‘Ah! The Wonder House! Can any enter?' 'It is written above the door—all can enter.'
“Kim clicked round the self-registering turnstile; the old man followed and halted amazed. In the entrance-hall stood the larger figures of the Greco-Buddhist sculptures done, savants know how long since, by forgotten workmen whose hands were feeling, and not unskillfully, for the mysteriously transmitted Grecian touch. There were hundreds of pieces, friezes of figures in relief, fragments of statues and slabs crowded with figures that had encrusted the brick walls of the Buddhist stupas and viharas of the North Country and now, dug up and labelled, made the pride of the Museum.
- from the first pages of Kim, Rudyard Kipling
The Starving Buddha aka Fasting Buddha aka Emaciated Buddha is the star attraction in the Lahore Museum. Devout Japanese tourists have cried at the locked door when they arrived after closing hours. Asian art collectors from America quell their fears of terrorism to see it and it alone, even if all the other treasures in the Museum’s Gandharan Gallery were to be off view. It is alleged that one overeager conservator took it upon himself to fix with a messy glue job a crack in the left arm, which like the right is carved free standing unlike most other depictions including the headless one in New York’s Metropolitan Museum, that had long ago been made probably at the time of excavation in 1894.
The Lahore image is extraordinary because of the Gandharan signature perfection of the garment’s drapes and folds- seen here in the fabric creases over the legs and elbows that are carried over to the bony ribs and sinewed neck floating above the contrasting ovoid stomach cavity, also echoed in the equally empty eye sockets.
Kim’s lama is in appearance not unlike the Starving Buddha, “dressed in fold upon fold of dingy stuff”, "his eyes turned up at the corners and looked like little slits of onyx”, “his thousand-wrinkled face.” How was the moment of recognition between the two? But no, the lama did not stop there, but rather at another image…
“In open-mouthed wonder the lama turned to this and that, and finally checked in rapt attention before a large alto-relief representing a coronation or apotheosis of the Lord Buddha. The Master was represented seated on a lotus the petals of which were so deeply undercut as to show almost detached. Round Him was an adoring hierarchy of kings, elders, and old-time Buddhas. Below were lotus-covered waters with fishes and water-birds. Two butterfly-winged devas held a wreath over His head; above them another pair supported an umbrella surmounted by the jewelled headdress of the Bodhisat.”
…as if the lama was too terrified to stand before hell on earth, and instead opted for heaven in heaven.
