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May 11, 2020 · His image is so commonplace that you could believe it must always have existed — yet for six centuries after his death, he was never once depicted in human form. A headless seated Buddha, from...
- A Splendor of Caves
Shashi Tharoor article on great rock-hewn cave temples of...
- A Splendor of Caves
- Images of Śākyamuni
- Bodhisattvas
- Transcendent Buddhas
- Wrathful Figures
- Wisdom Goddesses
- Saints, Arhats, and Monks
- Images and Ritual
- See Also
- Bibliography
The earliest surviving Buddhist sculpture dates to roughly the third century bce, and the images that were produced contextually functioned as decorations and visual "texts" in monasteries. Significantly, however, the Buddha himself is absent from these very early images. Instead of his physical form, early Buddhist artisans employed a range of vis...
As the various Mahāyāna schools emerged and developed in India, Tibet, and later in East Asia, the Buddhist pantheon expanded tremendously and was reflected in both art and iconography. In India, particularly in the northeast, there was a virtual iconographic explosion after the eighth century. Although images of various bodhisattvas had been produ...
The various Mahāyāna schools articulated complex understandings of the continued presence and power of the Buddha in the world, understood broadly as buddhatā, or "buddhaness." One particularly common manifestation of buddhatā was the five celestial Buddhas, sometimes called Jina or Dhyāni Buddhas. More properly deemed the pancatathāgāta s, this se...
With the rise of the Vajrayāna in northeastern India around the ninth century, and its later development in Tibet, the divine pantheon expanded to a seemingly limitless degree, with a vast range of Buddha families, bodhisattvas, goddesses, yoginīs, and all manner of fierce divinities. There are numerous categories of wrathful beings in the Vajrayān...
A range of divine and semidivine female figures also is depicted in Buddhist iconography, many of which are elaborately described in medieval texts such as the Sādhanamālā and Niṣpannayogāvalī. The female divinity Tārā emerges in the Mahāyāna as a divine savior who protects and nurtures her devotees. Her name literally means "star," and she was per...
As Buddhism spread beyond India, an elaborate iconographic lexicon related to arhats, monks, and saints emerged. In China, the veneration and representation of important patriarchs became prominent; arhats were frequently represented, occasionally individually but more commonly in groups. In the Chan schools in particular, where monastic lineage wa...
The Sādhanamālā and Ni ṣpannayo-gāvalī are two medieval Indian iconographic manuals, written in Sanskrit and still used in the early twenty-first century. These texts—and the countless other lesser-known manuals that deal with three-dimensional icons, paintings, and maṇḍalas —describe in sometimes minute detail the proper way to construct an image....
Bodhidharma; Buddha; Buddhism, overview article; Buddhist Meditation, articles on East Asian Buddhist Meditation, Theravāda Buddhist Meditation, and Tibetan Buddhist Meditation; Buddhist Philosophy; Lotus; Mudrā; Stupa Worship; Temple, articles on Buddhist Temple Compounds.
For a broad-ranging orientation to Buddhist iconography, see Fredrick W. Bunce's Encyclopedia of Buddhist Demigods, Godlings, Saints and Demons, two volumes (New Delhi, 1994). The Image of the Buddha (Paris, 1978), edited by David L. Snellgrove, focuses on the development and function of Buddha images across the tradition. A good initiation into th...
Jan 28, 2019 · Read about the origin of the short, fat, bald, laughing Buddha; an image that most Westerners mistakenly think is the true Buddha.
Aug 1, 2022 · To many Buddhists, the Buddha is a man who achieved spiritual enlightenment — a state of mind in which all traces of personal suffering have been extinguished and reality is viewed with an...
Buddhism evolved the concept of a Buddha of the Future, Maitreya, depicted in art both as a Buddha clad in a monastic robe and as a princely bodhisattva before enlightenment. Gandharan artists made use of both stone and stucco to produce such images, which were placed in nichelike shrines around the stupa of a monastery.
These images constitute the core of the category of “Buddhist art” as it is commonly understood, but there is a significant difference between how such objects are viewed by Buddhist practitioners and how they are viewed by art historians and scholars of religion.
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Bh?rhut, two of the most abundant sources of early Buddhist art, there are no images of the Buddha. Moreover, the statement in the vinaya that bodhisattva images are allowed, but not Buddha images, damages the Huntingtons' position. To maintain his hypothesis, Huntington discounts the vinaya passage.
