216 Part III: South Asia
Monasticism was at its peak with vast monasteries filled with new art
forms. Many of these monasteries were dug into rocky cliffs, as at Ajanta in
western India and Dunhuang in northwestern China. Wealthy lay devotees
earned merit by commissioning paintings and sculpture, which were truly at a
peak during this period. In the upper Indus region, a Greek-influenced king-
dom known as Gandhara became particularly important in these developments
because of its location at the crossroads on the way west on the route to the
Mediterranean and north to Central Asia and China. Here Buddhism met
Greek sculptural traditions, alive with sensuous realism. Buddha, with his
ascetic’s topknot and semilidded eyes, looks remarkably like the Greek god
Apollo. He wears a toga draped in the Hellenistic style and Athenian sandals,
and is flanked by Corinthian columns. These influences travel all the way to
China and Japan, where Buddhism becomes associated as much with high cul-
ture as with renunciation.The Third 500 Years (500–1000 C.E.). This is the period of the rise of
Tantric Buddhism in India, Nepal, and Tibet, while in centers outside India,
Buddhism takes on creative new directions, particularly Chan (China) and Zen
(Japan) Buddhism.
In Tantra the goal is achieving harmony with the cosmos as the key aim of
enlightenment, and magic and occult methods are used to achieve it. The ideal
man is the siddha, a practitioner who is so much in harmony with the universe
that he has no material constraints on him and thus has extraordinary powers,
able to manipulate cosmic forces within himself and outside himself. In India,
Tantra developed a “Left-Handed” and a “Right-Handed” form. Both forms
assert that the goal of spiritual striving is to transcend all the multiplicity of
maya into a state of perfect unity with the cosmos, symbolized by male–female
dualism, which can be transcended by meditation and rituals in which the
unity of the self with the cosmos is enacted through sexual union with a part-
ner. The “Right-Handed” forms only did this symbolically, but the “Left-
Handed” forms did it literally. The art of Tantra was full of sexual images, most
notably the famous Yab-Yum, a male figure and a female figure locked in an
energetic sexual embrace.The Last 1,000 Years. There has been little change during the last thou-
sand years. Buddhism has been in a holding pattern. Everything is bound to
decay, according to the teachings of Buddhism, dharma included. Japanese
Buddhism marked the year 1052 as the beginning of the age of mappo, a
period of the total degeneration of Buddhism, after which individuals could
no longer hope to achieve Buddhist enlightenment by their own efforts, but
must depend on a savior. (See the following three pages for more about Bud-
dhist iconography.)