576 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1963 



dlias, differentiated from one another by tlieir mudrds and the trees 

 under which they are seated. At present the first 75 feet of wall sur- 

 face is devoid of any painting. 



I repeat here that the very scale of this great image at Bamiyan 

 implies that the religious of this center considered the Buddha as a 

 more than mortal teacher and is thereby thoroughly in keeping with 

 the transcendent nature attributed to him by the Lokottaravadins. 

 We should also consider in this regard the possible influence of classic 

 antiquity on the fashioning of enormous images of the gods not only 

 in Christian iconography, but also as here on Buddhist art. I need 

 only mention the statue of the Olympian Zeus and the effigies of the 

 divinized emperors of Rome among the logical artistic prototypes for 

 the practice of magnification to suggest a supraterrestrial power. 

 There is a possible parallel and explanation for the making of colossi 

 in the beginnings of Christian art. In the West, the early Christian 

 conception of the Lord as the Good Shepherd was in Byzantium of 

 the fourth century and was later replaced by the conception of the 

 superhuman Christ reigning in majesty above the skies. Under in- 

 fluences almost certainly emanating from Iran, the emj^erors as early 

 as Constantine had assumed the title of kosmokrator; the founder of 

 Byzantium himself was portrayed in statues of giant size, dimensions 

 deemed appropriate for the Lord of the Universe. When the emperor 

 himself had thus grown to colossal stature, it was hardly possible to 

 show any longer the Light of the World as a mere man ; there evolved 

 immediately the Christ Pantocrator, Ruler of All, and regal embodi- 

 ment of the World of the Father. Since colossi do not appear in 

 Buddhism before the Gandhara school, it may be that among the con- 

 tributions of this hybrid art was the plastic realization of the super- 

 hmnan nature of the Buddha contained in the texts, aided and abetted 

 by the Greco-Roman artists' knowledge of over life-sized figures of 

 gods and kosmokrators in the West. 



Although Christian art can boast no images on the scale of the 

 Eastern examples, the enormously enlarged representations of Christ 

 in the mosaics of the domes and apses of Byzantine churches are illus- 

 trations of the same principle. In both Buddhist and Christian art 

 the colossus is an outgrowth of the ancient device of hieratic scaling, 

 in which the most significant personage was magnified in order to 

 assert its importance over other figures in the painting or relief. 

 Before the colossi at Bamiyan and the pantocrators of Byzantium the 

 spectator himself provides the scale for the giant being that over- 

 shadows him. 



One very good reason for creating colossal images of Buddha even 

 at a very early period would be the conception of the Lord as 

 Mahapurusa. Buddha and Cakravartin, with whom he early became 

 identified, are essentially the Purusa (Prajapati) of vedic mythology 



