RELIGIOUS ART EAST AND WEST — ROWLAND 581 



significance of Buddha images on the stupas : in this legend two men 

 each engaged an artist to paint a picture of the Enlightened One; 

 when they came to pay their respects to the icons they had ordered, 

 the two patrons were disappointed to find only one painting of the 

 Buddha. At the artist's insistence that he had not defrauded them 

 and that the picture would give some "spiritual indication" of this, 

 the Painted Buddha divided in two from the waist upward, and the 

 two men "believed and exulted." It is specifically implied in this 

 passage that each man wished to have his own picture of the Buddha ; 

 in other words, we might well be justified in assuming that the multi- 

 ple statues of Buddhas on the monuments at Taxila and Hadda are 

 individual donations, or, at least, different likenesses of the same Bud- 

 dha. In the photograph of the Ali-Masjid stupa one can make out 

 statues of Buddhas and bodhisattvas of various types : it is tempting 

 to think of these as different deities or different aspects of the same 

 deity each in its separate niche like the, chapels dedicated to various 

 saints or types of Christ in the ambulatory of a great cathedral. One 

 could see in this repetition of the Buddha images on all four sides 

 of the stupas the germ of the idea embodied in the four- faced statues 

 of Lokesvara at Angkor which are not four-headed monsters but one 

 deity both seen and seeing everywhere at once. The multiple Bud- 

 dha images could be interpreted as representing not many different 

 Buddhas but one Buddha seen everywhere and simultaneously. 



I have already suggested that the homme-arcade^ a motif univer- 

 sally employed for sepulchral monuments in the West, was for this 

 reason found appropriate for the decoration of reliquaries and stupas 

 which can be regarded as funerary in function. 



It has been suggested that, first and foremost, the pagan sarcophagus 

 was the House of the Dead : it was also a representation of the Palace 

 of Hades as abode of the shades. In Christian art the Palace of Hades 

 is converted into the Halls of Heaven or the Heavenly Jerusalem; 

 Christ and the elect emerge from the colonnade that had formerly 

 sheltered Apollo and the Muses as companions of the departed. Wliat 

 could be more appropriate for a sepulchral monument than the repre- 

 sentation of the Celestial City where the soul hoped to dwell in peace 

 with the Savior? In the same way, the pagan sarcophagi with the 

 flora and fauna of Elysium are converted into those Christian cofRns 

 that portray the bay trees, the gardens, and goodly walks of Jerusalem 

 the Golden. The conception of Paradise as a "palace" is almost uni- 

 versal in Indian mythology: I need mention only the palace of the 

 Cakravartin, the King of the World who sits enthroned in the center of 

 the great wheel of the world, and that center is his palace on the siun- 

 mit of Mount Meru, the cosmic mountain that pillars apart Heaven 

 and Earth. Sometimes the Heaven of the Tusita gods, the dwelling 

 place of the Bodhisattva Siddhartha before his last incarnation, is like- 



