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ART. IV.-The Indian Buddhist Cult of Avalokita and his Consort Tara 'the Saviouress,' illustrated from the Remains in Magadha. By L. A. WADDELL, M.B., M.R.A.S.

THE present paper brings the much despised Mahāyāna form of Buddhism fully home to the very cradle-land of Buddhism in India, and invests it with unexpected importance in the history of Indian Buddhism.

No one has yet realized the vast extent to which Mahāyāna and Tantrik Buddhist remains cover India; nor sufficiently realized the leading part played by the Mahāyāna in Indian Buddhism during its most popular period.

These facts only dawned upon me when I found myself with official duties traversing the interior of the Buddhist Holy Land, after having studied Southern Buddhism' in Ceylon and Upper Burma, and Northern Buddhism' in Sikhim, British Bhotan, and latterly in Japan. On coming to Magadha, and following in the footsteps of the famous traveller Hiuen Tsiang, it was quite a revelation to find in the Buddhist Holy Land itself so much of the Lamaist pantheon, including forms hitherto believed to be Tibetan in origin, represented in the hoary Buddhist images strewn over the old ruins throughout the country, or collected by pious Hindu hands at Brahmanical shrines. Nearly every village throughout the Buddhist Holy Land contains old Mahāyāna and Tantrik Buddhist sculptures, and I have also seen these at most of the old Buddhist sites visited by me in other parts of India.

Hitherto most of these allegorical images, strange and fantastic in form, have lain unrecognized and unheeded even by the Archæological Survey Department, in the

belief that they were uninteresting Hindu images, as many of them are worshipped as Brahmanical gods at village shrines. Yet these neglected images, unlike Hindū idols, often possess artistic merit; and have only to be interrogated to yield a rich harvest of information regarding a most important, though obscure, phase of image-worship and theistic Buddhism, as yet but little studied. And they especially afford information for that dark period of Indian Buddhism subsequent to Hiuen Tsiang's visit.

The keys to unlock the mysteries of these allegorical images of extinct Indian Buddhism lie with the Lamas, the jealous custodians of Indian Buddhist lore, tradition, and practice. Chinese Buddhists cared little for the symbolism and ritual of Indian Buddhism, and the Japanese, though much more materialistic, obtained their Buddhist symbolism through China, and have made it hopelessly chaotic. At the principal Buddhist centres in Japan I found both priests and artists generally ignorant of the most rudimentary symbolism, even such as is known to every lay Buddhist in Tibet. The Japanese Manual of the Buddhist Pantheon, entitled Butsu-zó-dsui, contains few forms of strictly Indian type, and even its own canons are not adhered to by the Japanese artists, who, I found, formed the images much according to individual caprice, and were often careless about the sex of the image, the number of its hands, or the symbols with which they invested it, or the left or right hand side, etc., etc. But what, indeed, can be expected from an artistic gleeful people whose piety sits so lightly on them that they take the greatest liberties even with their own Penates, the Seven Gods of Luck,' whom they represent in endless irreverent postures?

The Lamas, on the contrary, craving after symbolism, seized upon every detail of the externals of Indian Buddhism, and rigidly stereotyped these as canons which they now slavishly follow to the minutest detail. And the profoundly accurate and scholarly nature of the Lamaist translations of Sanskrit Buddhist books has excited the

admiration of all Sanskrit scholars who have looked into this subject-Csoma Körösi, Prinsep, Burnouf, Wassilief, Max Müller, Rhys Davids, etc. So that, in the absence of Indian sources of information, since it is clear that the Tantrik and Mahāyāna features of Lamaism were imported largely en bloc from Indian Buddhism, and received at the hands of the Lamas but few important additions, it is to the Lamas that we must chiefly look for the traditional explanations of the details of Indian Mahayana and Tantrik Buddhism. And the novelty of the present paper in bringing much of the so-called 'Northern' Buddhism home to the Buddhist Holy Land, has been mainly obtained by utilizing Lamaist sources of information. Here I would note that the use of the term 'Northern' Buddhism seems responsible for much of the existing confusion in Indian Buddhist history; as its loose use as a synonym for the Mahayana leads to the fact being so frequently forgotten that the Mahāyāna, not only in its origin, but even in its fully developed form, is as truly an indigenous Indian form of Buddhism as the Hinayana itself.

In the present paper I deal only with my material bearing upon the genesis and worship of the Great Bodhisattva Avalokita-the key-stone of Northern Buddhism-and his Sakti Tārā, the Saviouress; and the illustrations are mainly drawn from the lithic remains in Magadha.

Avalokita, it will be remembered, is a purely metaphysical creation of the Indian Buddhists, who, in attempting to remedy the agnosticism of Buddha's idealism, endeavoured to account theistically for the causes lying beyond the finite, and so evolved the polytheistic Mahāyāna form of Buddhism: a polytheism which paradoxically is coupled with a nihilistic mysticism. In its materialistic. features, and the easier conveyance' offered by it to Nirvāņa, The Great Vehicle, or Mahāyāna secured ready popularity, and latterly its polytheism swung round almost into pantheism, single objects being separated out of the all-pervading Unity and treated almost as essentials in themselves. Thus

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