¶ … 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...

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…