This study shows that Chinese Buddhist literature has constructed many discourses on the link between the lion and the Buddha for ornamenting and symbolizing the Buddha's nobility, dignity, wisdom, courage and power. In Buddhist narrative, the lion, as the title of the Buddha's grandfather, indicated the nobility of the Buddha, indicating his birth in a royal family. Later the lifetime practice of the Buddha was also linked with the lion. The fast running of the lion symbolized the highest degree of Buddha's meditation. The roar of the lion as a rhetoric depicts the Buddha's power against other heretics in early period. After the Buddha achieved his enlightenment and began to preach his teaching, the lion was again used in Buddhist literature as a symbol of the Buddha's dharma power, wisdom, and majesty. Historically speaking, the lion as an ornament of the power and wisdom in South Asia reflected the order of local natural world and how this order was recognized and borrowed for symbolizing the political and religious order in the human realm.
