The Chennai Government Museum has brought out several guidebooks, which are well received by the visitors. Dr.A.Aiyappan former Superintendent of this Museum and Prof. P.R.Srinivasan, former Curator, Archaeology Section of this Museum painstakingly described each and every Amaravati Sculpture that is displayed in the Gallery. As this guide book ran out of stock, we felt that the scholars and connoisseurs should not be disappointed. We have brought out this edition this year. I hope that scholars, the viewing public and lay readers will benefit by this access to ancient knowledge.
BUDDHISM as an international faith of Indian origin is of interest to all enlightened persons. The literature on Buddhism is vast, but the Buddhist sculptures exhibited in the Museum give the visitor a deeper insight into facts concerning the Buddha and his teachings than the best book can ever give. This Guide can only draw attention to particular objects but the visitor has to seek for himself the inspiration which these sculptures were expected to give to the faithful who worshipped at the scared spots to which the sculptures originally belonged. To persons who have no cultural education, these sculptures are mere stones, but to others they are full of meaning, artistically pleasing, and historically revealing.
Buddhism was for several centuries a very popular religion in Southern India, particularly in the Andhra area. The collection of Buddhist antiquities in the Museum came.
from over a dozen sites, most of which are in the valley of the Krishna river, and of these Amaravati is the most important. Amaravati, the eastern capital of the Andhra dynasty, was a great city, sacred to Buddhists as the stupa contained the relics of the Buddha; and as a seat of learning it was well known even outside India. Kanchi in the Tamil country was still greater as a centre of Buddhist learning and culture, but with the emergence of Nagarjuna, the Buddhist establishments at Nagarjunakonda became more famous. Buddhism received its share of royal support from the various ruling dynasties but its own institutions, disappeared from the centres where it once flourished for over ten to fifteen centuries. Into the causes of the decline and fall of Buddhism in the land of its origin we cannot go here, but the opposition which it met from revived Hindu Organizations should be mentioned as one of the causes. The estates of several Buddhist institutions passed into the hands of temple and mutt authorities; the land near Nagarjunakonda, for example, today belongs to the Pushpagiri mutt.
The Buddha did not originate a body of philosophic and gave them new meanings and a new emphasis. According sources of his basic ideas were Upanishadic. He re-interpreted to Dr. Ananda Coomaraswamy, the popular idea that Buddhism was opposed to Hinduism has arisen out of the incapacity of Buddhist philosophy in relation to the teachings of the many modern scholars to understand the deeper meaning of Upanishads. The symbols which Buddhism used are all common both to it and Hinduism. In Buddhist sculptures, the Buddha identified with the Absolute is represented by the "Pillar of Fire", the "Bodhi Tree" or by the "Wheel of Dharma which are all Vedic or Upanishadic symbols. The Buddha in the Dhammapada describes, again, as several Hindu sages have done, the distinction between the true brahman and the spurious Brahman, using almost the same phraseology. This shows his views on Varna were of the same order as those of the Hindu seers who classified mankind on the basis of qualities (gunas) and not on the basis of the accident of birth. Though this popular Guide is not the place to elaborate the theme Buddhism versus Hinduism, I feel justified in devoting some space to clear the common but wrong idea that Buddhism is opposed to and different from Hinduism. "The more superficially one studies Hinduism, the more profound our study, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish Buddhism from Brahmanism."
To the common people of Southern India, of the third century B.C., whose religion must have been forms of spirit and nature worship (the visitor will see samples of it sculptured). the new religion which Asoka's missionaries from Magadha propagated must have opened an entirely new world of higher ideals of brotherly love, social service, charity and above all devotion to the personality of the great Teacher and his great disciples. As a concrete outer symbol of the inner awakening of vast communities, there arose the large monasteries of Amaravati with the great stupa as its hub. The reader should try to picture the place vast series of buildings to house several hundreds of monks and nuns, the prayer halls, schools, hospitals, the crowds of worshippers, etc.
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