The Narrative of the Buddha’s Life in Buddhist Art: Between Storytelling and Performance

In the Kushan period (1st- 3rd c. CE) Gandharan artists created a large body of narrative sculpture depicting the Buddha’s life story in a chronological and sequential manner. The Buddha’s actions in these pictorial narratives display a dramatic and cohesive thread that has no precedents in Indian art. The lecture intends to explore how this radically new way of narrating the Buddha’s life in Gandharan art may have been informed by modes of representations established in theatre. Textual and visual evidence speak for the early development of Sanskrit theatre and Buddhist drama in the Northwest of the Indian Subcontinent in the first centuries CE. Recent archaeological discoveries from Swat, Pakistan show how images associated with western theatrical performances were seamlessly integrated within the decoration of Buddhist stupas. All of the above evidence suggests that the performative tradition may have played a key role in the process of formulation and codification of Buddhist narrative art in the region.