradually quieted down. New evangelical forms of Hinduism overtook it in popularity; later, Islam would come on the scene and lay siege to Buddhism. By the 12th century it had been reduced to a remnant in India. Then it was almost gone.
If you didn’t know about this fate, it would be hard to guess from the glowingly vital, almost heart-pounding early Indian Buddhist art in the Met show. And from the perspective of the time art was made, it would have been difficult to predict the terrestrial catastrophe of our time, caused by what has turned out to be the world’s most dangerous invasive species, man. The stand-alone Buddhas in the final gallery of the show are self-contained and expressively impressive, with a modern appearance. But having passed through rooms filled with statues of humans and deities jostling one another, body to body, like New Yorkers on a subway—with those bodies inextricably intertwined in landscapes of trees and flowers and birds—”self-sufficient” and “commander” and “modern” feel like obligations, not virtues.
Tree & Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BC. – 400 AD
Through Nov. 13, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., (212) 535-7710; metmuseum.org.
