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The Far East
is some ninety feet in height and here the form is full and
round, but some of the smaller figures are very delicate
and slender. One of the features of immediate Indian
origin is to be recognized in the gigantic figures of door-
guardians represented as muscular giants protecting the
entrances to the Buddhist caves. While in these figures
the muscles are conspicuously developed and the body
bare, the Buddha and Bodhisattva figures are always
clothed and the details of the anatomy suppressed and
generalized. Similar decorated caves are found at Long-
men near the town of Honan, a later North Wei capital;
these excavations and sculptures belong to the sixth
century. The inscriptions recording the various donations
show that these works were commissioned by the king,
the queen, the nobles, and even by individuals of the lower
classes. A great development of Buddhist sculpture also
took place in Korea. These figures like those already
described are hewn out of the living rock, in an environ-
ment of great natural beauty, far from the haunts of men.
Buddhist art in India, as at Ajanta, and still more in the
Far East, is constantly thus associated with naturally im-
pressive scenes: and were it not for this love of Nature
and for the institution of pilgrimage to sacred and far
away sites, it would be difficult to account for the great
part which is played in Chinese and Japanese art by land-
scape painting somewhat later.
It is from Korea that Buddhist thought and art were
introduced to Japan in the sixth century. The new faith
met with considerable opposition. The hero of the period
of the first introduction of Buddhism to Japan is the
renowned Prince Wumayado, who prepared the seventeen
articles of the Japanese constitution, and wrote some
remarkable commentaries on the Buddhist Sutras, setting
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