Indian Art Exhibit Illustrates Irrelevance of Time & Space

The Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection of Indian and Nepali Art the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, closed yesterday. The Collection spanned four millennia, from 2,000 B.C. to the mid-20th century, and included 300 of the finest examples of sculpture, palm leaf manuscripts, paintings, textiles, and decorative arts outside India.

The awesome calm of Indian art often bewilders Western viewers. The gods -- the usual subject of Indian paintings and sculpture -- maintain an expression of cosmic serenity even when engaged in brutal battle or erotic activity. Many Westerners find the lush anatomy and serpentine lines oversensuous and corrupt, and on the whole the Indian aesthetic does not correspond to anything which is immediately meaningful to Western eves. The meaning and beauty of Indian art eludes anyone untutored in the thought from which the artists proceeded.

Indian philosophy views self-realization as the purpose in life. During the life cycle, a soul moves toward greater awareness through evolution and involution, through a Path of Pursuit and a Path of Return. Men on the outward path assert their willfulness in the physical world and accumulate knowledge of its temporal objects and fleeting sensations. Through wisdom and meditation, men on the inward path gradually break down the separateness of the individual self, and realize their identification with the eternal, divine Self which is one with all of nature.

Indian art seeks to evoke this fusion of identity with the timeless, regenerate Self. It tries to break down the distinction between the temporal, individual identity of the viewer and the identity of the subject to be contemplated. Accordingly, time-space has a peculiar irrelevance in most Indian masterpieces. In the 18th century Rajput miniature of Krsna and Radha at a riverbank (fig. 1) the artist describes movement as a concrete quality which defines the objects rather than as an activity which the objects engage in. He abstracts a motion into a frozen form; the movement of the swirling water, for example, is captured as an object with no dimension in time and space. The articulation of the borses' musculature in the 17th century Tibetan tanka (fig. 3) is rigid and eternally frozen in time, yet force and violent motion is unequivocally implied.

To the Indian artist each thing in nature represents an individual ego reincarnated at a particular moment in its search for knowledge of the Self. Man is the turning point where the Path of Pursuit gradually yields to the Path of Return. Hence, both Hindus and Buddhists attach immeasurable importance to birth in human form.

In reincarnation, the individual soul is born into the natural form which is appropriate to its age. The Indians recognized a hierarchy of spiritual age among men which had no relation to the physical or chronological age of a man's body. Unlike the Buddhists, the Hindus attempted to order society on this principle through a rigid hierarchy of hereditary classes. A youngster of the Brahman class -- on top of the social ladder -- was therefore older, in spirit, than an aged man of a lower class. In theory, an intellectual and spiritual aristocracy ruled Hindu society.

For Indian society, "knowledge" and "ignorance" replaced the Christian concepts of "good" and "evil." Those who had not yet achieved wisdom and self-awareness were considered young rather than evil souls. The Brahmans, irrespective of the austerity of their own lives, held that society should provide "youthful" men with the opportunity for full employment of all sensual pleasures. They believed that complete knowledge of pleasure and sensual gratification was necessary to bring ultimate self-awareness and the eventual abandonment of physical pleasures. The acquisition of wealth (artha) and the enjoyment of sense pleasure (kama) -- contained within the broad limits of a moral law (dharma) which protects the weaker from the stronger -- are all legitimate occupations of men on the outward path.

At first, Indians regarded art as only a means of arousing sensual pleasure. The two addorsed tree dryads of the first century A.D. (fig. 2 showing one side) show both the serenity of Indian art and the erotic sensuality. The Buddhists regarded Nirvana as the only aim of life and rejected everything but strict austerity. This quality is evident in the 13th century seated Buddha (fig. 4) from Nepal.

The Buddhists thought of beauty and personal love not only as evanescent feelings of the outward path -- as the Hindus saw them -- but as snares to be avoided. The Buddhists considered artists lowly people not even to be admitted to the ceremony of offering to the dead.

The Hindus never forgot that art was part of life, the field of holy Pursuit and Return. Yet the early Hindus, at best, saw the artist as a courtesan who made his occupation the knowledge and fulfillment of sensual pleasure.

Both Hindus and Buddhists placed great value on the strict discipline of Yoga and they soon recognized that the concentration of the artists was very similar. Those who practice Yoga concentrate on an object until they can overlook the distinction between themselves and the object they are contemplating. Through this concentration a man reputedly achieved a harmony or unity of consciousness.

In art, both the viewer and the artist are swept into total involvement with the subject matter. The art attempts to stimulate a complete fusion of idenity between the viewer or artist and the subject of the work itself. Hindus believed that all knowledge was directly accessible to the concentrated and "one-pointed" mind without the direct intervention of the senses.

Most Indian art is religious in nature, but even the exceptions (the most noticeable are the Rajput miniatures) are intimately bound up in the philosophical and religious traditions. Unlike Christian art, which exemplifies a didactic theme, Hindu and Buddhist art attempts to directly trigger a religious experience.

Because Indian art tried to provide a very individual experience, and because the artists -- who were not monks themselves -- made highly subjective interpretations of the religion, no generalized art theory can explain each individual Indian work. The situation is not made any clearer by the strong influence of other religions and cultures, particularly the Islamic, on both the folk art and the orthodox art of India.

In the idealized version, a work of Indian art is completed before the actual work of representation is begun. The artist, after ceremonial purification proceeds to a solitary place. There he performs "sevenfold office" beginning with the invocation of the hosts of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, and the offerings to them. Then he must conceptualize the four infinite moods of friendliness, compassion, sympathy, and impartiality. He must meditate upon the emptiness of the non-existence of all things, in order to destroy his individual ego consciousness. Then only should he invoke the desired divinity by the utterance of the appropriate seedword and begin to identity himself completely with the divinity to be represented. Finally, on pronouncing the dhyana mantram (in which the divinity's attributes are defined), the divinity appears visibly, as in a dream, and this brilliant image becomes the artist's model.

Indian art is designed to inspire spiritual freedom and self-realization. It attempts to release the spirit from the individual ego in order to entirely become one with the divine nature of the Self; to attain awareness of the total unity of being. The aesthetic experience in Indian art occurs when the self perceives the Self. Hence Indian art, properly experienced, is meant to be a kind of divine inspiration and expression of a higher understanding