Page:Footfalls of Indian History.djvu/160

124 FOOTFALLS OF INDIAN HISTORY There Eastern and Western alike fell under the eastern spell. The thought of a human being who was at the same time incarnate Godhead fascinated them. Influenced by the tendency of classical Europe to exalt the human and virile side of every concept, they busied themselves in portraying the companions and disciples of Buddha. These became as essential a part of the scheme of the evangel as the Master himself. The old Asiatic conception of a story told in a series of bas-reliefs, as we see it at Sanchi, came to their aid, and we have a singularly impressive epos of the ideal rendered into stone. Apostolic processions and saintly choirs, as we know them from the fourth century onwards in Christian art, whether Byzantine, Roman, or Gothic, began in the Gandharan art of the second and third. There, from Buddhist monks trying to instruct their workmen in the feeling and artistic traditions of Magadha, was learnt the power to utter the divine epic whose hero was the conqueror of the mind, perfect in chastity as in compassion, and its appeal to man in the name neither of country nor state, nor yet in that of personal emotion, but in something which is beyond either and includes both, the passion of the upward-striving soul.

We cannot too clearly understand that while Gandharan art made no contribution whatever to the Indian ideal of Buddhahood, while it created nothing that could stand a moment's comparison with the work of the nameless artist of Nalanda,