In the early history of Buddhism, lohans (a term derived from the transliteration of "arhat" in Sanskrit to "a-lo-han" in Chinese) were isolated practitioners. Later, influenced by the popular teachings of Mahāyāna (Greater Vehicle) Buddhism, lohans were endowed with the attributes of protecting and maintaining the true law of the Buddhist faith, assuming the characteristics of bodhisattvas in assisting and benefiting all sentient beings on the path to enlightenment. With no records of illustrations to define the features of lohans, Chinese painters, who already had possessed a long artistic tradition, gave reign to their imagination to come up with examples of their own. Through brush and ink, they sometimes developed lohans into the cultivated figures of high Chinese monks. At other times, lohans were rendered as Indian figures with exaggerated foreign features. From the Yüan dynasty, Tibetan-style lohan images (which accompanied the introduction of Tibetan esoteric Buddhism) also appeared in China, being quite different from the figural art traditions of China proper. In fact, each lohan painting with its individual and unique qualities illustrates the varied and colorful world of Chinese Buddhist painting