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Gandhāran Buddhism refers to the Buddhist culture of ancient Gandhāra which was a major center of Buddhism in the northwestern Indian subcontinent from the 3rd century BCE to approximately 1200 CE. Ancient Gandhāra corresponds to modern day north Pakistan, mainly the Peshawar valley and Potohar plateau as well as Afghanistan's Jalalabad. The region has yielded the Gandhāran Buddhist texts written in Gāndhārī Prakrit the oldest Buddhist manuscripts yet discovered. Gandhāra was also home to a unique Buddhist artistic and architectural culture which blended elements from Indian, Hellenistic, Roman and Parthian art. Buddhist Gandhāra was also influential as the gateway through which Buddhism spread to Central Asia and China.
Kushan art, the art of the Kushan Empire in northern India, flourished between the 1st and the 4th century CE. It blended the traditions of the Greco-Buddhist art of Gandhara, influenced by Hellenistic artistic canons, and the more Indian art of Mathura. Kushan art follows the Hellenistic art of the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom as well as Indo-Greek art which had been flourishing between the 3rd century BCE and 1st century CE in Bactria and northwestern India, and the succeeding Indo-Scythian art. Before invading northern and central India and establishing themselves as a full-fledged empire, the Kushans had migrated from northwestern China and occupied for more than a century these Central Asian lands, where they are thought to have assimilated remnants of Greek populations, Greek culture and Greek art, as well as the languages and scripts which they used in their coins and inscriptions: Greek and Bactrian, which they used together with the Indian Brahmi script.
Shōshin Kuwayama is a Japanese historian and archaeologist. He has been Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at Kyoto University, and is credited with contributing to the "formation of an entire generation of scholars in Japan and abroad". Kuwayama is one of the leading scholars in the area of historical interactions between China and India, and especially researches the southern Hindukush region. He led extensive archaeological projects in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Narrative images of episodes from the life of Gautama Buddha in art have been intermittently an important part of Buddhist art, often grouped into cycles, sometimes rather large ones. However, at many times and places, images of the Buddha in art have been very largely single devotional images without narrative content from his life on Earth.
References
- ↑ Callieri, Pierfrancesco (December 2002). "Wladimir Zwalf: 1932-2002"". East and West. 52 (1/4): 441. JSTOR 29757552.
- ↑ "Wladimir Zwalf (Biographical details)". British Museum . Retrieved 15 November 2016.
- ↑ Lo Bue, Erberto (1987). "Review - Buddhism: Art and Faith by Wladimir Zwalf". Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. 50 (2): 393. JSTOR 617159.
- ↑ Whitfield, Roderick (April 1986). "Review - Buddhism: Art and Faith by Wladimir Zwalf". The Burlington Magazine . 128 (997): 303. JSTOR 882478.
- ↑ Filigenzi, Anna (December 2000). "Review - A Catalogue of the Gandhāra Sculpture in the British Museum, Vol. I: Text, Vol. II: Plates by Wladimir Zwalf". East and West. 50 (1/4): 584–586. JSTOR 29757475.
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