Chapter 75 Facing Gandhara

Islamabad was the youngest city we encountered along the way, only a few decades old.Pakistan decided to build a new capital for itself in the middle and late of this century in order to get rid of all the burdens of the old capital, which is the emergence of Islamabad. Such a capital could of course be neatly dressed according to modern planning.Because I have just walked more than 2,000 kilometers in the hinterland of this country, I always feel a bit abstract when I see such a capital.It is so different from the land under its own jurisdiction that it didn't even bring up any dirt or roots.At which gates does it complete this most thorough cleansing and blocking?I suddenly had a thought that it would be a humorous misunderstanding for those UN officials and foreign leaders to feel that they have a general understanding of Pakistan after they have been to Islamabad a few times.

There are some place names worth visiting around Islamabad, such as Peshawar and Rawalpindi, which I have been familiar with since I was a child, and Taxila, which I didn’t know when I was a child.These places are very close and were often connected together in ancient divisions.My first choice is Taxila, mainly because it is the center of Gandhara art. Taxila is half an hour's drive northwest from Islamabad.The road signs are marked with the names of many ruins. We first went to the more important Sekapu ruins. This is a city man-made by Greece more than 2,000 years ago. Now there is not even a single wall, only one side of the wall base, which is decayed and neatly divided into lush trees and green grass.

When a Greek castle appears so far away from the Greek mainland, we immediately think of Alexander who conquered here in the fourth century BC.Sure enough, it was him.He brought more than 80,000 troops and stationed them in two places, and this is one of them. When he left, he didn't take all the soldiers with him, but left a large part of them, and they thrived here along with the Greek culture.It was already in the second century BC that an old barracks was built into a capital here.It was lively for about three or four hundred years, and it fell in the second century AD. As a relic, it was excavated in the middle of this century, and the leader of the excavation was the British archaeologist Marshall.

There is a podium in the ruins of Sekap.Three kinds of doors are carved in the relief pattern of the base, one is Greek, one is native and one is Indian.There is a double-headed eagle perched on the door, which is said to symbolize the meeting of East and West. Miss Meng Guangmei and I sat among the rocks and chatted.She said, Alexander was clearly an aggressor from thousands of miles away, why do people here always talk about him in a reverent tone? I said that Alexander was a student of Aristotle. He injected Greek civilization into the East in a military way, and at the same time brought Eastern civilization back to the West. He was very different from those invaders who only wanted to plunder treasure.

What's more noteworthy is that Alexander used race retention to achieve civilization retention, but turned enemies into relatives, making resistance lose its reason.After he conquered Persia, he personally took the lead in marrying the daughter of Darius III. There were as many as 10,000 pairs of Macedonian officers and Persian women who married him on the same day. Unfortunately, he died at the age of thirty-three.The descendants of the Greeks he left here must have experienced a lot of tragicomedies of civilization collision and integration, but unfortunately there are no detailed records.Only the carvings on this Buddhist podium are left, silently singing the praises of cultural integration.

Gandhara art was produced in this fusion. Gandhara (Gandhara) was originally a place name centered around Taxila. It was the capital of the Guishan Kingdom established by the Da Yuezhi people in the first century AD. It was also called Gandhara before.However, the scope of Gandhara art mentioned in the history of world art is slightly larger, referring to the art of Buddha statues found in this area and the hundreds of kilometers in the south of Afghanistan after the first century AD.This is an indispensable concept in the study of oriental art.When I was studying oriental art more than ten years ago, I also repeatedly collected information related to it.

Gandhara is epoch-making.Before it, the worshiped images in Buddhist art had always been symbolic animals, plants and monuments, starting from Gandhara, where Buddha and Bodhisattva images were directly carved.This leap to directly calling the portrait was inspired by Greek art. The Buddha statues in Gandhara have certain characteristics of Europeans from the bridge of the nose, eye sockets, lips to the chin. Even the clothes are similar to Greek sculptures, but they are not European in spirit. They have kind faces, slightly closed eyes, and are tolerant and peaceful. , a noble dream of an oriental soul.

If you analyze it in detail, Gandhara has many comprehensive cultural orientations, fully presenting the vortex and coagulation force of the traffic hub.According to Mr. Lu Shulin, the Chinese ambassador to Pakistan, some local scholars believe that Gandhara contains no less Mongolian elements than Greek elements.I haven't seen the specific arguments of this scholar, so I can't agree with him for the time being, and I will talk about it after reading his paper. Not far from the Sekapu site, there is a Taxila Archaeological Museum.This museum is very small, in fact, it is just a large room divided into three areas, but it has a good collection, the most outstanding of which is Gandhara art.I thought in front of the Buddha statues that many Buddha statues are incomplete, but the complete Buddhist scriptures are hidden between their eyebrows and eyes.

Buddhism is different from other religions. The majority of believers may not be able to understand Buddhist scriptures. Therefore, religious rituals have become a way of group reading. The main body of the ritual is not the abbot, but the Buddha statue.Believers only need to look up, and they can realize some profound meaning through intuition, and they can repeat this intuition infinitely.I once transferred this spiritual feeling effect to art theory, and put forward the theory of aesthetic effect loaded with philosophy in intuition in the book "Art Creation Project". I call this aesthetic effect the Buddha effect.Today, the land under my feet is the place where the Buddha statue was first sculpted, and the sculpture is so excellent that no one can surpass it once it is born.

Gandhara, I salute you deeply. On December 5, 1999, Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, stayed overnight at the mMarriott Hotel