Buddhist Sculpture from China to Japan 仏像 中国・日本 by Alan Wiren Buddha has many faces. That’s a loaded sentence so indulge me while I unpack it. First of all “Buddha” is not the name of a person or a god. It is the name of a state of being: enlightenment. In Buddhist philosophy any person has the potential to achieve enlightenment thus the faces of everyone who has achieved it are all the faces of Buddha. But there is another sense of this that is more relevant to the exhibition of Buddhist sculpture currently displayed at the Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts. Buddhist Iconography To examine it, let’s go back to a time when Buddha arguably had no face. Prince Shakyamuni introduced Buddhism sometime between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE after he had attained enlightenment. When he died his body was burned and it is written in Buddhist scripture that he said he did not wish there to be any physical representations of himself once his actual body was no longer in this world. For centuries after it seems that it was so. Although there is speculation that images of Shakyamuni, the Historical Buddha, were made of wood during […]
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