1892.] L. A. Waddell —Buddhist Pictorial Wheel of Life . 
133 
Its interest. 
And Importance. 
The Buddhist Pictorial Wheel of Life. — By L. A. Waddell, M. B, 
(With, three plates). 
One of the most striking of the many frescoes which adorn the 
interiors of lamaic temples is the Sid-pa-i 
Khor-lo # (in Sanskrit Bhavachahra ) or ‘ Cycle 
of Existence,’ a symbolic and realistic picture of the most leading law 
of Buddhism—Metempsychosis—the secret of Buddha having con¬ 
sisted in the means he devised for escaping from this ceaseless round 
of re-births and its attendant suffering. 
But although this picture of ‘The Wheel of Life ’ is so interesting 
in itself as an epitome of Buddhist principles, 
and, perhaps, one of the purest relics of Indian 
Buddhism that the lamas have preserved to us ; and extremely valuable 
as portraying in concrete and traditional form several of the abstract 
metaphysical conceptions of the Indian Buddhist philosophers, that are 
only known to the western world by their ambiguoust Sanskrit and 
Pali terms and Tibetan equivalents, as found in the old Buddhist Scrip¬ 
tures, it is remarkable that not even the most cursory description of it 
has yet been published. Gfeorgi in his Alphabetum Tibetanum appears | 
to have given a rough sketch of a rather confused copy of this picture, 
and his wood-cut has been in part reproduced by Foucaux,§ but no 
description of its details seems to have been attempted. 
Owing, doubtless, to its execution in perishable painted form and 
, not as a sculpture, I can find no trace of its 
Its hitherto unde- . 1 ’ . 
tected presence at modern existence m India except among the 
Ajanta. cave-paintings of Ajanta. The painting at the 
left end of the verandah of Cave XVII, the so-called ‘ Zodiac ’ of 
Indian Archaeologists, of which there is in the Society’s collection the 
fine photograph here shown, vide Plate VII, is a fragment of a Buddhist 
Pictorial Cycle of Existence. And I am glad to be able, by means of 
lamaic sources of information, to interpret its hitherto unknown 
details and restore its blanks caused by the ravages of time.|| 
w Srid-pa-i hkhor-loi phyag-rgya: | (In Skt. Bliava- 
chakramudrd ). 
t Koppen gives ( Die Religion des Buddha I. 604) for one of these terms, viz., 
Sansl&ra, which is pictorially symbolized in this fresco, a long list of the different 
renderings which have been attempted, each with widely different sense. And most 
of the other Nidana terms are equally vague. 
I I have been unable to consult Georgi’s work. 
§ Le Lolita Vistara traduit du Sanskrit par Ph. Ed. Foucaux, Paris. 1884, 
p. 290, (forming Tome sixieme Annales du Muse'e Guimet). 
|| I have no doubt but that careful search at Ajanta, Ellora and other Buddhist 
caves in India would discover more of these pictorial cycles. 
R 
