The religious principles underlying that empire’s greatness and providing a basis for a firm sense of duty to guide a temperament of fire, are nobly embodied in the three gigantic statues placed in the inner chamber of the Mendoot or, to be quite exact, round which that _chandi_ was reared, for the entrance is too small to let them through, especially the largest of them which, miraculously undamaged save one missing finger-tip, has slid down from its pedestal and consequently occupies a lower station between the subordinate figures than originally intended. All three are seated and the first in rank, of one piece with his unembellished throne, measures fourteen feet; the two to his right and left, of less grave aspect, wearing richly wrought necklaces, armlets, wristbands, anklets and tiaras, measure eight feet each. If the _oorna_[131] more excellent than a crown, identifies the master among them, the position of whose fingers reminds of Vajrochana, the first Dhyani Buddha, the others have been taken respectively for a Bodhisatva and for a devotee who attained by his meritorious life a high degree of saintliness but whose Brahmanic adornment flatly contradicts the Buddhist character of such perfection. This explanation is therefore considered unsatisfactory and unacceptable by many, as, for instance, his Majesty Somdetch Phra Paramindr Chulalongkorn, the late King of Siam, who, by the way, when visiting the _chandis_ Mendoot and Boro Budoor in 1896, claimed those masterpieces of _mahayanistic_ art for his own, the southern church, to use the incorrect but convenient distinction. According to this royal interpreter, the idea was to represent the Buddha in the act of blessing the Buddhist prince who ordered the Boro Budoor to be built, here placed at his right with an image of the deliverer in his _makuta_ and carrying no _upawita_ but a monk’s robe under the insignia of his dignity; the third statue, directly opposite, at the Buddha’s left, without Buddhist accessories but with an _upawita_ hanging down from its left shoulder, might impersonate him again in his state before conversion, or his unconverted father on whom, after death, he wished to bestow a share in the deliverer’s benediction. However this may be, there is no doubt of the Enlightened One’s identity in one of his many personifications and, leaving the eighty secondary marks unexplored (three for the nails, three for the fingers, three for the palms of the hands, three for the forty evenly set teeth, one for the nose, six for the piercing eyes, five for the eyebrows, three for the cheeks, nine for the hair, ten for the lower members in general,--without our entering into further detail!), the thirty-two primary signs are all present: the protuberance on the top of the skull; the crisped hair (of a glossy black which the sculptor could not reproduce) curling towards the right;[132] the ample forehead; the _oorna_, which sheds a white light (also unsculpturable)