116. The Buddha at Benares

Thus went the Buddha gradually through various lands towards the great city of Benares and when he had dressed himself at break of day he entered the great city of Benares with his bowl and monk’s frock to ask for alms. And after passing through the citybegging, and having done what he had to do to get food and at last having eaten what he had collected in his bowl, he betook himself to Rsipatana, to the deer park where the five of the blessed company were. (407 :12).

This is one of the few reliefs that might cause us to suspect that the sculptors worked perhaps more with fixed models than the variety every where introduced seems to imply. This relief is remarkably like No. 73; both show us "a mendicant Buddha in a great city", first Rajagrha, now Benares, and in both cases the composition is exactly the same; the Buddha or Bodhisattva, coming from the right, stands on a lotus cushion holding the tip of his garment in the left hand and stretching his right towards a woman kneeling before him touching the ground with her hands; behind her stand a man and woman well-dressed, the first offering a food bowl, further we see several men sitting and then a small building on the left. Only the details vary; instead of the three spectators in the right hand corner of No. 73, here there is a sitting umbrella-bearer of the Buddha, and the hovering heavenly-ores have disappeared. The woman standing, who holds nothing on No. 73, now has a bowl of food; the seated figures on No. 73, the king’s suite with his insignia, are now a group of citizens seated under the trees. Finally the building differs in style and here looks like a large rice-shed quite in keeping with the well-known stone models, but with a penthouse built on columns at the right, beneath which sits a guard with a beard and a club. In spite of these certainly not unimportant differences of detail, the composition of the whole is remarkably similar.