Rethinking my over use of Buddhist statues

[Nevs4511]

Bhante Sujato’s post here (along with the rest of the thread) might be of use.

Images of the Buddha

I don’t think there’s any definitive answer to this, as it doesn’t seem to come up in any of the early texts. The earliest images date from a few hundred years later, and there the Buddha is depicted with a symbol—the wheel, the Bodhi tree, etc. So it seems reasonable to infer that there was some religiously based reluctance to represent the Buddha’s actual image, perhaps out of reverence, the idea that it is not possible to properly capture his image. Obviously that didn’t last, and not long …