Sichuan Buddhist statues are historical, leaving precious legacy of art assets, building a model of advanced grotto art in China in recent years. Scholars have dedicated to Grottoes and gained a considerable achievement. However, in related studies, researchers have always concentrated on a few famous grottoes in Sichuan. Sichuan Grotto statues are lack of systematic protection, so are the grottoes. The General research of Buddhist statues, mainly concentrated on the body of the Buddha and Bodhisattvas, not even focus on the protective deities, and heavenly kings. For the reasons of its emergence, the statues of the ritual ... and so on, systematic researches and in-depth monographs are rarely seen. King statues of Sichuan Grottoes are often put alone in chisel shrine as the main statue enshrined except for being put as a protective deity. It is an extremely rare situation in other parts of the grottoes, also the main features of Sichuan grotto. In order to make a deeper analysis and discussion about Sichuan heavenly kings’ statues, the research analyzes the information, combined with a lot of graphic materials based on historical documents and archaeological reports, trying to let "kings" to be closer to the general public. The research divides the thesis into five chapters as following. The first chapter explains the motivation, related researches and literature, methodology and scope. The second chapter explores the historical position and importance of Sichuan in the Grotto chain, starting from Sichuan Grottoes geographical environment, cultural background, historical development, distribution, and the statues’ characteristics. In the third chapter, the research does the presentation and interpretation of the concept of "Heaven", "King", "Four Kings", and "Prevail King " in details through the combining its functions and the images in the records and the classic books. After all, it will be difficult to see the whole picture if not starting from the scriptures when studying Buddhist statues. In chapter four, it shows the tabular, data, images based on the collected drawings of the grotto kings’ statues in Sichuan. It also sorts out the specific kings’ statues and the process of changes through comparing the text data and images. It traces the origin of kings’ statues in the grottoes and defines the image of kings clearly, and get to know that the distribution of kings’ statues in Sichuan Caves and kings’ unique styles. The conclusion is in chapter five.
