Word: buddha
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Many young Vietnamese army officers, claim Buddhist leaders, have become converts to Catholicism to win official favor. "But if the Viet Cong ever come through the barbed wire," said one U.S. officer of his recently converted Vietnamese counterpart, "I have a feeling he'll do his praying to Buddha...
There have been thousands and thousands of Buddha statues since, but their work has not been to serve religion alone. For much of the Orient, the Buddha has been the dominating theme for artists, and to a large extent, the evolution of the Buddha image reveals the development of Eastern art itself...
Legend to the contrary, says Rowland, no statue of Buddha was made for centuries after his death because it was believed that he had passed into a realm of invisibility and could be represented only by such symbols as an empty throne for his Enlightenment or a great wheel for his first preaching. But eventually, the faithful came to hunger for something closer to the Buddha, and the great procession of images began...
This delay, ironically, caused the first Buddhas to be made on Roman models. The earliest known figures date from the 1st century and come from the ancient Indian region of Gandhara. The Gandhara artists were imported from the thriving cities of the Near East, and when faced with the problem of inventing a Buddha image, they fell back on the Greek and Roman image of Apollo dressed in a kind of Roman toga. They probably borrowed the halo from the traditional Iranian sun disk that symbolized the heavenly light of Ahura Mazdah. For Buddha's ushnisha-the bump...
...Oval of an Egg. In time, India's artists developed their own canons for the image. Since Buddha was more than human, they did not follow human anatomy but devised a complex series of mathematical formulas for each part of Buddha's body. In the case of life-size Buddhas, for example, they authorized so many finger-widths from hairline to eyebrows, so many more from brows to nose, so many from nose to chin. In some areas, Buddha's features were made to resemble some perfect form in nature. His head had to be a perfect...