Note 393 — Chapter XVI · THE DRAGON, MOUNTAIN-WORSHIP, BUDDHISM

The simple uncarved stones seem to gain in interest when we go back in thought to the days of the early Greeks and the early Babylonians and Assyrians. Of the ancient Greeks Pausanias tells us that they worshipped the gods through the medium of images, and that these images were unwrought stones. Some of the T'u Ti and other images that one finds everywhere in Weihaiwei—with their short, squat, scarcely human bodies—suggest a transition from the mere unwrought stone to the carved and finished statue. Similarly in Greece we find first the absolutely rough, unhewn stone, such as that which represented Eros at Thespiæ, next the legless, angular, ugly images such as the well-known square Hermes—of which, one would have thought, both gods and men should be ashamed—and finally the exquisite statues of idealised boyhood and youth such as are still a source of the purest delight to all lovers of beauty and of art. Unfortunately the desire to make the gods appear different from ordinary mankind led the Chinese, as it led the Indian and other Eastern races, to what may be called the cultivation of the grotesque, so that there is very little that is grand or beautiful, as a rule, even in the best of their divine images. The finest statues, generally speaking, are undoubtedly those of Sakya Buddha. Tradition, in this respect, has been comparatively merciful to the memory of the great Indian philosopher and sage. Europeans often find fault with the Buddha-faces for their alleged insipidity: whereas what the artist has really aimed at is an ideal of passionless repose.