Material and meaning in a fragment of a north Indian standing Buddha

by Hannah Healey

1
Contents
Main text .................................................................................................................................... 3
Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 18
List of illustrations ............................................................................................................ 21
Illustrations .................................................................................................................. 23

2
Main text

In the Ashmolean Museum’s Imagining the Divine exhibition, which brought together the art

of Hinduism, Christianity, Islam and Judaism in the first millennium, the transition from

Hindu to Buddhist art was marked by a stone sculpture depicting the hand and forearm of

the Buddha (fig. 1-3). This fragment of a monumental Buddha statue forms part of the

museum’s permanent collection of Indian sculpture and was on display in the centre of the

gallery dedicated to Buddhism, facing viewers as they entered the space. In the museum

interpretation, as well as the limited scholarship on the object,1 the focus was its aesthetic

and cultural importance; its attachment to a significant moment in the history of the visual

culture of Buddhism. Though central to museum visitor’s interaction with the object, no

reference was made to the condition of the stone or its material presence. The object is

certainly valuable as evidence of the aesthetic development of the anthropomorphized

Buddha image, however examination of the object in the context of responses to ancient

fragmentary sculpture can lead to an understanding of how the object’s material state

communicates meaning to the viewer, and why broken and battered antique fragments have

proved to be so engaging.

The fragment originally formed part of a monumental Buddha statue produced c. 100-200 CE

in the workshops of Mathura. The number of Buddhas produced during the Kushana period

is prolific,2 though the Ashmolean fragment is one of few particularly early surviving

examples. On the palm of the hand, carved in fine lines, is the symbol of the dharmachakra

(fig. 4) which has been used since early Buddhism to represent the teachings of Gautama

1
See; Robert Bracey, ‘Envisioning the Buddha’ in Imagining the Divine: Art and the Rise of World
Religions, ed. by Jas Elsner, Stephanie Lenk, et al. (Oxford: 2017) pp. 85-101; Naman Ahuja, Early
Indian Art at the Ashmolean Museum, forthcoming, no. 92.
2
Usha Rani Tiwari, Sculptures of Mathura and Sarnath: A Comparative Study (Delhi: 1998) p. 61.

3
Buddha.3 Kushana Buddhas have several notable features such as a squat and fleshy form

emphasised by short, stumpy limbs and the right hand raised in abhayamudra gesture.4 The

figure would have worn a simple robe over one shoulder, with its folds closely following the

contours of the body and the figure’s eyes would have been wide open. A modern steel

mount allows the arm to be displayed in a free-standing, forward facing position measuring

55cm high and 40cm wide (fig. 5). Carved in the distinctive red sandstone of the Mathura

region, the material is a fine grained, silica-cemented rock with low porosity,5 properties that

result in a freestone that can be carved into elaborate and deeply cut forms, making it

possible to sculpt monumental Buddhas in the round with distinctive forms and fine detail.

Silica cemented quartz arenites are also a particularly weather-resistant composition of

sandstone and although the figure has been fragmented many details are well preserved,

such as the fines lines of the wheel on the palm and the creases at the joints of each finger.

The stone may have been covered in a fine plaster and painted in a red colour to protect the

surface,6 however relatively little is known about the details and processes of the workshops

of Mathura.7

The city has a long association with religious activity; it is considered to be the birthplace of

Krishna, and was referred to by Ptolemy as Modoura, ‘the city of the gods’.8 Its historical and

religious significance can be ascribed to its geographic location. By land, Mathura was

connected to the two major highways of ancient India; the Daksinapatha southern highway,

and the Uttarpatha northern highway.9 The city could also be reached via the Yamuna River

3
Albert Grünwedel, Buddhist art in India, ed. by Jas. Burgess (New Delhi: 1999) p. 67.
4
Usha Rani Tiwari (1998) p. 62.
5
Richard Newman, The Stone Sculpture of India: A Study of the Materials Used by Indian Sculptors
from ca. 2nd century BC to the 16th century (Cambridge, Mass.: 1984) p. 44.
6
Manomohan Ganguly, Orissa and her remains, ancient and medieval: district Puri (Calcutta: 1912) pp.
243-254.
7
Ibid, p. 153.
8
Shrikala Warrier, Kamandalu: The Seven Sacred Rivers of Hinduism (London and New Delhi: 2014) p.
88.
9
R. C. Sharma, Buddhist Art: Mathura School (New Delhi: 1995) p. 5.

4
which carried the large boats of maritime traders into the city.10 The traffic from these

routes transformed Mathura into a metropolis of ancient India through which traders,

religious leaders, pilgrims and the social elite travelled.11 While in Mathura, these merchants

and noblemen would spend large sums of money erecting buildings, shrines, monasteries,

gardens and other monuments in a practice called istapurta whereby those who spend their

money on projects that improve public welfare earn spiritual merit.12 The statue from which

the Ashmolean fragment originates is thought to have been produced between 100 and 200

CE, during which time Mathura constituted the southern capital of the Kushan Empire. The

Kushanas were liberal in their religious outlook, with epigraphs and the number of images of

the Buddha indicative of a particular leaning towards Buddhism.13 This was especially the

case during the reign of Kanishka the Great, who was the emperor of the Kushan dynasty

from around 127 to 150 CE,14 and whose coins featured images of the Buddha figure.15 The

Kushan rule began to break down in the third century CE following the death of Vasudeva I in

225 CE, and during the subsequent period of political instability, Mathura was repeatedly

attacked. The city lost its political status and its trade disintegrated. Though Mathura

remained an important religious site beyond the Kushan period, political instability and

religious conflict led to the destruction of many shrines, monasteries and stupas in the

region.

Mathura was an important centre of artistic production at least as far back as 200 BCE,16 and

in the early first century CE the city was a major site for the manufacture of Buddhist stone

10
Ibid.
11
R. C. Sharma, Mathura Museum and Art (Uttar Pradesh: 1976) pp. 2-3.
12
Pāṇḍuraṅga Vāmana Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra : Ancient and Medieval Religious and Civil Law,
VII, part II (Poona: 1941) p. 843.
13
Usha Rani Tiwari (1998) pp. 35-36.
14
Harry Falk, ‘The yuga of Sphujiddhvaja and the era of the Kuṣâṇas’, Silk Road Art and Archaeology
VII (Kamakura: 2001) pp. 133.
15
Usha Rani Tiwari (1998) pp. 35-36.
16
Richard Newman (1984) p. 43.

5
sculpture. The products of Mathuran workshops travelled across the north Indian region,

and the founder of the Archaeological Survey of India, General Alexander Cunningham

remarked: ‘everywhere in the North-West I find that the old Buddhist statues are made of

Sikri sandstone from which it would appear that Mathura must have been the great

manufactory for the supply of Buddhist sculpture in Northern India.’17 In the Kushan period,

Mathura witnessed the development of an iconography that saw Buddhist visual culture

move away from purely symbolic references with the emergence of the anthropomorphised

image of the Buddha.18 The hand raised in the abhayamudra, and the hair in a series of

stacked curls resembling a snail shell marked these new forms as that of the Buddha. Apart

from these features, the sculptures were otherwise very similar to other contemporaneous

images of gods, such as the Vedic natural spirits, yaksha and yakshi (fig. 6). Artists in the

Mathuran workshops lacked a prototype of the Buddha from which to work, and so adapted

their standard types for these other gods. This approach to the creation of religious imagery

defines artistic production in Mathura, and the Director of the Mathura Museum wrote that

Mathuran art ought not to be classified by sectarian divisions, as artists worked on

sculptures depicting the figures and themes of all sects.19 This was reflected in the patronage

of religious arts by the rulers of ancient Mathura as the Kushana and later Gupta leaders

funded the erection of images of the deities of many sects.20

Before the emergence of this new anthropomorphised Buddha, and for around 500 years

following the death of Gautama Buddha, Buddhists did not depict his physical form. The

reasons for this are unclear, as Buddhism has no explicit prohibition on image making.21 It is

equally unclear why, after several centuries during which significant efforts were made to

17
Jean Philippe Vogel, Catalogue of the Archaeological Museum at Mathura (Allahabad: 1910) p. 28.
18
Usha Rani Tiwari (1998) p. 36.
19
R. C. Sharma (1995) p. 14.
20
Usha Rani Tiwari (1998) p. 43.
21
Robert Bracey (2017) p. 88.

6
construct a visual culture which could depict the Buddha’s presence symbolically, artists then

began to portray the Buddha in human form. Buddhist teachings do however prohibit the

worship of idols,22 and the approach of Buddhists to images of their spiritual leader therefore

differs from other traditions in India. The image of the Buddha is not considered to ‘contain’

the deity,23 as a Hindu would consider a sculpture of Vishnu,24 and so is not prayed to or

worshipped as a manifestation of the deity. Buddhists instead revere the image of the

Buddha as a gesture to the wise and benevolent man who lived so well that he was able to

attain nirvana.25 The ‘worship’ of the Buddha image is therefore better understood as an act

of veneration and devotion to the values that he represents.26 His image is used not as the

focus of worship but as a medium through which devotees can reach an understanding of

Buddhist teachings. Throughout the Divyāvadāna text, which contains a collection of early

Buddhist tales, seeing is represented as a transformative experience through which followers

who see the Buddha’s physical form are thus able to ‘see’ his dharmic form.27 The

anthropomorphised Buddha is therefore a vehicle of transcendence which allows devotees

to develop spiritually.

In a sense, the object on display in the Ashmolean museum can be said to echo this early

Buddhist interaction. In Imagining the Divine, the fragment was mounted in the centre of the

space dedicated to Buddhist art, positioned above eye level indicating the monumental scale

of the statue. Rowan Williams describes the effect of this display in an article for The

Guardian: ‘[…]the palm is raised: ‘Stop, stay with this, don’t panic and don’t hurry away.’’28

22
Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: 1998) p. 148.
23
Gudrun Buhnemann, Puja: A Study in Smarta Ritual (Vienna: 1988) p. 52.
24
Gavin Flood, ‘Miracles in Hinduism’ in The Cambridge Companion to Miracles, ed. by Graham H.
Twelftree (Cambridge: 2011) p. 194.
25
Robert E. Buswell and Donald S. Lopez, The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (Princeton: 2013) pp.
589-590.
26
Alfred Gell (1998) p. 148.
27
Andy Rotman, Thus have I seen: visualizing faith in early Indian Buddhism (Oxford: 2009) p. 152.
28
Rowan Williams, ‘Gods and glory: Rowan Williams, Mary Beard and more on the power of religious
art’, The Guardian, 27th October 2017

7
Williams perceives the hand to be communicating with the viewer; reaching out to us in a

greeting and holding us there in that moment. The positioning of the hand is key to this, as

Williams identifies the open palm to be ‘instantly recognisable as imposing calm and

stillness.’29 Martin Gorick, Archdeacon of Oxford, articulates a particularly religious

interpretation of the hand:

Powerful and compelling in its own right it made me think of hands in Christian

imagery and Christ’s painfully open hands often shown with the mark of the nails in

the centre of each palm…The human longing for God goes back to the dawn of time,

and the ways that longing has been expressed are many and various.30

For Gorick, the hand speaks to a profound human impulse for connection, an impulse which

this fragment of an ancient Buddha statue shows to transcend not only religious sect but

also time. As a representation of history, it reaches out to us from the past. Though the

secular visitor may not read the object in this spiritual way, there is a quasi-religious effect

created by the material of the object. Being mounted in a free standing position, visitors are

able to move around the object; to stand in front of the outward-facing palm as well as to

view the finished surface of the left hand side and the broken right hand side which exposes

the raw material (fig. 3). As the object is not in a display case, it is possible to closely view the

surface of the object and observe the light reflecting flecks of the stone and the scratches

and areas of discolouration which mark the surface. The visitor gets a sense of the object

having had a long life as the marks of this history covers its surface, and the raw material

highlights the broken nature of the object and reminds us that it is but part of a once

monumental whole. These interpretations of the object echo responses to antique

<https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/oct/27/gods-and-glory-rowan-williams-mary-
beard-power-religious-art-living-with-gods-imagining-the-divine> (11th March 2018).
29
Ibid.
30
The Ven. Martin Gorick, ‘Imagining the Divine’, Diocese of Oxford, 11th January 2018.
<https://www.oxford.anglican.org/imagining-the-divine/> (14th March 2018).

8
fragmentary sculpture throughout the history of modern interaction with ancient objects;

ideas of history, transcendence and absence.

In the 19th century, Auguste Rodin amassed a vast collection of antique sculptures which he

valued because of their perceived function as the manifestations of history.31 He described

the beauty of the antique as ‘the infinite splendour of things eternal, the transfiguration of

the past into eternal life.’32 Rodin showed a particular interest for fragments for precisely

this reason, as he understood broken and battered fragmentary sculpture as a signifier of the

past rendered in the present. Benedicte Garnier argues that he valued fragmentary sculpture

because he perceived it to bear the scars of its history, its life, just as Rodin’s own works such

as the Man with the broken nose carried on its surface the marks of age and experience.33

For Rodin, the marks of deterioration on antique sculptures were central to their value.

Writing in response to an archaeologist who had dismissed the sculptor’s earlier praise of the

surface texture of the head of a statue from Chios as merely an overcleaned and damaged

piece of stone, Rodin insisted that it was exactly this damage that rendered the object so

interesting:

First of all, the characteristic qualities of this head are the worn state of the marble

and the lack of definition in the relief of the features, which give the impression of

gentle soft focus, and the interiorization of the gaze.34

Garnier writes that the characteristics perceived by the archaeologist as flaws, were

understood by Rodin as signs of the object’s life which have the effect of ‘incarnating

31
A current exhibition at the British Museum entitled ’Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece’ explores
Rodin’s relationship with antique sculpture.
32
Auguste Rodin, ‘Reflections on the head of a goddess from Chios, in the Warren Collection’ trans. by
Maev De La Guardia in Rodin: The Zola of Sculpture ed. by Claudine Mitchell (Leeds: 2004) p. 138.
33
Benedicte Garnier, ‘The sculptor, the collector and the archaeologist: Auguste Rodin, Edward Perry
Warren and John Marshall’ in Claudine Mitchell (ed.) (Leeds: 2004) p. 127.
34
Ibid.

9
memory’.35 As an artist, Rodin saw this incarnation of memory as the material manifestations

of the knowledge of ancient artists, and fragments as traces of this knowledge which made

its way to him ‘like a gift from the gods’.36

Rodin’s response therefore suggests that material culture is in some way transformed into a

witness to history, a role assigned in particular to statuary because its inhabits space more

fully than the flat arts. This idea was explored by Elissa Gootman in a New York Times article

detailing the installation of the damaged remains of Fritz Koenig’s The Sphere at Ground Zero

in March 2002. This public sculpture, a 45,000 pound bronze structure, originally stood in the

World Trade Centre plaza as a monument to the creation of peace through world trade (fig.

7-8). Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the sculpture was installed as a site of

remembrance. Gootman describes how the damaged form of the ‘now bruised, torn, dented

and scratched’37 object is perceived by onlookers as having witnessed and even experienced

the trauma of the attacks itself: ‘Those who previewed the sculpture, who saw the hole torn

in the top and the way it still glitters in the sun, spoke of destruction and resilience, crisis and

strength.’38 It is ascribed the characteristics of a survivor of the events and is seen to reflect

the experience of the community. As one onlooker, Mrs. Moore, comments: ‘it can’t be

restored completely, and I don’t think anyone will be restored completely.’39 This sense that

an object can bear witness to history, and be rendered a manifestation of this history is

explored by Denis Byrne in a discussion into the power of religious images, using the

example of the Emerald Buddha Jewel which since 1784 has been housed in the Wat Phra

35
Benedicte Garnier (Leeds: 2004) p. 127.
36
Auguste Rodin (Leeds: 2004) p. 138.
37
Elissa Gootman, ‘A Nation Challenged: Memorials; A Day of Somber Reminders Revolves Around a
Broken Sculpture and Lights’, New York Times, 11th March 2002.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/11/nyregion/nation-challenged-memorials-day-somber-
reminders-revolves-around-broken.html> (9th March 2018).
38
Ibid.
39
Ibid.

10
Kaew temple in Bangkok. Before being installed in Wat Phra Kaew, the statue moved across

the various kingdoms of Thailand, revered by many different peoples in many different

temples. The statue therefore has what Byrne calls a ‘peripatetic history’40 which is central to

devotees’ perception of its efficacy. Byrne argues that the history of the object speaks to its

fame and potency because it is viewed as ‘sedimentation of magical power embodied in the

material form of the object.’41 In the case of the damaged sculpture, this sedimentation is

not only present in the mind of the viewer, but is a physical manifestation. The ‘peripatetic

history’ of the object can be seen in its material, in the tears in the bronze and steel of The

Sphere, and the marks and residue left in the stone of the Buddha hand and forearm.

In the case of ancient Indian art, interpretation of these histories have differed over time.

Mathura came under British rule in 1804 and it was during this period that antique art in the

region began to be unearthed. Colonel Stacy was the first to uncover an antique sculpture at

Mathura,42 while British men such as General Alexander Cunningham and F. S Growse, who

was responsible for founding the Mathura Museum, visited Mathura often and published

detailed accounts of their archaeological discoveries and the history and culture of the wider

Mathura region.43 These men discuss their discoveries in strictly archaeological terms; little

reference is made to their meaning or how the authors felt about them, and much more

attention is paid to their aesthetic value and the establishment of a chronology or system of

classification. They are explored as ethnographic evidence. For Indian art historians of the

twentieth century however, ancient material culture was transformed into the cultural

heritage of a newly independent nation. Writing in 1953, T. N Palaniappan, District Collector

40
Denis Byrne, ‘Museums, Religious Objects, and the Flourishing Realm of the Supernatural in Modern
Asia’ in Religion in Museums. Global and Multidisciplinary Perspectives ed. by Gretchen Buggeln, et al.
(London: 2017) paragraph 10.12.
41
Ibid.
42
See L. R. Stacy, ‘Note on the Discovery of a Relic of Grecian Sculpture in Upper India’, in Journal of
the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 5, (Calcutta: 1836).
43
See F. S. Growse, Mathura: A District Memoir (Allahabad: 1874).

11
of Thanjavur writes that the ‘disturbed and neglected’ pieces of antique sculpture implore

him to be unearthed and saved from despair in order to ‘entertain the art lover and to serve

the people of Independent India.’44 The new meanings assigned to antique sculpture in the

second half of the twentieth century can be seen throughout the work of R.C. Sharma who

ascribes particular significance to Mathuran art because of the profound influence of the

Mathura school on the development of visual culture throughout the rest of the Indian

subcontinent.45 Though Colonel Stacy believed the sculpture he found to have been Grecian

in origin,46 Sharma insists that Mathuran art is not simply an Indian attempt at Hellenistic

convention, but is instead the product of the ‘glorious artistic activities which were vibrated

with indigenous thoughts, vision and sentiments.’47 Thus Sharma perceives the fragmentary

remains which emerged from the ground, and from the Indian ancient past, to be a

representation of an inherently Indian consciousness. The fragmentary remains of ancient

Indian art thus become imbued with the cultural history not just of the region in which they

are found, but of the nation of India. The importance of this nationalistic reinterpretation

can be seen in the foreword to Sharma’s catalogue for the Mathura Museum, wherein Sri C.

Sivaramamurti writes that the standing Buddhas produced in Mathura during the Gupta

period constitute ‘the greatest masterpieces in the world representing the form of Buddha in

any school of art in India or abroad.’48

The art historians of the twentieth century transformed sculpture into cultural legacy,

rendering the fragment a trace of this national heritage, memory and consciousness just as

44
Bruce M. Sullivan, Sacred Objects in Secular Spaces: Exhibiting Asian Religions in Museums (London:
2015) paragraph 12.8.
45
R. C. Sharma (1995) p. 14.
46
L. R. Stacy (1836) p. 567.
47
R. C. Sharma (1995) p. 14.
48
C. Sivaramamurti, ‘Foreword’ in Mathura Museum and Art by R. C. Sharma (Uttar Pradesh: 1976) p.
i.

12
Rodin’s fragments acted a ‘memory-links’ 49 to the thoughts and practise of the artists of

ancient Greece. This tendency can also be seen, at an earlier date, in the writing of Johann

Jaochim Winckelmann. Winckelmann suggests that antique material culture can tell us

something beyond the ‘merely historical’, as though it holds a deep and profound insight. As

though, if we look at the hand of the Buddha well enough, and look after the missing

portions, we can glean some ‘truth’. For the western viewer, the Ashmolean arm represents

a fragment of this distant culture which has made its way to us not only through time but

also through space, the marks on the stone bearing witness to its long journey to Oxford all

the way from the workshops on northern India. The object can thus still be said to express

the magical effect on the viewer that such an object would have exercised over early

Buddhist devotees in Mathura. Though museum displays can have the effect of secularising

religious objects,50 Svetlana Alpers also argues that museum displays can be ‘culturally

informing’ when the object is compatible with ‘what museums are best at encouraging.’51

Alpers gives the example of the display of altarpieces which, though removed from their

religious context, are still understood as object to be beheld and can thus be seen to have

retained some of their meaning when interacted with by the public. 52 This can equally be

said of the Ashmolean Buddha fragment, which may not be meditated on in order to achieve

dharma, but is contemplated as a means of gaining insight into a culture which is distant to

us both in time and space.

The ability of the fragment to go beyond the ‘merely historical’ is also expressed by Rodin,

who valued the fragment precisely because it was not a complete object but the suggestion

of a possible whole. On the subject of the incomplete piece he wrote that the ‘unpolished

49
Benedicte Garnier (Leeds: 2004) p. 127.
50
Denis Byrne (2017) paragraph 10.12.
51
Svetlana Alpers, ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing,’ in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of
Museum Display, ed. I. Karp and S.D. Lavine (1991) p. 27.
52
Ibid.

13
appearance means that, like life itself, it seems capable of developing further.’53 Rodin

claimed to complete these objects in his own vision, making the fragment a part of a larger

whole generated by his imagination. It can be seen in his description of the Venus de Milo:

Dismembered though you are, you are nonetheless complete. The destruction

wrought by time has been permitted so that all may see the impotence of its

impious endeavour.54

Rodin imagines the Venus not as an incomplete object but one which is effectively finished

by the marks of damage that have allowed it to become complete as a representation of the

futility of time. This demonstrates perfectly Denis Byrne’s ‘sedimentation of history’, and

shows how important the sense of the absence is to our intrigue with antique fragments. In

Ozymandias, Percy Shelley imagines the fragment as the voice of Rameses II, reaching out

through time to us through the material which lies broken in the middle of the desert.55

However, Shelley never saw the statue for himself and encountered it only through accounts

in archaeological and traveller publications.56 But that did not matter, what proved to be

powerful for Shelley was the idea of the statue and what it could represent, the object as a

starting point from which he could invent his own meaning. This is particularly the case for

the fragmented, damaged sculpture of antiquity because, unlike the World Trade Centre

sculpture, its actual history is shrouded in mystery. While it is possible to know exactly what

happened to The Sphere, the viewer can only imagine what the Ashmolean’s Buddha hand

has experienced and as such it is not just the present fragment but the sense of the absent

which becomes imbued with meaning.

53
Auguste Rodin, quoted in in Rodin: The Zola of Sculpture ed. by Claudine Mitchell (Leeds: 2004), p.
155.
54
Ibid.
55
Percy Shelley, ‘Ozymandias’ in Selected Prose and Poetry, ed. by Alasdair D. F. Macrae (London:
1991) pp 34-35.
56
See Johnstone Parr, Shelley's "Ozymandias" in Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol. 6 (Winter, 1957) pp. 31-
35.

14
In the museum space, it is not just the object but the display which communicates these

meanings. The lack of a display case enables visitors to closely observe the surface pf the

sculpture, while the positioning of the hand with the palm facing directly out at the viewer

allows both the smoother finished forms and the broken, raw material to be seen. It is this

positioning which creates the immediate impact when encountering the object, as Rowan

Williams observed, and the display seems to have been dictated by the iconography of the

object. The wheel on the open palm of the hand indicating the abhayaamudra gesture of

reassurance is often seen on monumental Buddha statues that have the right arm raised and

facing out at the viewer. However, several details of the Ashmolean fragment indicate that

this may not have been how this particular object actually related to the full statue. Close

examination of the modelling of the hand and forearm shows that the articulation of the

wrist was not rendered uniformly on both sides; the left side of the joint appears more

defined while the right side the hand merges into the forearm with little definition. This can

be seen in fig. 9 wherein the shadow shows the definition of the left side while the outline of

the right side appears rotund, suggesting that it was perhaps not viewed from the front but

from this left side. Furthermore, the raw edge of the fragment goes from the edge of the

hand and moves down the forearm of the figure in a relatively uniform line, suggesting that

it was down this line that the fragment broke away from the larger statue. Though it could

be suggested that this line constitutes the line between flesh and drapery, comparison with

Mathuran standing Buddhas statues of the period showed that the forearm would not be

expected to be exposed as the Ashmolean fragment is, but covered in drapery from the wrist

downwards, often leading the hands of these statues to break off from the wrist (fig. 10-11).

The Ashmolean fragment is therefore more likely to have originated from a statue that

depicts the arm held across the body, with the palm facing not directly out but across (fig.

12). Even so, there remains a case for leaving the display as it is, with the palm facing

outwards. Though it may not be entirely faithful to the original sculpture, it does not change

15
its essential meaning; whether the palm and wheel face directly out at the viewer or across

the body of the Buddha, it nonetheless represents the abhayamudra gesture. Furthermore,

changing the display would obscure the damaged side of the object, whereas the current

display allows viewers to examine the object more fully and gain a better understanding of

the state of the fragment. The Ashmolean display could even be considered to be more in

keeping with the original meaning of the object, as a gesture which is intended to

communicate to the viewer a feeling of reassurance the dispelling of fear, or as Rowan

Williams wrote: ‘imposing calm and stillness’. A hand which does not face out to the viewer,

greet us, and ask us to stop for a moment, but instead is pointed obliquely across the room,

would not elicit this response as effectively.

To adopt Svetlana Alpers’ suggestion that the measure of a museum’s success can be ‘the

freedom and interest with which people wander through and look without the intimidating

mediation between viewer and object,’ 57 the Ashmolean’s display of the hand and forearm

fragment of a monumental standing Buddha statue is entirely successful. It allows viewers to

move around the object and view all aspects of its condition; the finished surface as well as

the raw material exposed by the absence of the full figure. It is this access to the object

which allows visitors to engage with it in an imaginative way, and gain appreciation of it as a

manifestation of the history of religious impulse, a nation’s heritage, or simply that of an

object moving through time and space. Close examination of the material has therefore led

not only to a better understanding of how the object was constituted as part of a larger

statue, but also of how the object is perceived by museum visitors, and how meanings are

created around fragmentary antique sculpture.

57
Svetlana Alpers (1991) p. 30.

16
17
Bibliography
Alpers, S., ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing,’ in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics
of Museum Display, ed. I. Karp and S.D. Lavine (1991) pp. 25-32.

Buggeln, G. (ed.), Religion in Museums. Global and Multidisciplinary Perspectives (London:

2017) <http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/OXVU1:LSCOP_OX:oxfaleph020758325>

Buhler, G., ‘Specimens in Jaina Sculptures from Mathura’ in Epigraphia Indica, vol. 2 (Delhi:
1939)

Buhnemann, G., Puja: A Study in Smarta Ritual (Vienna: 1988)

Buswell, R. E., and Lopez, D. S., The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (Princeton: 2013)

Elsner, J., Lenk, S., et al., Imagining the Divine: Art and the Rise of World Religions (Oxford:
2017)

Falk, H., ‘The yuga of Sphujiddhvaja and the era of the Kuṣâṇas’, Silk Road Art and
Archaeology VII (Kamakura: 2001) pp. 121–136.

Ganguly, M., Orissa and her remains, ancient and medieval: district Puri (Calcutta: 1912)

Gell, A., Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: 1998)

Gootman, E., ‘A Nation Challenged: Memorials; A Day of Somber Reminders Revolves Around
a Broken Sculpture and Lights’, New York Times, 11th March 2002.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/11/nyregion/nation-challenged-memorials-day-
somber-reminders-revolves-around-broken.html> (9th March 2018)

Gorick, M., ‘Imagining the Divine’, Diocese of Oxford, 11th January 2018.
<https://www.oxford.anglican.org/imagining-the-divine/>. (10th February 2018)

Gross, K., Dream of the Moving Statue (London: 1992)

Growse, F. S., Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 44:1 (Calcutta: 1874) pp. 212-215.

18
Growse, F. S., Mathura: A District Memoir (Allahabad: 1874)

Grünwedel, A., Buddhist art in India ed. by Jas. Burgess (New Delhi: 1999)

Kane, P. V., History of Dharmaśāstra : Ancient and Medieval Religious and Civil Law, VII, part
II (Poona: 1941)

Mitchell, C. (ed.), Rodin: The Zola of Sculpture (Leeds: 2004)

Newman, R., The Stone Sculpture of India: A Study of the Materials Used by Indian Sculptors
from ca. 2nd century BC to the 16th century (Cambridge, Mass.: 1984)

Parr, J., ‘Shelley's "Ozymandias"’ in Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol. 6 (Winter, 1957)

Quintanilla, S. R., History of Early Stone Sculpture at Mathura, Ca. 150 BCE-100 CE (Leiden:
2007)

Rotman, A., Thus have I seen: visualizing faith in early Indian Buddhism (Oxford: 2009)

Seckel, D., The Art of Buddhism (London: 1964)

Sharma, R. C., Buddhist Art: Mathura School (New Delhi: 1995)

Sharma, R. C., Mathura Museum and Art (Uttar Pradesh: 1976)

Shelley, P., ‘Ozymandias’ in Selected Prose and Poetry, ed. by Alasdair D. F. Macrae (London:
1991)

Stacy, L. R., ‘Note on the Discovery of a Relic of Grecian Sculpture in Upper India’, in Journal
of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 5, (Calcutta: 1836).

19
Sullivan, B. M., Sacred Objects in Secular Spaces: Exhibiting Asian Religions in Museums
(London: 2015)

Tiwari, U. R., Sculptures of Mathura and Sarnath: A Comparative Study (Delhi: 1998)

Twelftree, G. H., (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Miracles (Cambridge: 2011)

Vogel, J. Ph., Catalogue of the Archaeological Museum at Mathura (Allahabad: 1910)

Warrier, S., Kamandalu: The Seven Sacred Rivers of Hinduism (London and New Delhi: 2014)

Williams, R., Beard, M., et al., ‘Gods and glory: Rowan Williams, Mary Beard and more on the
power of religious art’, The Guardian, 27th October 2017.
<https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/oct/27/gods-and-glory-rowan-williams-
mary-beard-power-religious-art-living-with-gods-imagining-the-divine> (11th March 2018)

Winckelmann, J. J., History of the Art of Antiquity (1764) ed. A. Potts (Los Angeles: 2006)

Winternitz, M., A History of Indian Literature: Buddhist literature and Jaina literature (Delhi:
1985)

Yousef Jameel Centre for Islamic and Asian Art, ‘Fragmentary hand and forearm from the
Buddha’, Eastern Art Online
<http://jameelcentre.ashmolean.org/collection/4/6739/6744/all/per_page/50/offset/25/sor
t_by/date/object/11412> (24th January 2018)

20
List of illustrations
Figure 1. Front view of the fragmentary hand and forearm from the Buddha, sandstone, c.
100 – 200 CE, Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford. Author’s own.

Figure 2. Side view of fragmentary hand and forearm from the Buddha, sandstone, c. 100 –
200 CE, Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford. Author’s own.

Figure 3. Side view of fragmentary hand and forearm from the Buddha, sandstone, c. 100 –
200 CE, Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford. Authors own.

Figure 4. Dharmachakra detail of fragmentary hand and forearm from the Buddha,
sandstone, c. 100 – 200 CE, Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford. Author’s
own.

Figure 5. Mount of fragmentary hand and forearm from the Buddha, sandstone, c. 100 – 200
CE, Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford. Author’s own.

Figure 6. Two Yakshas from Patna, ancient Pataliputra.

<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Patna_Yakshas.jpg>

Figure 7. Fritz Koenig, The Sphere, 7.6m, bronze. Shown in the World Trade Centre Plaza.
<https://i.huffpost.com/gen/766547/thumbs/o-WORLD-TRADE-CENTER-SPHERE-570.jpg?3>

Figure 8. Fritz Koenig, The Sphere, 7.6m, bronze. Shown at Ground Zero.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FEMA_-_4042_-
_Photograph_by_Michael_Rieger_taken_on_09-21-2001_in_New_York.jpg>

Figure 9. Detail of the modelling of the wrist of fragmentary hand and forearm from the
Buddha, sandstone, c. 100 – 200 CE, Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford.
Author’s own.

Figure 10. Representation of the Buddha in the Greco-Buddhist art of Gandhara, 1st century
CE.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_art#/media/File:Gandhara_Buddha_(tnm).jpeg>

Figure 11. Early depiction of the Buddha. <http://museum.wa.gov.au/extraordinary-

stories/highlights/statue-buddha/>

21
Figure 12. Seated Buddha, sandstone, 70.5 cm, early 2nd century CE, Government Museum,
Mathura. <https://content.ngv.vic.gov.au/col-images/api/EPUB001615/1280>

22
Illustrations

Figure 1. Front view of the fragmentary hand and forearm

from the Buddha, sandstone, c. 100 – 200 CE, Ashmolean
Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford. Author’s own.

Figure 2. Side view of fragmentary hand and forearm from the

Buddha, sandstone, c. 100 – 200 CE, Ashmolean Museum of
Art and Archaeology, Oxford. Author’s own.

23
Figure 3.. Side view of fragmentary hand and forearm from the
Buddha, sandstone, c. 100 – 200 CE, Ashmolean Museum of Art
and Archaeology, Oxford. Authors own.

Figure 4. Dharmachakra detail of fragmentary hand and

forearm from the Buddha, sandstone, c. 100 – 200 CE,
Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford. Author’s
own.

24
Figure 5. Mount of fragmentary hand and forearm from
the Buddha, sandstone, c. 100 – 200 CE, Ashmolean
Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford. Author’s own.

Figure 6. Two Yakshas from Patna, ancient

Pataliputra.
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Patna_Ya
kshas.jpg>

25
Figure 7. Fritz Koenig, The Sphere, 7.6m, bronze. Shown in the World Trade Centre Plaza.
<https://i.huffpost.com/gen/766547/thumbs/o-WORLD-TRADE-CENTER-SPHERE-570.jpg?3>

Figure 8. Fritz Koenig, The Sphere, 7.6m, bronze. Shown at Ground Zero.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FEMA_-_4042_-
_Photograph_by_Michael_Rieger_taken_on_09-21-2001_in_New_York.jpg>

26
Figure 9. Detail of the modelling of the wrist of
fragmentary hand and forearm from the Buddha,
sandstone, c. 100 – 200 CE, Ashmolean Museum of
Art and Archaeology, Oxford. Author’s own.

Figure 10. Representation of the Buddha in the

Greco-Buddhist art of Gandhara, 1st century CE.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_art#/me
dia/File:Gandhara_Buddha_(tnm).jpeg>

27
Figure 11. Early depiction of the Buddha.
<http://museum.wa.gov.au/extraordinary-
stories/highlights/statue-buddha/>

Figure 12. Seated Buddha, sandstone, 70.5 cm, early 2nd

century CE, Government Museum, Mathura.
<https://content.ngv.vic.gov.au/col-
images/api/EPUB001615/1280>

28