Concluding remarks

To sum up, the depictions of the eight great events of the Buddha's life worked not only for the transmition of the Buddhist teaching and narratives, which were shown, but also as a map to the Indian Buddhist sacred sites itself and the pilgrimage to it. This map worked not only as the start of a physical pilgrimage to these places, but could also be used as a kind of virtual map for pilgrimage (as seen in the examples of Dunhuang Cave 76). Furthermore we can see a shift in the main focus of the different depictions, from lying more weight on the narrative side to more focus on the Buddhist sacred sites and notion of pilgrimage. These different forms, materials and shifts in focus have to be seen in the context of the different cultural, chronological and geographical environments in which the images were found.