XI.
It only remains for me now to add a short description to the Buddha sculptures which made the ruin call: Båra-buddå or Pårå buddå, that is, the many or conjoint Buddhas.[72].
All of them are in a sitting posture with crossed legs, almost in the same posture the Javanese call silå, but upright.
They are dressed in a thin mantle uncovering their right arms and shoulders—such as the monks of the southern church wear their cowls—and have the tiara, the round hair-knot, on their heads all covered with short curls. Even the ûrnâ, the little tuft of hair on their fronts is still to be seen on many a sculpture, and on the other ones, less accurately hewn, they are forgotten[73].
The posture of all of them tells resignation and peace, and may speak of the later final dissolving in the nirvâna, the joy- and painless not-to-be.
But the sculptor didn’t succeed in interpreting all the sculptures in this sense. Not all the sculptors had been equally good artists for they must have had much more work the best of them might have finished alone.
Among the sculptures placed opposite the five zones of heaven, the East, South, West and North and the Zenith, there is to be seen a slight difference in the posture of the right hands, and something more difference in the posture of the two hands with regard to those sculptures we see on the round terraces. All the sculptures on the five encircling walls have been hewn with their left hands in their laps, that is, with the palm on the right foot. Those on the four lower walls have (on the east side) their right hands with their backs, on the south side these very same hands with the palms upwards on the right knees; those of the west (opposite to the setting sun) hold both their hands in their laps, and those of the north rise their right hands a little above the right thigh, palm forward, and the five fingers closed together in a perpendicular line.
The sculptures of the whole fifth and highest walls dominating all the regions of heaven only distinguish themselves from those on the northern lower walls by means of the bent index of the raised right hand forming a closed circle with the somewhat joined thumb, that is, because of the stone’s brittleness.
The sculptures of the open worked tyaityas on the three round terraces however, raise their two hands before the epigastric region, the left one with the palm and the bent finger-tips in an upward direction, the right one with the palm to the left and the fingers bent over those of the other hand[74]. Moreover, they all miss the glory and have not been placed in open temple-niches above a human and mythical- and animal world represented by many sculptures, but hewn in transparently closed graves, and in higher spheres above this world. There is consequently more difference than between the sculptures of the five encircling walls.
There is still another sculpture unique of its kind.