Buddhist Art
Subscribe to this topic via: RSS
Caution! Under Construction
Please be aware that this tag is still under construction and as such is missing information and may be changed or removed at any time. For all the content under consideration for this tag, see the “Buddhist Art” folder on Google Drive.
Table of Contents
- Books (10)
- Canonical Works (2)
- Readings (46)
- Audio/Video (26)
- Reference Shelf (3)
- Related Topics (2)
Books (10)
Canonical Works (2)
Readings (46)
Featured:
-
⭐ Recommended
Because of the war, the mission of the Shōjuin bell swung drastically…
-
Ritual theories almost always assume that ritual is a kind of human action, which makes it impossible to explain ritual spaces or objects that were designed to enact the ritual without human participation. The relic depository of Chaoyang North Pagoda was a completely sealed stone box that was clearly designed as a ritual space for chanting the Uṣṇīṣavijayā dhāraṇī. This ritual space—occluded from human access—contradicts contemporary understandings of ritual. By illuminating the relic depository from the emic perspective of medieval Buddhists and applying anthropological theories, this paper offers theoretical explanations for conditions in which religious rituals were primarily enacted through non-human agency.
31 pages -
Beginning in the northwestern region of India, and spreading through Central Asia and the rest of Asia along the Silk Road, the making of colossal Buddha statues has been a major theme in Buddhist art. The colossal Buddha statues predominantly feature Śākyamuni (the Historical Buddha), Maitreya (the Future Buddha), and Vairocana (the Transcendant Buddha), and they were fashioned out of religious devotion and frequently in conjunction with notions of Buddhist kingship. This paper examines the religious, social and political circumstances under which these colossal statues were made, focusing on examples from Central and East Asia made during the first millennium CE. Beginning in the 1990s, there was a revival of making colossal Buddha statues across China and elsewhere. The paper also briefly compares the current wave of building colossal Buddha statues with historical examples.
-
Miracle tales from medieval China recorded the ability of Buddhist statues to walk, speak, emit light, and even feel pain. Consecration ceremonies, however, emphasized the sense of vision and the agency of the ritual practitioner over the agency of the statue. This essay argues that by underscoring the corporeal agency of animated sculptures, which was manifested both in their extraordinary qualities and in their vulnerability to damage, the circulation of miracle tales enabled a participatory practice in which devotees, monks and laypeople alike, were able to engage in the performative act of writing statues into life.
-
⭐ Recommended
… the history, myth and cult of a Burmese Buddha image standing in the middle of the [Shan] city of Chiang Tung and the ways in which religious visual culture expresses ethnic-religious identity.
-
To present slowness and simplicity as prophetic counterpoints against the dizzying excesses of the contemporary metropolis; and to offer contemplative attentiveness as a therapeutic resource for life in the modern world.
-
Our observations demonstrate that ancient Indian artists of the Gandhara region had a basic knowledge of human anatomy, especially surface anatomy and musculoskeletal features. They also possessed knowledge of the approximate size and position of the bones, joints and muscles, including their approximate origin and insertion points. However, certain errors of anatomical knowledge including an extra number of ribs and a segmented sternum were noticed.
See also:
Audio/Video (26)
Reference Shelf (3)
Featured:
-
A large collection of 3D models of Buddhist statues.
See also:
