By S. G. D. Wickramasuriya

 Carved out of fine grained bluish achist stone, 33 inches high on a base 21 inches wide, the fasting Siddhartha is one of the most exquisite pieces of Gandhara sculpture housed in the Lahore Museum.

It was dug out in 1889 by. Lt. col. Deabe from a mound in a small village called Shrike Baba near Shahbaz Garhi, district Mardan and presented to the Lahore Museum along with innumerable pieces.

The fasting Siddhartha represents Buddha’s practical quest for truth in which according to Buddhist Cannons, Siddhartha ultimately succeeded when he attained complete enlightenment. He travelled all over the land going through all Yogic exercises and at Gaya he finally undertook the last ordeal the six year long fast.

This piece of sculpture is a very true representation of this Buddhist narration. The physiological and anatomical details of the piece may not be true to life. In fact, they do not have the graceful serenity of the face, the natural drop of the drapery on the shrinking body and stately recreation of Yogic absorption, the unarrested growth of the beard and body hair all are so superbly realistic in execution that they overlap all anatomical discrepencies.

The sculpture bears no inscription which could tell us when it was carved out, nor do we know which stratum of the mound it was dug out of.

The excavations conducted by Lt. Col. Deane were not as scientific and methodical as they are today. There was hardly any technology of archaeological excavations. We can therefore date it only approximately and that too by assigning it to one or another of the types of sculpture associated with different periods of the development of Gandhara school. The thin and a natural fall of the drapery folds the treatment of the statues base, the planeness yet dignity in the personification of the Buddha belong to the phase of maturity of the Gandhara art of sculpturing.

This phase of maturity was attained and this prediction for naturalistic treatment of themes arose during the last quarter to the first century A.D. and continued into the second quarter of the second quarter A.D. Thus the fasting Siddhartha may be about 1900 years old.

The five Ascetics, Kondanna, Bhaddiya, Vappa, Mahanama and Assaji come to meet Ascetic Siddhartha