The Enduring Smile

By ROBERT HUGHES

One of the difficulties that the Western eye has with the ancient Buddhist art of South Asia is its apparent sameness. With Buddha, as with the Cheshire cat, the form recedes from us but the smile remains. That august smile of calm and benediction, traced on a thousand metal faces, is one of the obsessive presences of Buddhist sculpture, and has given rise to some of Andre Malraux's most excited dithyrambs on the absolute.

The sense of monotony, however, is more a question of culture than of nature. No doubt the differences between one constructivist painting and another would seem just as nugatory to a bonze.

For traditional Buddhist art is not about individual style; still less is it about self-expression. "The aesthetic canon involved is a very simple one," writes Art Historian Theodore Bowie. "An image is beautiful because it is the Buddha, and one image is not more beautiful than any other." But the variety and richness are still copious, as is demonstrated by a superb exhibition that opened last week at Asia House in Manhattan: "The Sculpture of Thailand," a collection of 80 bronzes, carvings and goldwork from the 7th to the 19th centuries, lent from the national museums of Thailand and the private collection of King Bhumibol. India, Gautama Buddha's birthplace, provided the basic prototypes for the image of the god-prince. His representation was no simple matter. Religious texts have fixed it since the Middle Ages; he had 32 ma jor and 80 minor "marks." Because Buddha was a prince before his Enlightenment, his head bears the long pierced ear lobes in which nobles wore their ornaments. Because he shaved his hair, Siamese sculptors endowed him with a circle of tight ringlets. Because he radiated superabundant quantities of teja (fiery energy), his statues were gilded and equipped -- like the 16th-18th century standing Buddha (opposite) -- with a finial of flame rising from the scalp.

His nose traditionally resembled "a parrot's beak," his head "an egg," his chin "a mango stone." Buddha, in short, was fenced about with even more attributes and iconographical details than Christ.

Mythic Victory. The sum effect of his "supernatural anatomy" was exquisitely stylized. No muscles or corrugation interrupt the liquid flow of his body; its smooth, continuous modeling is a supreme metaphor of wholeness.

In late Siamese art, this refinement of contour and line often becomes insipid. Yet every detail of a fine Thai bronze is impregnated with communicative power; it would, for instance, be difficult to find a shape more authori tative and succinct than Asia House's 14th-15th century hand, its slender fingers raised in the abhayamudra, or gesture of dispelling fear. Buddhism is a discipline of inner stillness; yet even when movement is specifically shown, it seems to involve the defeat of time.

In the 12th-13th century bronze of the divinity Hevajra dancing, the sinuous body, the faintly smiling face, the 16 arms performing their ritual gesture, exist in some sphere beyond contingency.

Hevajra was "the Destroyer of the Maras," that is, the subjugator of desire and attachment. His mythic victory over de sire was the enterprise of all great Buddhist art; and this may be why these Siamese icons of calm seem at first repetitive, and then so consoling, when seen in America.

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