Page:A Handbook of Indian Art.djvu/283

Rh car and, like Vishnu, holding up the heavens, has the same static pose of the Buddha as the Teacher of the Universal Law. Sūrya's active pose when he is shooting the arrows which destroy the demons of darkness is finely given in the relief from the Kailāsa temple (Pl. XXV, ).

Sūrya was one of the ancient Vedic deities worshipped by the Aryans both in India and in Mesopotamia. In Indian art he appears as the Aryan fighting chief in his war-car, which probably played the same part in the Aryan conquest of India as it did in the conquest of Egypt by the Shepherd Kings. The horse introduced into Mesopotamia from Irān about 2,000 replaced the ass in the war-cars of Babylonia, an innovation which for a time made these early engines of war as irresistible as the tank in modern warfare.

The ideas of Vedic India manifest themselves in Buddhist sculpture and painting as clearly as they do in Buddhist architectural designs. The Buddha as the Guru represents the Brahman or Indo-Aryan thinker who found salvation by the path of knowledge; the Bodhisattva, the Kshatriya or Indo-Aryan hero and leader of men who was the central figure of bhakti worship, the path of loyalty or devotion. The reason why there are so many missing links in the chain connecting Indian sculpture and painting with pre-Buddhist times is no doubt the same as that which has prevented the explorer from tracing the evolution of the stūpa and the sikhara. As in ancient Egypt, the houses and palaces of Indo-Aryan nobility were of clay or sun-dried bricks. They were adorned with paintings and carvings, and in spite of the prohibitions of the Vedic Rishis, there were probably icons of