In the last lecture we saw that Scythian art brought certain new elements into the Chinese tradition, but that these were so nearly akin to pre-existing Chinese art that they did not effect a very striking change. It was very different with the next great invasion from Central Asia, because this brought with it a new religion, namely Buddhism.

I am generally rather sceptical about the influence of religion on art-at least I think it is often assumed to exert a more direct influence on the actual forms used by the artist than it does–but in this case of Buddhism in China there is no doubt of the importance of the change. It forced upon the Chinese a problem which was quite foreign to their way of thinking, because it made them face for the first time the problem of an idealized type of humanity.

As we saw, the Han artists represented human beings in the situations of ordinary life. Their pictures were essentially genre pictures, their attitude to the figure was essentially like that of modern painters. They noted the individual character, and by their instinctive feeling for movement, were able to suggest the psychological reaction to the situation. The effect of Buddhism, with its insistence on a single idealized type of human being and the expression of a particular kind of feeling, was to make Chinese art much less modern. Under Buddhism, Chinese art became something which we should call medieval.

There is a curious parallelism between the Eastern and Western worlds at this juncture. Both for Christianity and for Buddhism GrecoRoman art supplied the first iconographic types, and to some extent the Greco-Roman tradition was modified in a similar way. The chief difference is that the catastrophe of the fall of the Roman Empire was far greater and more lasting than the Tartar invasion which brought Buddhism to China. China managed to assimilate its barbarian invaders more quickly and more completely than Rome could. There is nothing in Chinese art corresponding to the long period of the Dark Ages, and thus Chinese ‘gothic’ comes more or less straight out of Hellenistic Greek art. But this change did not take place in China itself. The home of Greco-Buddhist art was in the regions of NorthWestern India, Eastern Afghanistan and Bactria. In this region the successors of Alexander the Great had imposed Greek culture on the inhabitants and it was here that Buddhist iconography first took shape. Apollo became Buddha in Bactria in almost exactly the same way as he became the Good Shepherd in Rome, though the Hellenistic models in the East were certainly a good deal better than the feeble Roman visions which were all that the early Christian artists had to work upon.

The Greco-Buddhist relief is strikingly like an early Christian sarcophagus. There is the same high relief, the same crowding of the figures with little feeling for design, the same general effect; though the individual figures are more delicately and sensitively handled, and in particular the drapery falls in more rhythmical folds and lacks the heavy rounded loops of early Christian work.

The bust from Hadda is one of the many stucco figures discovered at the great Buddhist centre of Hadda in Afghanistan, and we see an almost pure Hellenistic type; only there is something new, not in the actual forms but in the feeling, as given both by the expression of the features and the poise of the head.

There at once you get what the East nearly always felt, and what Greco-Roman art lacked, that instinctive feeling for the animating spirit which gives coherence and meaning to movement. You get, too, a new tenderness in the expression which makes one think of early Gothic sculpture of Chartres and Reims, although the form is essentially Greek.

The three heads show some more Hadda types. The one might almost be from a French thirteenth-century Christ, and shows how immediately this new spiritual conception of Buddhism found its ‘Gothic’ formula, whereas it took about 1000 years for Christianity to get to this point in the West. The central head shows already the beginning of the peculiarly Buddhist conception of the spirit withdrawn into itself in a mood of intense contemplative abstraction. Note, too, the long ears due to the wearing of heavy ear-rings which became everywhere a fixed character of Buddha. The right-hand head is a vividly realistic portrait of an Oriental–I suppose an Afghan type. It is certainly not Mongolian.

Of the two remaining heads that to the right is almost a pure Hellenistic portrait head of a philosopher, which here does duty for an attendant on Buddha; but again with that slight change in the direction of a greater psychological expressiveness. The other shows already a slight modification of the Greek physiognomy in an Oriental, I think a Mongolian, direction. But how much it still keeps of the elegance, the physical beauty, of the Greek notion of humanity.

The coloured stucco figures come from one of the oases of Turkestan, and therefore make a longish stage in the journey of GrecoBuddhist art towards China–and, as you see, they show a much further departure from Hellenistic originals. The left-hand figure with its painted moustache is distinctly Iranian or Persian in influence, for this phase of Central Asiatic art receives many influences from without. Bactria itself was conquered more than once by Sassanian kings and they brought with them an art which likewise sprang from GrecoRoman origins but which they had already modified greatly, so that we get another stream of Greco-Roman influence changed in a specific manner by its sojourn in Persia. Yet another influence comes through by way of India. It, too, derives from the Hellenistic centre in the north-west of India, but it was modified in a quite different direction by the Indian genius. And all these three currents mix in Turkestan and are fused and modified by its Mongolian and Turkish inhabitants, as well

as receiving even stronger and stranger Chinese influences as they move eastwards. In these regions, too, there was an extraordinary mixture of races–Sogdians, Tokharians, Uigur Turks–and even a mixture of religions, Nestorian Christians and flourishing settlements of Manichaeans as well as Buddhists. The Manichaeans, who were mainly Persian, are peculiarly interesting because their strange founder, Mani, united with an extreme asceticism a passion for miniature painting and calligraphy which he transmitted to his followers, who thus developed a peculiar Manichaean art which had great influence on the later developments of Persian art as well as contributing to the compound art of Central Asia.

It would take me many lectures to unravel all the strands of this complicated structure, and it would not repay us to do so because, although this strange compound has its own peculiar beauty, it scarcely produced anything of the highest aesthetic quality. Only I want you to picture to yourselves vaguely the situation in Turkestan in the early centuries of our era. There is something thrilling to the imagination in the fact that all the spiritual, aesthetic and cultural ideas of the ancient world thus fixed a rendezvous together in the oases of this remote desert region; above all perhaps in the fact that Greek culture lived on so long in Central Asia, that when in 630 Hsüan Tsang, the Chinese Buddhist, made his great journey from China to India through these regions, the various kingdoms through which he passed carried on Hellenistic culture and manners but little changed from those of Alexander’s immediate successors.

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