The writing around the Buddha’s head reads, “Everything has a cause.” The Buddha realized at his moment of enlightenment that nothing in the world is disconnected from anything else; samsara, remember, is caused by our own minds.
“You can actually read off the sculpture that it’s the enlightenment experience,” Durham said. “And you can understand what the Buddha actually understood that woke him up.”
If you’re not quite ready to accept that your own mind causes the endless cycle of death, rebirth and suffering, there’s still plenty to be gleaned from this ancient tradition and its artworks.
“The Buddha’s teachings can be read on many levels,” Guy said. “But at a fundamental level, all the storytelling was a way of conveying ethical values. One of them is the peaceful coexistence of all life forms, which is very germane today. We’ve wandered dangerously far from that principle in the era of climate change.”
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Amazing pieces of art. Thank you for sharing!!
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