RELIGIOUS ART EAST AND WEST — ROWLAND 577 



and mysticism : the "laksanas" are derived from the distinctive marks 

 of the Cosmic Man. Tliey are in no sense physiological features but 

 "cosmognomical emblems." The Great Person is at once the year 

 and a solar myth and contains all worlds within his mystic anatomy. 

 One could look on this concept as a synthesism with ideas already ex- 

 pressed in the Bhagavad Gita where we read : "There in the body of the 

 God of Gods, the son of Pandu saw the whole universe resting in one" 

 (XI, 13) ; and "The space betwixt heaven and earth and all quarters 

 are filled by Thee alone" (XI, 20). "Thou art the Ancient Purusa" 

 (XI, 18). As Paul Mus has remarked, there is a suggestion of just 

 such a cosmological stature in the Buddha's flattening the earth with 

 liis footsteps, in the likening of his head to an umbrella ; indeed, A. K. 

 Coomaraswamy has shown that the early icons symbolizing Buddha 

 by a parasol, altar, and footprints are really likenesses of the "mys- 

 tical" body of the Great Person, respectively, sky, air, and earth — or, 

 in other words, the cosmic anatomy of Prajapati. It becomes clear 

 with this that, as cosmic god and universal iniler (Purusa-Cakravartin) 

 equal to all space, Buddha could appropriately be shown in enor- 

 mous size as though literally filling a whole "cosmos." That cosmos 

 is — in the case of the Bamiyan Buddhas — the shrine or niche that, 

 like the chaitya^ the elevation of which it reproduces in cross section, 

 may be understood as the cosmic house — its portals broad as the earth, 

 its roof the sky : "Cut ... in the vertical direction, the massive world 

 fabric shows its net where everything is fixed in its place." 



This idea of the Buddlia- Purusa is already present in the chapter on 

 the vision of the Universal Form in the Bhagavad Gita and corre- 

 sponds to the conception of Vairocana in the Kegonkyo, in which text 

 the Tathagata's body is described as comprehending all the directions, 

 all space, all living beings ; a similar text, the Bommokyo, determined 

 the iconography of the Daibutsu at Nara. On the Nara Daibutsu the 

 various Buddhas and worlds contained in Vairocana's universal form 

 are represented on the petals of the lotus throne; at Yiin Kang the 

 colossal image of Vairocana in Cave 18 has its body clothed in a veri- 

 table garment of small Buddhas exactly in the same way that the 

 multiple emanations of Lokesvara cover the statutes of this deity in 

 Indo-China. It is perhaps not too difficult to see that, as on the Nara 

 Daibutsu the worlds are engraved on the petals of the lotus throne so 

 at Bamiyan these creations of the Cosmic Lord's are painted, row upon 

 row, on the sides and vault of the niche. Although it is, of course, 

 impossible to state categorically that the colossus in Afghanistan al- 

 ready represents a production of the worship of Vairocana or Uni- 

 versal Buddha as imderstood by the esoteric sects, the implications of 

 what we see at Bamiyan — an enormous image surrounded by paintings 

 of multiple Buddhas and bodhisattvas — certainly suggests that the 

 idea of Vairocana is there in all but name. 



