In the research, author concentrates on the arts regarding the Buddha’ s life stories, and studies how they were established and developed in India. Th e paper tries to identify how the scenes from the Buddha’s life stories were cho sen and illustrated, while spreading from Gandhara to China along the Silk Road, and, furthermore, how their mode of expression has changed and developed. Final ly, the paper examines how a transformed and renewed iconography of arts regardi ng the Buddha’s life stories was created in China, how it reached Japan, and how it has developed. The author points out that after the T’ang period, the influe nce of Gandhara or India has been fading, on the while, but the art of Buddha’s life stories has developed in its own way in China.
