1. The 432 Buddhas of the open temple-niches on the five richly hewed encircling walls, all of them seated on lotus-thrones and crowned with glories.
2. The 72 Buddhas of the open worked tyaityas on the three round terraces, without any glory or lotus-throne but represented by the padmâsana of the tyaitya-foot. But even the human and animal world hewn under the niche-Buddhas we don’t see there again.
3. The only Buddha of the large dagob entirely sequestered, without glory or throne, but seated above the padmâsana which carries the whole dagob.
The posture of the hands however, ought to refer to six groups, because there are six different mudrâs.
Wilhelm von Humboldt was the first who considered five of the six Buddhas to be the representations of the five Dhyâni-Buddhas.
Three of them: Vairotyana, Akshobhya and Ratna Sambhava successively redeemed and ruled over three following former worlds; the fourth, Amitâbha—our Gautama or Shakya-muni—ruled over our world these 24 centuries, and is said to be succeeded, after the creation of a new world, by the fifth and last, Amogasiddha, the Buddha of love.
Especially in the posture of the hands there is some conformity between five of the six Båråbudur-images and the five Dhyâni-Buddhas such as we see them hewed in Asia. But there are also some points of difference.
In the Mongol countries, for instance, the two first Dhyâni-Buddhas are throning in the East; the third in the South, the fourth in the West and the fifth in the North[76].
Taking, according to the posture of the hands, the images of our ruins to be Dhyâni-Buddhas the East would then be only occupied by the second and the zenith by the first of them, that is, above the round terraces which don’t dominate any region of heaven. But this happens more elsewhere in Asia.
But which will be the sixth Buddha represented there by all the sculptures of the fifth and highest encircling wall, and dominating all the zones of heaven, but which can’t be a Dhyâni-Buddha?