Constructed according to the laws of sacred proportion, each Buddha image should be consecrated and empowered by specific rituals before it is 'alive' enough to be worshipped . The same image serves different purposes. At the most popular level it is considered the repository of supernatural power, recipient of prayers. And a magical being that can intercede in daily life. In the resolutely animistic countries of Southeast Asia, images often have distinct personalities and preferences, and are sometimes even jealous of each other. At another level, the image is a springboard for meditation, a means of filling the mind with a form, which represents perfection. True appreciation of form leads to the formless, just as true perception of sound leads to silence.
As the spiritual center of consciousness, the head received particular attention from Buddhist artists. In example, the dreamy head of stucco Buddha from Gandhara, the origin of the earliest school of representation, shows the influence of Greece in its similarity to the adolescent Apollonian sungod of late Hellenistic art. Two of the thirty-two bodily signs (lakshana) of a Buddha are discernible: the third eye (urna) in the center of the forehead, signifying spiritual insight, and the protuberance at the crown (ushnisha), which represents Enlightenment, when the 'thousand-petalled lotus' at the apex of the subtle body is fully opened. More typically oriental in their willowy stylization are heads of the bodhisattva Miroku (the Japanese Maitreya), the Buddha of the future age, shown pondering the means to achieve the salvation of humanity. They can show a third lakshana, the elongated ear lobes which, although originally perhaps caused by Gautama's princely earrings, came to be a symbol of wisdom.
In Buddhist iconography, all hand gestures (mudras) have a meaning, just as they do in Hindu images. Mudra movements mirror the movements of the mind, and are one of the main symbolic means of conveying the principles of the dharma. One of the most common is the mudra of teaching, in which the fine discriminative insight of the Buddhist way is portrayed by the joining of the thumb and index finger, a circularity also recalling the Wheel of the Law and the eternal continuation of the dharma. Less usual is the healing mudra from a bronze image of Yakushi, the Japanese Buddha known as the Master of Medicine, who cures the root disease of ignorance. In his palm is the lakshana of the 'lotus whorl' in the form of the eight-spoked Wheel of the Law. Mudras may well have originated in the ancient gestures of Indian dance, such as this representation of the lotus, symbol of purity and Enlightenment. back to top
Feet represent the grounding of the transcendent, and have long been the focus of respect in India. The 'lotus feet' of gods and gurus are worshipped there even today, elders and parents merit having their feet touched in respect by their children, and bare feet are always expected in temples, shrines and houses, in the early days of Buddhism, natural declivitous were sometimes seen as evidence of the Buddha's footprint (buddhapada), and especially in Theravada countries the cult flourished as a natural extension of animistic stone worship. Examples can show a catholic combination of Hindu and Buddhist symbols: the solar disc, related to he deity Vishnu (of whom orthodox Hindus see Shakyamuni as the ninth incarnation), the trident of Shiva, representing the unity of past, present and future, and the eight fold lotus, alluding to Enlightenment and the path there. The soles of reclining Buddha are covered with the 108 auspicious signs of the faith. back to top
A boy who spends his early years in the monastery gains not only a good education, but also has the opportunity to make contacts which, should he later choose to leave the Robe, would stand him in good stead. It is still the custom in Theravada countries, particularly in Thailand, for young men to enter the monastery at least once in their lives for a limited period, often during the annual three-month rainy season retreat. So established is this custom that employers will grant time off for it.
Life in the sangha is traditionally very regimented. Monks should eat their one daily meal by noon, and offerings of food or drink given to images should likewise be made only in the morning. In addition, a monk should observe 227 vows - including prohibitions on handling money and watching entertainment - which are recited in their entirety by the community each full moon. Traditionally only a, limited number of possessions is allowed: a robe, an alms bowl, needle and cotton, and water filter. Although such rules still apply in Theravada sects, nowadays they tend to be less strictly observed in Buddhism as a whole. Monastic life is devoted to meditation, study, debate and eventually teaching.
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A stupa is a solid reliquary mound derived from the ancient tumuli of India,
which had been royal tombs since earliest times. Miniature stupas were used
as reliquaries or votive offerings. The pagodas of the Far East are versions
of the stupa, the name being a derivation from the Sri Lankan term dagoba ('relic
store').
The first cult object in Buddhism was the bodhi tree, or cuttings from it, which
were taken wherever a major seat of the new faith was established. This custom
will have dovetailed well with existing animistic tree-worshipping cults, and
allowed the new faith to take root. The tree was then stylized and used as the
crowning member or finial of the stupa.
Symbolically the dome of the stupa (the anda) refers to the Cosmic Egg from
which the universe sprang, and the stupa thus belongs to that type of sacred
building which represents the origin and center of the world, whereas the finial
(or yasti) is a version of the axis mundi which unites heaven and earth. The
relics are commonly called bija, menacing 'seed', a term, which implies the
life-giving force, and transforms the funeral mound from a monument to the dead
to an inspiration for the living.
There are four categories of stupa: those containing ashes or belongings of
the Buddha; those containing ashes or belongings of an important teacher; those
commemorations an event; and those donated as an act of merit by a layperson.
The stupa is found everywhere Buddhism spread, and is the religion's major contribution
to world architecture. The variety of form is enormous and each country has
a different name for similar structures; all seeing chortens in the Himalayas;
monolithic pagodas in Burma; and gracefully attenuated chedis in Thailand.
All phenomena are interrelated; thus in the macrocosm the levels of the stupa
symbolize the five elements (base =earth, dome =water, spire =fire, parasol
capital =air, finial =ether of Buddha nature), and in the microcosm of the human
nervous system, the five principal chakras and the five senses smell, taste,
sight, touch, and hearing respectively. A modern stupa, marking the establishment
of a dharma center in England, combines traditional elements of design.
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No other single school has developed such spectacular and arcane rituals as
the esoteric Mahayana school known as the Vajrayana ('The Way of the Adamantine
Thunderbolt') practiced in Tibet, and thence t he other Himalayan countries.
Buddhism was introduced into Tibet by the great Indian yogi Padmasambhava in
the eighth century, and Vajrayana is a complex mixture of Indian transcendental
philosophy and esoteric ritual derived both from Tantric sources of north east
India and Tibet's indigenous shamanistic religion of Bon-Po. Linked to and ancient
Central Asian tradition, Bon-Po provided much of the vocabulary that expressed
the Mahayana vision, including masked spirit dances, rituals using human bones
and skull-caps, communal exorcism, liturgical music, and offerings sculpted
out of yak butter, one of the country's most treasured commodities.
Under Buddhist influence, the raw cosmic powers were allied to the bodhisattvas
and a pantheon of peaceful and wrathful deities, and were invoked for the benefit
and protection of all beings. Ceremonies of universal purification, especially
at New Year, are an important ritual. The daily eight-hour trances and pronouncements
of the State Oracle, spokesman for the awesomely powerful spirit-protector Pehar
Gyalpo and his principal emissary to Tibet, Dorje Drakden, governed much Tibetan
life. The institution is still active in Dharamsala, north India, the headquarters
of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan peoples in exile.
The liturgical music of the Vajrayana centers on resonant bass chanting, and
is used to summon, appease or banish elemental energies, or to induce the spirit
to leave the body and travel in the astral realm. The complex deities with many
limbs and heads, often studded with coral and turquoise, are cast in bronze,
a skill the Vajrayana developed to great effect, while deities and mandalas
painted on cotton and mounted on silk (thankas) constitute some of the finest
Buddhist art. It is sometimes said that Tibetan and thence Vajrayana art is,
for all its strangeness, essentially provincial Chinese work, but in fact nothing
could be further from the truth. As with all aspects of its extraordinary world-view,
Vajrayana developed a profoundly idiosyncratic artistic style whose transcendental
inspiration owed little to the imperialistic influence of its more powerful
neighbor.
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Protectors and spirits.
The jungle countries of southern and eastern Asia have always been rich mines
of animistic lore, and Buddhism adopted many local protective spirits as it
spread. In conformity with the dharma's tolerance - a result of its non-dual
perspective on life - the Buddhist worldview has always sought to include pre-existing
beliefs and practices rather than to banish or alienate them. Thus spirits associated
with trees and fertility were incorporated into myths of Gautama's birth; serpents
and dragons, always a beneficent supernatural presence in the East, protect
Buddhist teachings and temples, and celestial musicians and dancers grace the
walls of complexes such as Angkor Wat. In this way, Buddhism flourished as a
natural outgrowth, albeit more refined and significant, of the existing cultural
mulch and as a result could be easily assimilated by cultures converted to the
dharma. The sacred inner sanctum must always be protected from the profane outer
world of impurity and death - the threshold and entrance are always the most
vulnerable points. Protectors may appear as deities awaiting sacrifice or warriors
thirsting for battle.
In these and many other cases, the lines between what is Hindu and what is Buddhist
iconography are often blurred, myths and images being shared as part of the
vast pan-Indian reservoir of imaginative life. Indeed, temple sites may be sequentially,
or even simultaneously, worshipped by Hindu and Buddhist, with no sense of friction.
Garuda, a mythical man-bird, attendant of the Hindu deity Vishnu, appears on
many temple lintels as a protector in the Himalayas.
Many protectors are represented as peaceful beings, suffused with a soft and
happy beauty to show the sensuous bliss that awaits those who penetrate to the
heat of life. Many are female, expressing the mysterious and irrepressibly fecund
power of nature. Male protectors, in conformity with ancient Indian ideals of
beauty and wholeness, exhibit an androgynous grace, and it is often impossible
to tell from the face alone the gender of the being.
This type of representation perfectly suited the artist's intentions to portray
an energy that is beyond the normal divisions of our dualistic vision and managed
to combine the sensual and the spiritual in works that are, at their best, breathtakingly
lovely.
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In Buddhism, the entire universe of relative existence is known as the realm
of namarupa - 'name and form' - and it is through the correct understanding
of sound and substance that its secrets are unlocked. The supreme man-made form
is the Buddha image. Beautiful though they usually are, to the believer considerations
of aesthetics are secondary, and the charm of an image (rupa) does not derive
only from the sensory level. The image is somehow mysteriously charged with
the power of the dharma, and in this capacity provides both a focus for the
cultivation of refined emotions - such as loving-kindness, reverence and devotion
- and also a springboard from which the mind can ascend in contemplation. Buddha
rupas are traditionally made by hereditary families of artists and craftsmen,
who are considered to be time-tested channels through which the sacred forms
can be made manifest. In the creation of a rupa, the craftsman should mindfully
follow a routine of purification and invocation before visualizing the divine
form to be represented. Form is structured by sound; the most perfect man-made
sound is the chanted scripture, through which the mind and senses are purified
and the world of name and form can be understood in its fullness
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Thus the arts of the manuscript - calligraphy, block printing and illumination
- have always been of great importance in Buddhism. Monastic libraries are traditionally
the repositories of all aspects of knowledge - religious, medical, administrative
- as were their counterparts in medieval Christendom.
In the fine arts, Buddhist calligraphic skills linked the philosophy of the
dhama to the refined sensibility of the Chinese landscape tradition. Ch'an,
the Chinese meditative school that became Zen in Japan, was founded by Budhidharma,
a monk from India, always portrayed as a somewhat lugubrious character with
bushy eyebrows. Some of the Far-Eastern representations of nature (often featuring
bamboo, the epitome of strength though flexibility) are justly celebrated. The
best capture the unity of form and emptiness expressed in the Zen aphorism that
'the trees show the bodily form of the wind', and manage directly to suggest
the creativity of the Void, the inexhaustible freshness of the Buddha-field.
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Conches, drums,
Life at both gross and subtle levels is movement: movement involves sound. And
just as all form is sculpted in stillness, so all sound is grounded in silence.
Tibetan prayer wheels containing texts printed on rice paper of cotton send
silent supplication to the gods who themselves are manifest as vibration energies
in the realms of subtle sound, and who can be invoked by the correct intonation
of their harmonic bodies as chants and mantras. Shakyamuni observed that between
any two moments in time, an infinite number of 'mind-moments' occur, and these
in turn arise out of the immaculate void that is our real nature. This subjective
awareness of the undisturbed ground of activity is fundamental to the oriental
disposition, and has influenced all aspects of its culture. Eastern classical
music incorporates quarter tones and deliberate tonal spacing to allow for minute
subdivision and thence silence, and its concept of harmony comprises not only
the component parts of the music itself, but also the fact that tonal rhythms
should be in concord with the other planetary rhythms of time and space. Thus
in ancient India particular types of music were deemed to be suited to particular
times of day, seasons and places, and all music had a liturgical purpose. In
this way the healing power of sound, known to all cultures, was incorporated
consciously and therapeutically into the structure of what we call music. Buddhist
ritual instruments such as the conch and the drum should be played in such a
way as to enliven rhythms in the physiology of the listener and to make full
use of the stillness between each note. Similar considerations lie behind the
phrasing of the Gregorian Chant of the West.
Mental silence, the culmination of all internalized sound, is the outcome of
meditation, a procedure by which images, thoughts and sounds are traced to their
root in the matrix of inner quietude. The silent mind is achieved through long
retreats when the world of the senses is left far behind. Nor is the lucid equanimity
that results from retreat limited to the conductive surroundings of forest or
cave. As Gautama's own cycle of retreat, solitariness and eventual compassionate
return indicates, for the wise the tranquil state persists under all conditions
of life.
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