At the press opening for the Metropolitan Museum’s beyond-beautiful “Tree & Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BCE-400 CE,” five red-robed monks chanted Pali blessings, the voice equivalent to the calmness of the ocean. 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 wild summer party.
There are other contrasts in the opening, too, less obvious. Due to the enormous light of the sculptures, each one illuminated to appear deeply carved out of the darkness, you would probably never think to guess the difficult, always temporary process — logistical and diplomatic, stretching over a decade — that went into assembling them, with more than 50 on loan from India for the first time. It says something about those curatorial struggles that we haven’t seen such a display of ancient art from India, on this scale, in an American museum for years, and likely won’t happen again anytime soon.
So when the Met’s curator of South and Southeast Asian art, John Guy, stepped to a microphone to thank a group of visiting Indian museum directors, his words had particular resonance. These are the people who gave permission for this show to happen.
Buddhism itself, in its basic form, is a permissive faith, offering us, as it does, myriad ways to save our souls, including through practices of generosity. At the same time, it is a faith of the absolute ethical, a fundamental being: stop killing — your fellow beings, meaning all living things, and the earth, which has its own consciousness.
And it is with images of the Earth – of Nature driven by spirits, as it is gradually seen and understood by the man who will become Buddha – that the exhibition begins.
Man is, in many senses, always a worldly being. He was born to a prince, Siddhartha Gautama, in the fifth century BCE in what is now Nepal, near the Indian border. As a youth he was a familiar type, a wine-women-and-song sensualist, but one with a depressive streak that led him to grow up fixated on the reality of mortality and its difficulties. In a fit of despair, he completely changed his life, took to the road and became a discerning seeker, one of the many, of various causes and persuasions, roaming India at that time.
And once out there, he soon found he was in a spiritual land, one suspected and revered by nature cults. Trees, he learns, have souls; the birds spoke wisdom; flowers are timeless, and snakes have protective powers. In this world, incredible creatures – part crocodile, part tiger, part fish – are as common as household pets. And the populations of nature spirits, male (called yakshas) and female (called yakshis), ridiculous and gorgeous, malignant and benign, ruled.
In this environment, Prince Siddhartha transitioned to Buddhahood, and found the peace he sought. He is in his 30s, and already has several followers. By the time he died, at the age of 80, he was much more. At that time, Buddhism became a “thing,” a path, a faith. And significantly for art, it is on its way to becoming a monument-building institution.
The first monuments were of a particular type. Known as stupas, and based on traditional South Asian funerary markers, they are domes of fired brick and packed earth in which the Buddha’s relics – initially cremation ashes – are embedded.
The stupa is a recurring visual theme in the Met exhibition. A towering abstract walk-in version of one is a pivotal feature of Patrick Herron’s charismatic exhibition design. (Enter this stupa and you’ll find a third-century BCE reliquary hoard composed of rock crystal chips, tiny pearls, and sheet-gold florets arranged in a bright mandala pattern.)
And a sculptural depiction of a stupa, carved in relief on a limestone panel, opens the show. Dating from the first century CE, it was once mounted on top of an actual, now long-lost stupa at Amaravati in southern India (in what is now the state of Andhra Pradesh), a place the Buddha never visited, but one that produced some of the greatest memories of him, and the source of most of the works in the Met show.
Cut across the panel are features of the natural-meets-supernatural world that Siddhartha-becoming-Buddha learns about. A majestic rearing snake deity guards the stupa’s barred gate. A large umbrella-shaped tree covers its dome. And in a rare relief nearby, a grave-faced, soft spirit of nature seems to live like a mist from the stone.
In other reliefs from various locations, in northern and southern animist India, you can see scenes of communal worship being performed at stupas. With so many figures kneeling, and waving and praying and flying – there’s no real division between the natural and the supernatural here – these juxtapositions can look a little wild, and they probably are. Early Buddhist public devotions, as did the animist nature cults, had a jamboree atmosphere. Along with rituals and processions, no doubt, there were food vendors, and incense sellers, and corner buskers, as there are in India today. These occasions are about joy, abundance, more joy — about heaven, yes, but also about earth.
One figure you rarely see engaging in sensuous combat is the Buddha himself. For reasons that have been the subject of much historical speculation, early on, and for a long time, he appeared in art only in the form of symbols: an empty throne, a flaming pillar, a wheel (representing his teachings), a pair of footprints, or the stupa itself. And this is true even when the subject depicted is, as is often the case, a scene from his own life.
It seemed a blasphemy, and a shame to return him to bodily form, after he had been freed from the anxiety of mortality, which he had labored to attain. What cannot be explained is his great reward, a badge of Buddhahood, one that he urges us all to try to earn.
Safety is, of course, like art, a general concept, only different in detail and scale from place to place. And while the particular milieu of the Met exhibition is India, its curator, John Guy, who also oversees the superlative catalog, is careful to avoid the impression that early south Indian Buddhism and culture are landlocked phenomena.
In a gallery titled “Buddhist Art in a Global Setting,” he succinctly demonstrates, through the juxtaposition of two beautiful luxury trade items, the long-standing give-and-take between the subcontinent and the Mediterranean world. One piece is a first-century CE bronze Roman copy of a Greek figurine of the sea god Poseidon, discovered, among other Roman objects, in the 1940s in Western India and preserved in a museum there. Another, absolutely stellar work, also from the first century, is an ivory statue depicting a completely naked and strikingly seductive yakshi, or courtesan. It was carved in southern India and was found, in 1938, in the ruins of Pompeii.
By the time these pieces traveled away from their home, single-figure sculpture, with traces of Western models, had already exerted a long influence, as a prestige style, on Buddhist art in northern India, in political and religious centers such as Gandhara. It was only later, in the third and fourth centuries, perhaps stimulated by the increase in commercial sea trade between Greater Rome and the subcontinent, that the taste for it moved south.
And when this happened, the Buddha himself began to appear there also in bodily form. Carved and cast, free-standing and in-the-round, often dressed in robes with a toga-ish cut and drape, this image became the main focus of worship in shrines, now centered in monasteries. It replaced the serpent-deities and tree-spirits strategically adopted from the old nature cults, and it incorporated some of the incorporeal symbols – the Dharma wheel – that once stood for the Buddha.
A few free-standing Indian figures turn the final gallery of the show into a kind of chapel, teasingly titled “The Buddha Revealed.” And it is visually clear that a page has been turned, both in the narrative of the exhibition, and in the history of Buddhism itself.
By the time the latest of these single-figure icons were produced in the late fifth to sixth centuries CE, the map of Buddhism was changing. At that time the religion was widespread in Southeast Asia and China. In the sixth or seventh century, it will come to Japan. And its heyday in India has gradually subsided. New evangelical forms of Hinduism rose to prominence; eventually, Islam would enter the scene and put Buddhism under siege. By the 12th century, it was reduced to a remnant in India. Then everything is gone.
If you don’t know this fate, it’s hard to guess it from the glittering precious, all but palpitating early Indian Buddhist art in the Met show. And from the perspective of the time the art was made, it’s hard to predict the terrestrial catastrophe of our time, wrought by what has become the planet’s most dangerous invasive species, humans. The stand-alone Buddhas in the final gallery of the show are self-contained and expressively commanding, and modern-looking. But going to them after passing through rooms full of pictures of people and divinities chasing each other, body to body, like New Yorkers in a subway — those bodies inextricably woven into landscapes of trees and flowers and birds — “self-contained” and “commanding” and “modern” feel like liabilities, not virtues.
Tree and Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BCE — 400 CE
Through November 13, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., (212) 535-7710; metmuseum.org.
