For the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Tree and Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India exhibition of South Asian art, an array of one hundred forty breath-taking major works dated ca. 200 BCE to 400 CE made their way across the world, perhaps never to be seen again in the US during our lifetimes. The Tree and Serpent curator John Guy centered the exhibition on the art that arose from the first lived tradition of Buddhism in the world. The exhibition shifted our understanding of early South Asian art in two critical ways—first, away from Buddha images as bodily representations to sculptures that indicate the Buddha’s presence in other ways, and second, beyond the geographical scope of Northern India to the lesser-known corpus of the early beginnings of Buddhist art in Andhra. Additionally, with sculptures fresh out of the ground from the Southern Indian monastic site of Phanigiri, which was until very recently unknown to archaeologists, the exhibition presents the site with new major developments across scholarship on late Buddhist art. 

Only two centuries after the lifetime of the Buddha, sculptures reveal an ancient art-making that arose out of the landscape in which the Buddha taught, traveled, preached, and died. Most sculptures are original architectural fragments from stupas or funerary mounds consisting of a drum, dome, parasol, and outer railing that established a clear circumambulatory pathway. The mahaparinirvana-sutra, a Buddhist text, dictates that the perfect teacher’s bodily remains must be buried in the manner of a king in such a mound. One of the exhibition’s defining features is a reconstruction of a stupa walkway that illustrates worship through embodied experience. At the center of any stupa would be the interred sacred relics, in this case on display from Piprahwa in pearl, gemstone, carnelian, jade, and precious materials. These offerings were once hidden from sight at ancient monuments yet were visible to the viewer at the center of the walkway. Although unstated in the exhibition itself, the curatorial decision to display the relics is enabled by destructive colonial-era archeological projects aimed at retrieving objects that ancient Indians intended to remain unseen. The colonial perspectives entrenched in these object histories is likewise present in the exhibition’s title, which refers to an 1868 volume Tree and Serpent Worship: Or, Illustrations of Mythology and Art in India in the First and Fourth Centuries After Christ by the architectural historian to the British Empire, James Fergusson. In the publication, he quite rightly asserts the first mythologies of Buddhist art as transforming ideas from prior worship of trees and serpents, yet lesser known from the text is that he also incorrectly associates the perceived serpent worship with “human sacrifice” (3). Scholars based both in the US and in India might have wished for a deeper discussion of this colonial baggage in the context of this exhibition, which has returned the spotlight to art of ancient India in desperate need of critical scholarly attention.

The exhibition began with the earliest eras of Buddhist stupa art in narratives, featuring snake deities, personified tree spirits, and other auspicious beings near the Buddha in symbolic form. From there, the display framed a shift towards worship scenes with the Buddha in bodily form within narratives, particularly in the Andhra region. Sculptures of festivals, offerings, and other types of celebratory scenes archive the worship cultures of these monuments. Of great interest among these are royal figures, such as a worshipping king as sovereign from Amaravati, in which the artist positioned the king’s head beneath the image of the stupa and his royal parasol. Such a long durée of works highlights the persistence of some symbolic forms in Andhra, such as the wheel with which the Buddha “turned the wheel of the law,” as a constant theme of the exhibition.

From the earliest centuries, the global movement of ideas and things as evidence of contacts with the early Iranian kingdoms, Greek world, and later Roman empire, is evidence of the profound cultural and economic ties beyond the subcontinent. The exhibition highlights connections through objects such as the infamous ivory of an auspicious female yakshi excavated in a merchant’s house in Pompeii and the extraordinary first-century Roman bronze image of Poseidon excavated in Kolhapur, India. Curious viewers and academics alike may wonder, what was truly the extent of trade stemming back to Achaemenid rule? Was it just one merchant of Pompeii who knew of such an auspicious female figure, or was the array of stunning Buddhist imagery well-known there across the world?

Among the more exciting objects were sculptures from Phanigiri, where ongoing excavation reveals that the history of early Buddhism is still evolving by way of new discoveries, particularly since the site contains the first discovered torana among stupas of Southern India. As seen on the beautifully preserved crossbars are narrative scenes from the life of the Buddha, including the birth—not represented in bodily form, but instead depicted with the mere presence of a swaddled cloth. An embodied tree shrine figure greets the newborn Buddha represented as footprints on that swaddled cloth with reverent clasped hands. Next in the sequence is the soon-to-be Buddha in bodily form, depicted in a scene in which he witnesses of embodied suffering of human life (old age, sickness, and death). In another intact scene, the Buddha as a perfected and fully awakened figure giving his first teaching cannot receive food offerings in his hand, and thus, the artist has shown the gods of the four directions arriving with small bowls to receive his meal.  While such gateways are well-documented in Northern India, the Phanigiri gateway displayed at the Met is one of the only known architraves of its kind in Andhra. 

As one of many ways of approaching the enigmatic shift to figurative representation of the Buddha, the exhibition makes the intriguing case that the Buddha image inevitably made Buddhism more accessible. In the final room of the exhibition, freestanding Buddha images from the first through third centuries show a gradual transition towards bodily representation. One stunning image of a freestanding Buddha from Telangana stood behind a moonstone, which is an architectural feature marking the entrance to the monument. The sacred ushnisha (cranial protuberance) and urna (forehead circular mark) of the Buddha recall the full list of the thirty-two major marks of a mahapurusha, the name for a superhuman form of the Buddha.

At times the viewer might have found it difficult, as I did, to trace vital art historical shifts across time and space in such an expansive show. As a scholar of early Buddhist art, I wished that the Buddha images had appeared earlier, since they arrived historically in the first century of the common era, far earlier than the date of sites such as Phanigiri. Many visitors from the Indian diaspora and those who have traveled to India might have left thinking that despite the impressive array of objects, aspects of the exhibition’s presentation of Buddhist art were too introductory. One might consider the compelling work of Vidya Dehejia and Parul Pandya Dhar, among others, as enriching towards the study of Buddhist art. Yet the exhibition took on the enormous role of introducing the earliest Buddhist art of the world to the Met’s audience with great vision, and the expansiveness of the curatorial ambition was perhaps why, at times, the viewer was left with more questions than answers. It is incredible to imagine that such an exhibition, with treasured and rare objects on loan from museums of India, had never taken place before this exhibition. May it set an exciting new precedent for future shows at the Met and beyond. Tree and Serpent invited the viewer to become lost in the vast and magnificent array of early Buddhist imagery and was an expression of just how much of this ancient world there is to explore and discover.