Old Smiles

A Chinese last week was doing his quiet bit to enlighten Manhattanites on a subject of great current interest to China--India. C. T. Loo, noted dealer and connoisseur, after a quarter-century of patient collecting, opened a display of "The Sculpture of Greater India." The people who went to contemplate his 69 hard-won pieces in stone and bronze were mainly Mr. Loo's friends--museum curators, students, artists. While the learned visitors took their tea, found a corner for sketching, or discussed the possible influence of Buddha upon Christ, the gods of ancient India--Brahma, Siva, Vishnu, Buddha-- looked down with old smiles.

The U.S. finds it difficult to understand Indian art--which, in any case, it rarely sees. Life for the Occidental is rarely "a prolonged sacrament"--the description of the life of the Indian given in Mr. Loo's catalogue. Hindu and Buddhist art, arising from intense spiritual concentration, assumed symbolic forms and sectarian twists that only long study can clarify. U.S. amateurs can merely distinguish between Hindu art (oddly vital) and Buddhist art (oddly serene).

Hinduism came before Buddhism in India, and lasted longer. Of the numerous Hindu deities, Brahma is boss, with Vishnu, the preserver, and Siva, god of destruction and creation, making up the Hindu trinity. The Hindu measures his own brevity by a vast time sense: a day in the life of Brahma runs roughly to 4,320,000,000 earthly years. Siva, as Lord of the Dance, is sometimes represented as both masculine and feminine (see cut) and incarnates the pulse of this cosmic life. "In the night of Brahma," says an Indian scholar, "Nature is inert, and cannot dance till Siva wills it: He rises from his rapture, and dancing sends through inert matter pulsing waves of awakening sound, and lo! matter also dances, appearing as a glory round about Him. . . ."

Buddhism, which originated in India in the 5th Century B.C., had spread all over the East but practically disappeared from its homeland by the 13th Century A.D.The Buddhist ascendancy mellowed Indian sculpture into a less sensuous character. Instead of the bulbous breasts, swivel hips, wasp waists and whirling, multiple arms of Hinduism's gods, the Buddha had a repose of form and peace of countenance somewhat like that of the greatest Greek sculpture.

The person who became known as Buddha devoted his life to seeking a way out of the unending cycles of rebirth to which the Hindu and his universe, through Siva, were bound. Through asceticism and contemplation Buddha found his goal of complete and final extinction (nirvana). His perfect enlightenment (bodhi) in this matter was what caused him to smile, and all his images to smile. On 57th Street in Manhattan last week they still smiled.

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