weapons which, like those of the great Aryan heroes, are personified and made to take places in the Buddhist pantheon as various manifestations of the Bodhisattva, e.g. Divine Love, Avalokitēshvara, and Divine Wisdom, Manjusri.
The type of head conforms to fixed tradition regarding marks of identity (lakshanas)—e.g., eyebrows joined together; a bump of wisdom on the top of the head (ushnisha), covered in the case of the Bodhisattva by the high-peaked tiara; three lucky lines on the neck; the lobes of the ears split and elongated in a fashion still prevalent in Southern India; a mark in the centre of the forehead (urnā) symbolising the third eye of spiritual vision. But every school of sculptors impressed its own racial type upon the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas it created. A Gandharan Buddha is unmistakably one of the race to which the Kushan dynasty belonged; an Indian image is of some Indian race. A Chinese image has a Mongolian character. Yet it is very rarely the case that any attempt at portraiture is made, as often happens in Western sacred art: it is an ideal racial type rather than an individual that is represented.
This was also the case in the gods of the pantheon which Greek artists created. The difference between the Indian and Greek ideal lies in the metaphysical outlook. The Indian idea was that Yoga, through which divine wisdom was attained, not only gave the body eternal youth and superhuman strength, but purified it of its physical dross and gave it a finer texture than the common mortal clay. The Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree at Gāyā, reduced to a living skeleton by mental agony and prolonged fasting, was at once supernaturally transformed when the Great Truth of the cause of human suffering flashed
