from an article by _MADANJEET SING

The Buddhist faith is the inspiration and reason for HIMALAYAN ART_but the form of Buddhism that was carried to the mountains around the eighth century A.D. by the Indian guru Padmasambhava bears scant resemblance to the simple teachings that had been set forth about twelve hundred years before by the historic Budha, Siddhartha Gautama. What the Himalayan people recived was Buddhism in the vastly elaborated form it had taken during its long settlement in India. By the early years of the Christian Era the historic Buddha was diefied and elavated into an eternal. absoulute, primordial principle. At the same time Indian Buddhism not only permitted the use of idols but took over a vast array of dieities from the Hindu religion. The branch of Buddhism that became most popular in the Himalaya was Vajrayana. Vajrayana worship relied on magical formulas and magical ceremonies_and on the introduction of goddesses (Taras) and Buddhas-to-be) (Bodhisattvas) to the ever-expanding Buddhist pantheon. Popularly known as Lamaism, this branch of the religion taught the devotee could summon up a number of imagined dieties by means of certain magical formulas.

Presumably a novice monk could better fix his imagination if the source of power was pictured in paintings and sculptures, and therefore the dieties were described iconographically in the treatises of the fourth and fith centuries ( the Gupta period), and later in even greater detail in the mystical Indian texts known as Tantras. These demigods in the Vajrayana pantheon essentially revolve around the five Dhyani Buddhas, identified with the four points of the compass and the cosmicapex, presided over by the supreme god, the Adi-Buddha. Inthis way, through the doctrine of an increasingly complex metaphysical thought, the Buddhist pantheon, which had begun with no god at all, was joined by hundreds of "emanations."