Bronze Standing Buddha Statue

¶ … Bronze Buddha in 12th century art, in philosophy and in image: Nagapattinam The image of the bronze, standing Buddha Nagapattinam from the Buddhist tradition of the 12th century belies some of the common popular assumptions about Buddhist iconography a contemporary Westerner might hold, if he or she was unfamiliar with the history of the Buddhist tradition of images in Asiatic art. The most popular image of the Buddha in America is that of the beatific, Enlightened and seated Buddha.

This popularity, however, says as much about American cultural assumptions of Buddhism as it does about the much more wide spanning Asiatic philosophy of Buddhism itself. The Nagapattinam depicts, for instance, not the Enlightened Buddha but a teaching Buddha marked for Enlightenment, although it is of the earlier Theravada tradition of Buddhism, as famously discussed by the monk Dr. Walpola Rahula in his classic treatise to the West on Buddhist philosophy entitled What the Buddha Taught.

Buddhism, although it began during a period of creative religious ferment in Hindu and caste-based India, over the course of its long history, melded with many contemporary native cultures, faiths, and traditions. For instance, Japan's modality of Mahayana Buddhism manifests a syncretism, a blend of Shinto gods and goddesses in some of its strains, as well as the samurai-influenced Zen, and the Indian Buddhist images reflect aspects of the Hindu tradition.

The Theravada tradition is considered more austere and focused on images of the Buddha, rather than of Bodhisattvas in its range of images, but still manifests a plethora of iconographic images, standing and seating, great and small, in its span. (Rahula, 1986) Buddhism's portability as a religion has thus produced a plethora of diverse images of the Buddha, as diverse as the philosophy itself. There is no one Buddha, but many ways of seeing the Buddha, depending on one's ideological point-of-view.

Moreover, Buddhist tales of the Buddha's life span a wide range of concepts, depending on the region and country that Buddhism took root, regarding the Buddhist's life and lives and mission upon the earth. Thus the complexity of Buddhist imagery varies regionally, religiously and philosophically, and according to the particular chronology a country's tradition tells about the life of the Buddha's many incarnations.

The Mahayana tradition stresses the closeness of the Buddha to ordinary people while the Theravada Indian and Tibetan strains stress the importance of monastic life and thus tend to show a teaching, rather than a laughing Buddha, for instance. According to the scholar Jin Weinu, all "Buddhist images" however, regardless of origin, usually "display the thirty-two lakshanas and eighty notable physical characteristics of the Buddha," as does the 12th century Bronze Nagapattinam statue noted specifically above, at the beginning of this essay.

These thirty-two characteristic physical markers indicate that the figure, over the course of its life, sought to "seek dignity, a singular superb ness, in order to embody all excellences and good fortune and virtue," over the course of the Buddha's specific life phase, or this specific Buddhist incarnation over the course of his many lives, even though the image might be of a pre-Enlightened part of the Buddha's biography.

(Weinu, 1999) Overall, the Buddhist idea of aesthetics, "during its two thousand years of development, was enriched continuously by the artists of each period...The attempt to paint and sculpt the many types of human characteristics among the Buddhist images on the one hand reflected the perceptive observation of society by the artists, an intimate knowledge of customs and practices, and this circuitously reflected ability of realism which enriched Buddhist art caused the it to permeate society even more." (Weinu, 1999) This bronze statue, Nagapattinam, it should be noted, as a piece is dated relatively later than similar structures of standing, bronze Buddhas, most of which date from the 10th century.

Like many of the earlier bronzes, however, the Buddha wears a long sanghati with wave-like horizontal lines hangs from neck to feet covering its entire body. The ends of the sanghati give the Buddha an ethereal or bird-like quality, stressing the Buddha's connection to the celestial, rather than the terrestrial realms of spirituality, and highlighting the stress during the period upon the striving for a separation between ordinary and religious life, emphasizing the monk-like Theravada strain of Buddhism. (Rahula, 1949) The statue's ear lobes are elongated.

This is another one of the traditional signs of marking true Buddha-hood in a physical fashion. Its right hand shows an abhaya, the mudra of protection and its palm is marked by a cakra placed within a geometrical figure formed by four bands, each hand consisting of two parallel lines. The design of this palm-mark is referred to as one of the uttama or mahapurusa-laksana, another mark of the Buddha's status as a Great One.

The Buddha's left hand shows varada or the mudra of conferring a boon or the bounty of Enlightenment upon the seeker who stares at the statue, and its palm presents the same cakra design as noticed on the right. "The mouth is firm suggesting determination and the lower lip is prominent. The eyes open though not fully." (Buddhist Art, 2004) This image of the Nagapattinam is also.