In the future Buddha will be a towering giant… After the Chinese, Buddhas must be the most numerous folk on the globe. With 360 million Buddhists worldwide, each having at least two or three statues of their founder, this amounts to about a billion copies of the same body. Given such abundance it’s no surprise that Siddhartha Gautama appears in so many different forms. Emaciated or with folds of fat on the legs, tiny or the size of a three-storey building, he appears in all kinds of styles, from the finely crafted to the shockingly kitschy. Thailand is responsible for much of the proliferation of the world’s Buddha population. The…