Our icons among us

A new exhibition bringing together most of the Art Gallery of NSW’s Asian sculptures reveals a significant collection.

Ah Xian 'Evolutionaura 14: Taihu rock-2' 2011-2013 bronze, gold leaf, Lake Tai stone

Contact and exchanges between the great civilisations of the eastern Mediterranean, the Indian subcontinent and China, and their cultural dependencies, from western Europe to southeast Asia, are among the great themes in the history of humanity. The relations of China, India and the West are still among the most fundamental issues in contemporary geopolitics; but they were no less important in past centuries, when communication was more difficult and more tenuous.

This is, for example, why the Silk Road is such an interesting subject: an immensely long and arduous caravan way leading from Anatolia and Syria through Persia, the vast arid stretches of Central Asia north of the Himalayas, and into western China: a path travelled in both directions by traders of many ethnic backgrounds, exchanging not only goods but also ideas, design traditions, and religious beliefs.

It is also why the lands between the Mediterranean and India, unified for the first time under the Persian Achaemenid empire in the sixth century BC, were so important as the vectors of cultural exchange in subsequent centuries. The Persian empire was conquered and expanded by Alexander the Great at the end of the fourth century BC, and this led to an acceleration of exchanges in both directions.

Alexander’s biographers recall that while in India he met with the so-called gymnosophistai, or naked wise men, whom we would probably identify as sannyasis or yogis. And recent scholarship has suggested that Pyrrho, the philosopher who accompanied Alexander and whose name later became synonymous with radical scepticism, may have been influenced by or even converted to Buddhism.

Song dynasty 960-1279 'Guanyin, bodhisattva of compassion' 12th-13th century wood, pigment

Alexander’s empire soon broke up, after his death, into smaller parts, with the Ptolemies in Egypt, the Seleucids in Syria and for a time Persia too, and Macedonia, Pergamum and others further west. Less well-known are the Hellenistic states that persisted for centuries in Afghanistan and what is now Pakistan. The Greco-Indian culture of Gandhara, and elsewhere present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan, endured for many centuries before ultimately being reabsorbed into the vast and endlessly varied current of Indian civilisation.

Meanwhile most of India was unified, just after Alexander’s conquests, by Chandragupta Maurya, whom I mentioned here some months ago: he was known to the Greeks as Sandrokottos and, as a young man, was said to have seen Alexander in person. The greatest monarch of the Mauryan empire (322-185 BC) was Ashoka, who undertook a systematic program of disseminating Buddhism, including by sponsoring missionaries and distributing relics.

It was thus that the Greco-Indian region of Gandhara was converted to Buddhism and, some centuries later, now part of the Kushan empire, began to represent Buddha in human form in the first century AD. In the early centuries of Buddhism, there had been no anthropomorphic representations of Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha, or of other figures. Instead, his teaching was represented by the wheel (chakra) of the law.

Now they began to represent Buddha as a man and, as was the case with the earliest images of Christ, the model was the youthful and beardless figure of Apollo, with curly or wavy hair and robes hanging in elegant pleats in the fashion of the Greek himation. All of these features — the facial type, the curly hair and the robes — would evolve as they made their way across the Eurasian continent as far as China and Japan, in one of the most remarkable examples of cultural exchange and iconographic dissemination in the history of art.

Much of this journey can be followed in a new exhibition that brings together most of the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ collection of Asian sculpture and reveals it to be quite a substantial one, and for that very reason one that deserves to be developed and extended by strategic acquisitions. This exhibition has barely been promoted; in contrast with the lightweight and incoherent work prominently displayed in the main foyer of the gallery as part of yet another marketing exercise for the contemporary art business.

Kathmandu Valley, Nepal 'Padmapani' c13th century gilt copper, lapis lazuli, gems and stones

The first item that we encounter is a classic example of the Gandhara style, a standing Buddha that dates probably from the second century AD. This is the closest we have to a starting point for the whole subsequent development: there are features that will persist in later manifestations, but also some that will gradually become attenuated or disappear, like the muscular structure of the body and the characteristic dropping of the weight onto one leg, which goes back to the classical style of the fifth century BC: compare the attitude of this figure to its remote prototype in Polykleitos’s Doryphoros.

A second work from Gandhara is intriguing from another point of view: it is a double sculpture, back to back, of Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha, and Maitreya, who is the Buddha of the future but is here represented as a Bodhisattva. The former has retained strongly Hellenic features, but the latter is distinctly Indian, with a moustache and bare chest, and in Indian sarong-like dress instead of Greek robes. This remarkable piece seems to epitomise the double culture of these semi-Hellenised Indians.

Half a millennium after Alexander, the gravitational pull of India must have outweighed that of Greece, but even in a piece from the third century, we can see the two traditions poised in almost equal vitality. The posture of the fine seated Maitreya from Gandhara is profoundly un-Hellenic, but the sense of the structure and anatomy of the body, including the treatment of the pectoral muscles and other details, remain Greek.

The contrast is very striking if we look at a nearby fragmentary torso from Uttar Pradesh. It is about a century earlier and represents a local sculptural tradition without the Greek influence: there is no form in the pectoral muscles, and the breasts appear almost feminine, while the soft belly is compressed by the belt below. In comparison, the Gandhara works are still heir to the Greek conception of the torso as unified structural whole.

The classical form of the torso was essentially an expression of humanism, in the sense that it conceived of the human body as a single dynamic whole instead of a set of disconnected parts, but it was also a definition of the ideal virile body. Neither of these was a priority in the Buddhist vision of the world, and one of the most interesting developments in later Buddhist art, especially in China, was the tendency towards increasingly asexual or hermaphroditic images of Buddha and other Buddhist figures.

The most extreme case of this transformation was the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, the personification of compassion, who was actually changed in China into a female divinity, Guanyin, known in Japan as Kannon.

There are numerous images of her here, including a large wooden carving from the 12th century and smaller figures in white porcelain from the 17th and 18th centuries.

But from the structural point of view too, there is a reversal of the process by which the Greeks invented the form of the torso. The early Archaic kouroi had very slim waists that separated the chest from the hips and abdomen; the classical torso united the chest and the pelvic girdle into one strong, if articulated form. In particular the belly, the part of the body characteristically emphasised in images of the comical and the grotesque, is strictly subordinated to the order of the whole.

Here we see the reverse, with elongated and wasp-waisted figures like the beautiful Padmapani — another form of Avalokiteshvara, holding a lotus (padma) — from 13th-century Nepal. Or consider the standing Buddha from Lopburi in Thailand, from the 12th to 13th centuries, whose rounded breasts, small waist and round belly have become distinctly feminine.

The quality of carving is also interesting, for example, when we move from the Gandhara figures to two steles from the Northern Wei culture of China, one in sandstone from the sixth century and the other in limestone from the eighth. Although these works are a couple of centuries apart in time, they share a kind of inherent flatness, so that the figures do not assert themselves as truly free of the slab of stone from which they are carved.

Tibet 'Avalokiteshvara, bodhisattva of compassion' 19th century bronze, gold leaf, traces of pigment

Anyone who has tried to carve will have discovered how difficult it is to escape from the original flatness of the stone and achieve a fully rounded form, but here it seems to be as much a matter of style as anything else: perhaps a preference for a kind of rude austerity of style. Particularly striking, however, is the contrast with another relief from the Eastern Wei and from the sixth century, in which the carving is far more sophisticated and refined, the figures are fully rounded although still engaged, and the background itself is subtly concave.

Perhaps the most fundamental difference between many of the later and the most familiar Buddhist sculpture and their starting point in Gandhara, however, is simply the fact they are seated. As already suggested above, no classical freestanding sculpture is seated. Egyptian figures were often seated, from pharaohs to the images of Isis holding her son Horus on her lap, which became prototypes of the Virgin and Child in Christian art, but not Greek ones. Neither the kouros figures nor the classical athletes of the fifth and fourth centuries BC are sitting down. Their standing posture is deliberate and significant, an implicit assertion of confidence in the human. Indeed the only seated figures, even in the Parthenon frieze, are of the gods, not of men.

Buddhist art has its share of standing figures, but its point is not the assertion of humanism or of human confidence and dynamism. On the contrary, it evokes the abnegation of the will and of appetite. It seeks the quietening of the turbulence and chatter of the mind, or in the words of the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, chitta vritti nirodha, which literally means mental disturbance elimination.

If standing is assertion, sitting is humility. In Western art, the Madonna of Humility sits on the ground, and for the same reason it is customary for clerics, even popes, to be portrayed seated; Cardinal Richelieu’s standing portraits were a significant break with tradition.

Sitting cross-legged, ideally in half or full padmasana or lotus pose — that is, with folded legs — helps the back to be straight so it becomes effortless to remain seated without slumping and without strain, in meditation or dhyana, the Sanskrit word that becomes Chinese chan and Japanese zen.

But these sculptures are not simply representations of the meditative state. Sculpture is a powerfully physical medium that addresses the viewer rather as dance does, inviting a virtual imitation of its posture and movement. Thus just as the Greek nude invited us to stand tall, strong, confident and at ease, a seated Buddhist sculpture such as the beautiful Japanese Buddha carved from nutmeg wood invites us to emulate its peace and stillness.