When the Arhat Became a Guardian Figure in East Asian Art

East Asian Buddhism developed a devotional and artistic tradition around the arhat that has no real counterpart in Theravada practice: a specific group, most commonly counted as sixteen or eighteen named arhats, luohan in Chinese and rakan in Japanese, came to be venerated as guardians of the Buddhist teaching charged with remaining in the world until the future Buddha Maitreya arrives, rather than passing immediately beyond rebirth in the way the early Buddhist doctrine of the arhat's attainment would suggest, a theological adaptation that let the arhat ideal serve an ongoing protective and devotional function within Mahayana practice even after Mahayana texts had elsewhere criticised the arhat goal as lesser than the bodhisattva's.

These named arhats became a major subject of East Asian religious art, appearing as individualised figures with distinct personalities, postures and attributes in temple sculpture and painting across China, Korea and Japan for well over a thousand years, an artistic tradition that gave the arhat, largely an abstract description of a spiritual attainment in the earliest Buddhist texts, a vivid and enduring visual identity in cultures whose dominant Buddhist schools had, at the level of formal doctrine, already relegated the arhat's goal beneath that of the bodhisattva.