Immortals in Buddhist Arcadia Picturing Greek Mythology (Set of 2 Volumes)

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About The Book

The Mahayana cult presents two realities. One is the sole position of the Buddha at the core, which has given a world religion. The other reality breaking through is the goddess- centered mortuary cult involving Greek mythologies, hidden in plain view considering the secret nature of the Mystery Religion. Centaur to nude maidens, performance is part of the visual narrative in the Greco- Buddhist votive sculptures. From art to astronomy, scaffolding sigils in innovative visual modes mingle the geography of rebirth narratives with the acute observation of sacred architecture landscaped in Arcadia. The Greco-Roman style of magical Maya-Maia born on the other shore, peopled with heroes; ΒΟΔΔΟ, Hercules, Bacchus, and Demeter, and casts from the Elysian Mystery, offers a historical view of the cosmic transformation of pristine South Asia in the first and second-century CE.

About the Author

Arputharani Sengupta's secondary field is deductive archaeology, melding art history with etymology and morphology to decipher a decidedly analogue feel in early Buddhist art and culture. A historian of visual and material culture gathers Greco-Roman identities in the Buddhist artworks hiding pixelated lives of the people in a time capsule, living a revolutionary process to achieve immortality and forge the evolution of a new civilization in the Indian subcontinent. Tracking Greco-Buddhist artworks spun in Greek Mythology and conjured by aspirations backed by Egyptian skills flourishing during the first globalization in the Roman Empire has years of learning, teaching, and publishing several volumes. Sengupta is Professor Emerita | Head of Art History Faculty at the National Museum Institute of History of Art, Conservation, and Museology at New Delhi and Stella Maris College, University of Madras, at Chennai.

Preface

Most religious and philosophical traditions believe in the continued existence of the soul. The accounts of incarnations and rebirths are about the continuity of human awareness facing challenges to overcome human fate and become immortal. The body and the soul existing even beyond the grave are central to rebirth and the resurrection appears through esoteric rituals coded in the magical Dream of Maya. Neoplatonic spiritualism of the Greco-Buddhist cult inherent to the belief in the immortality of the enlightened, rational soul in the philosophy of Plato (c. 428- 347 BCE) propounded in Phaedo or dialogue. The arguments for Neoplatonism in Mahayana and Hinayana during the first two centuries of the Common Era, changing its scope in many respects, emerged as a school of thought in the Roman Empire only from the third to the fifth century CE. The Neoplatonic belief in immortality of the soul and pre-existence highlights the theory of forms, and the philosophy of death. Plato's Phaedo involves six arguments: the influence of the opposites, recollection, reprocessing, essential attributes, simplicity and the nature of forms occupy a central place in the history of thought and art in the Buddhist culture. Like the heavens above, it lets imagination go, but always rooted in concepts and with primary goals to fulfill. That is, to ensure immense radiance and infinite life conveyed by Amitabh Buddha.

In the heart of death is the potential to begin anew; formulaic "Danam" inscribed at the end of votive dedications magnifies its efficacy by invoking Danalakshmi, the goddess of wealth installed as Abhisheka Lakshmi on the Torana gateway, Gajalakshmi lustrated by elephants is Swargadwar to heaven. Past lives live through the magic of Maya; countless reliquary stupa monuments conceived as the House of Eternity brought together transplanted man and the promise of a new world. Hellenistic reliefs portraying allegoric scenes dedicated to the afterlife address deified royals as ΒΟΔΔΟ | Buddha, Aya, Arhat, Siddha, Jina, the Victor of Life, etc. Countless relic caskets and votive reliefs on the monuments were external aids to sustain life beyond the grave. It was an expensive process available to the world rulers, merchant princes, and the wealthy, ultimately unsustainable. A funerary cult mistakenly focused on a single immortal being named Siddhartha | Gautama Buddha in the ritual texts akin to the Book of the Dead, mentioning countless other Buddhas, leaves us in an endless predicament, fuddles chronology and undermines assessing the factual accuracy of generated texts and inscriptions.

Introduction

Devaraja Cult in the Crossroads of Cultures

In light of globalization, we are acutely aware of the unprecedented worldwide merging of visual, verbal, and written communications during the Greco-Kushan period. The influence of diverse cultures on the Mahayana mortuary cult is visible in the role of commemorative art and memory, the rediscovery and reconciliation are the basis of understanding early Buddhist culture. The morphology of form, philology, and the semiotic procedure of classifying signs and symbols reveal much. It spotlights the birth of new humanism in response to instability in various parts of the Roman world. Art is always situational; the art forms depend on the context of its creation, shifting the idea of an eternal essence of art focusing on the Greco-Roman Buddha deceptively retrieved from the Achaemenid period. The life cycle begins with the genesis of the Buddha contemporary to Pythagoras (570-490 BCE), by itself a significant contribution to symbolic Buddhist art and architecture of unparalleled standardization and scaffolding. Most of all, the world is made by the people living in it to suit their purpose. At all costs, they wished to escape the prospect of a freezing black, empty afterlife. An unorthodox progression of life, from immaculate conception and supernatural birth to inevitable death, coalescing as Great Departure, Nirvana, and Parinirvana culminating in the Enlightenment of the soul before the rebirth of a Buddha seems to solve the problem.

Mara inflicts death; personified Mara from mer in Indo-European languages is death or to die. Buddha's life cycle interweaves with the epic battles with Mara and his seductive daughters. Mara is from mer (singular) or meru (plural). In the ancestral language of Khanit and Kamit (Nubia and Egypt), Moor refers to the dead, damned, slaves, servants, vassals, etc. The sword-bearing bodyguards protect the luminous Buddha, coexisting with a legion of self-protected men laden with swords, daggers, Triratna, and other sigils. The immortals have the advantage of the protective Kushan goddess Nana-Nanaya, associated with Inanna, a Mesopotamian goddess of love and war. Nanaya parallels Abhisheka Lakshmi and Hariti, holding the cornucopia like Demeter or Greek Tyche introduced in Buddhist art.