It will be realized at once that the absence of the Buddha figure from the world of living men—where, however, there yet remain the traces of his ministry, literally footprints on the sands of time—is a true artistic rendering of the Master’s guarded silence respecting the after-death state of those who have attained Nirvana: “the Perfect One is released from this, that his being should be gauged by the measure of the corporeal world,” he is released from “name and form.” In the omission of the figure of the Buddha, the Early Buddhist art is truly Buddhist: for the rest, it is an art about
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