Monumental Rock-cut Images from Sri Lanka: New Perspectives

The creation of monumental icons of the Buddha constitutes an important chapter in the history of Buddhist image worship. By the eight century, colossal sculptures hewn from the living rock marked the Buddhist world from Central Asia to China, Western India, and Sri Lanka, yet the phenomenon of Buddhist monumentality has been largely overlooked. In Sri Lanka, the placement and function of colossal rock-cut sculptures in the landscape suggest that these types of images were closely linked to long-distance travel and trade and formed a local network of monumentality interwoven with myth and with the formation of a Buddhist collective memory. Colossal sculptures proliferated at a time of great mobility across the Buddhist world, and they may have also functioned as visual markers within a transnational Buddhist network that spanned South Asia.