John Guy looks at the embracing presence of gods of place in early Buddhist art.
This talk begins with the premise that subcontinental ancient India was marked by the embracing presence of gods of place. The pervasiveness of local deities, as later codified in such texts as the Mahāmāyūri and the governing deities of the Uttarādhyayana Sūtra, point to their localized nature and named identities. The former lists them according to the place each presides as the tutelary deity, the latter by iconographic features. As we move into the first millennium, the constellation of pan-Indian deities coalesces around a defined pantheon, reducing the religious spaces occupied by these nature deities, and seemingly marginalizing those that survive. A question that has long vexed art historians of early historic South Asia is the relationship of image to text. The antiquity of texts describing - and presumed to be prescribing – the way images of deities are represented, broadly speaking, appear to postdate surviving imagery. In presenting a corpus of the earliest extant imagery from subcontinental India, we will examine the place of yakṣas, nāgās and nidhis in this shifting devotional landscape and their afterlife in a polytheistic system.
