Abstract
In the well-known doctrine of the Three Bodies of the Buddha, the physical and earthly manifestation is called a nirmāṇa-kāya, “a body of artifice” or even more literally “a body of measurement”; a body made, then, as images and other works of art are made, by a “measuring out” (root mā). In the Divyâvadāna, ch. xxxvii, the word nimittam is similarly used of the Buddha's appearance which he himself emanates and projects for Rudrâyaṇa's painters, who cannot grasp his likeness unaided. It may be remarked that Indian imagery is always as much or more an iconometry (tālamāna) than an iconography; and that all this has an important bearing on the pragmatic equivalence, in Buddhist iconodule theory, of the verbal, carnal, and fictile manifestations by means of which the Buddha is presented to the world in a likeness. Our present object, however, is rather to point out what has not been generally recognized hitherto, that prototypes of the expressions nirmāṇa-kāya and nimittam occur already in the Brāhmaṇas and Saṁhitās.
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Schedule a callMore From: Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland
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