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Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

divinity which the original images were intended to represent. For others definite clues
have yet to be searched for.

The figure in the top corner on the left reproduces an image of Gautama Bodhisattva,
seated in the famous scene of Māra's attack immediately preceding the Illumination. This
is shown by the characteristic pose of the hand touching the rocky seat (bhūmisparśa-mudrā)
and by the triple monster head forming a crown over the Bodhisattva's head and symbolizing
the demon army of Māra. It was in that pose that the miraculous image at the sacred site
of Bodh-Gayā, described at length by the great Chinese pilgrim Hsüan-tsang and still
traceable in numberless replicas, presented Śākyamuni at the moment of Enlightenment.
The identification of our figure with this far-famed image is confirmed by the Chinese
inscription placed against it which describes it as a statue in the kingdom of Magadha.
In the figure now seen in the top right-hand corner we meet again with a Bodhisattva
seated in the bhūmisparśa-mudrā. His robe is like that of a Buddha and red. Two white
crescents are shown within the nimbus, which, like the vesica, is flame-edged. Here, too,
a fortunate chance has preserved the accompanying inscription from effacement. According
to M. Petrucci it mentions as the original a silver image preserved in the kingdom of Kapiśa,
which corresponds to the region of the present Kābul.²¹

Iconographic indications define four more of the images represented. The figure in
the middle of the topmost row shows the statue of a Buddha standing with the right hand
raised in the pose of 'Protection' and surrounded by an elliptical vesica which is filled
with rows of small Buddhas standing in the same pose and visible from the breast upwards.
The whole agrees in all details, down to the folds of the drapery, with two colossal stucco
relievo statues excavated by me in 1901 on the southern corner walls of the great Rawak
Vihāra of Khotan.²² Of these and similar representations on a much smaller scale in
Gandhāra relievos M. Foucher has proved that they are meant to exhibit Śākyamuni in
the act of performing the Great Miracle of Śrāvastī.²³ In another standing figure, the one
on the right of the middle row, the introduction of a pair of gazelles or deer into the ogee
top of the vesica proves that an image representing Śākyamuni in the Deer Park of Benares,
the scene of the First Sermon, is intended. The richly adorned standing figure of a Bodhi-
sattva in the bottom row, holding the characteristic emblems of the lotus and flask, is cer-
tainly an Avalokiteśvara, and the presence by his side of various small attendant figures
may yet help to the exact identification of the image intended.

Special iconographic interest attaches to the standing Buddha figure in the right-hand
bottom corner of the Plate. Its hieratic pose of peculiar stiffness, the treatment of the
drapery and what remains of the background of speckled rocks, leave no doubt as to the
identity of the figure with the image of Śākyamuni on the Vulture Peak, which is
represented in striking similarity also by the fine painting of Plate XIII previously discussed
and by the embroidery picture of Plate XXXIV. The vulture shown in the former makes
it quite certain that the background of all three paintings represents the famous rocky hill
near Rājagṛha or Rājgir in Bihār, where ancient tradition localized various episodes of
Śākyamuni's later life. There is no inscription to tell us where the Indian image which
all three representations were intended to reproduce was assumed to be. But the absolute
identity of the pose, and the extraordinarily close resemblance of all details in the treatment
of drapery, hair, dress, &c., prove all three to be replicas from the same model. That this
was a sculpture in the Graeco-Buddhist style is obvious at a glance.

The rigid adherence in details to a common original model which is proved in this
particular case supports confidence in the general fidelity with which the other figures,
too, in our painting may be assumed to reproduce the original images represented. A close
parallel is furnished by the miniatures in certain Nepalese manuscripts of the eleventh