The absence of the samsāra wheel in the Buddhist visual culture of Gandhara

Abstract

This article investigates and discusses the absence of representations of the Wheel of Samsāra in the Gandhara Indo-Greek Buddhist visual culture of the 3rd to 7th centuries. The aim is to understand and explain this visual silence in the face of the fact that the respective textual narratives were not only known in the geographic region, but were originally written there, and that this visual representation is very popular in other regions to explain fundamental Buddhist teachings. The methodology was a bibliographic study of the chronology and geographical locations of production and dissemination of textual narratives, taking into account the parallelism between textual and visual narratives. We had as main theoretical foundation the works of Aldrovandi, Behrendt, Tanweer, Teiser and Zin, and we came to the result that it is likely that such paintings existed but were lost.