In the course of the last decades, research on partial or complete biographies of the Bud dha and on Indian and Central Asian Buddhist art have permitted a better understanding of how the fi gure of the founder of Buddhism was constructed. Nevertheless, it is still necessary to study each of the episodes which make them up and to re-establish their redaction history. The visit of the young Prince Siddhārtha Gautama to the scriptorium lends itself all the more readily to historical reconstruction in so far as it has been compared to that of the child Jesus to the schoolmaster which, according to exegetes, inspired Buddhist biographers. A comparative study of different textual sources and of bas-reliefs shows that on the contrary this Buddhist episode was already recorded in its fully fl edged form from the fi rst half of the second century A.D.