Varanasi, the eternal city on the Ganges, is one of the strongholds of the Shiva faith. Many old people come here seeking a noble death, for whoever meets death here has a straight road to heaven. And yet today we are setting out for Sarnath, barely a few kilometres away, one of the chief places of pilgrimage in Buddhism. The three-wheeled motor scooter takes daring bends among lorries, camels, cyclists and cows, the driver is calm, and we watch his hair-raising manoeuvres with an imperturbable apathy characteristic, perhaps, of Buddha.
Sarnath is a small place, famous in fact for its Deer Park, where in 532 BC, at the age of thirty-five, Buddha gave his first sermon – as tradition puts it: he set the wheel of the teaching in motion. It was then that he revealed the fact of suffering inherent in human life, and the elements of the noble eightfold path that leads to nirvana. In time the little settlement grew into one of the four chief places of pilgrimage connected with Buddha's life – his birth, his enlightenment, his first sermon and his passing.
Its museum was built in 1910, modelled on Buddhist monasteries, and the finds were placed in the halls and along the open corridors – photography, of course, is not allowed. Here is the famous lion capital, the national symbol of India, with stone carvings large and small and other objects in the display cases, and along the walls several dozen full-length figures of Buddha. After a while so many statues are more than one can take in, but in the room on the left a Buddha of incredibly fine workmanship caught my eye.
A full-length standing figure, the body hardly more than hinted at, barely rising from the stone plane behind it. The legs are left unworked, the belly swells slightly, a finely pleated robe covers it from the navel down, but this too is airy, in the spirit of the Gandhara style. Nor is the chest emphasised, so all attention is drawn to the head, and above all to the face.
The head shows hair arranged in spirals, in tiny curls turning to the right, and the ushnisha, the bump on the head, is present here too. The sculpted heads of the Jain ford-makers, the tirthankaras, are strikingly similar, only they lack this bump, which could almost be read as a shaman's mark. The curls hugging the skull also form a homogeneous aura that sets off the face, whose modelling surpasses all imagining. The forehead and the brow ridge cast a delicate shadow over the half-closed eyes and the cheeks, whose curve and swell are of supernatural beauty. The nose is finely cut, airy, but the mouth…
The upper third of the face is transcendence: the brow that hides holy secrets, and the eyes closed in meditation… which open onto another dimension, even as they half close to the outer world. The middle third of the face is the world, is man: the tilt and liveliness of the nose, and the mysterious, playful interplay of light and shade beneath the brow and across the cheeks, reflect this, but the lower third, the chin and the mouth – is incredibly sensual, in a worldly way. Full lips, puckered almost as if for a kiss, so that the mouth, swelling forward, on its own overcomes the frontal effect. It is as if sensuality lifted man, too, out of the flat mass, but sensuality not transcended is also a trap, which does not help him reach salvation but binds him to the world. All this unfolds in the cool, blackish-grey tone of the sandstone, in a soft light.
Buddha was born in May – Sarnath celebrates at this time – so it is no wonder that he spoke little of transcendence, and instead, pragmatically – with four feet on the ground, like the bull – taught about the suffering of worldly existence. You see, astrology seems to be proved right once again…
It was as if, while I admired the statue, time had stopped for me, the wheel of the universe had turned back, and the nimble moment and the world had rushed past us. No wonder: for a thousand years or so the statue of Buddha has been contemplating those who contemplate it, whereas I stopped for only a few minutes – and yet this was a timeless meeting.