The Indian Buddhist Iconography, Mainly Based on the Sadhanamala and Other Cognate Tantric Texts of Rituals c9.10

c9.10

What service this Niṣpannayogāvalī can render to Buddhism may be illustrated by a reference to the several hundreds of images of Buddhist deities discovered in the Forbidden City of Peiping in Manchuria. In July 1926 Stael Holstein the Russian archæologist received permission to visit a number of Lama temples situated in Peiping which seem to have been neglected for a long time. In the upper storey of one of these temples he found a collection of bronze statuettes constituting a Lamaist Pantheon which had consisted originally of 787 figures. These figures along with a series of photographs from three manuscripts written in Chinese were studied by the famous American Professor Walter Eugene Clark, Wales Professor of Sanskrit in the Harvard University, and he published this rich material in two sumptuous volumes, entitled, the Two Lamaistic Pantheons in the Harvard Yenching Institute Monograph Series in the year 1937. The first volume contains an introduction, bibliography and indexes of deities in Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chinese. The second volume contains illustrations of innumerable deities.