Page:Footfalls of Indian History.djvu/139

THE ANCIENT ABBEY OF AJANTA 105 ing a language already understood by the people. The first images had arisen out of the desire to express to foreign peoples something of the ideal in the form of the beloved personality. This particular image now became pre-eminent as a mark of the fact that viharas were becoming colleges. Buddhism was taking upon itself the task of national education and scholarship.

But the original idea, in its original home, had not ceased to develop. There was always the irresistible instinct to express the growing and changing forms of the national faith in plastic concreteness. The evolution of Shiva and Saivism, being first to branch off from the original Hinayana stream, early hardened down, as far as Behar was concerned, into the use as its supreme expression of an emblem, instead of an image. It gave rise to a certain amount of descriptive sculpture, as in the case of Kartikeyya, for instance, but it did not share to the full in the later artistic and sculptural impulse. Still there remained unregimented the old idea of the Mother or Adisakti, and sculptural allusions to this begin to be frequent in the later phases of Buddhist art, along with that which supersedes everything under the Gupta emperors as the religion of the state. Here we come upon a wholly new symbolism, that of Narayan or Vishnu, the Great God of those who worship Krishna. Artistically speaking, indeed, on the west ,side of India, it took centuries to exhaust the sculptural impetus associated with Shiva, and much history is