Sean Bala quoted Golden Road by William Dalrymple
For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilization, …
The first Buddhist art is strikingly different from the pure and philosophically abstracted Buddhism admired around the world today, with its familiar image of the Buddha lost in meditation. Instead, early Buddhist art is aniconic, yet every bit as vibrant, crowded and cacophonous as so much later Buddhist art is still, silent and quietly meditative.
One reason for this is that the art of the first Buddhist monasteries is shot through with the cosmology of ancient animist cults that existed before the arrival of the new teachings. The first Buddhist monks believed that they lived in a spiritually charged landscape, alive with powerful local godlings and spirits - called yakshas when male and yakshis when female - who took up residence in the trees and stones and streams around monasteries.These spirits personified the forces of nature and revealed themselves at will.…
In all this early art, you feel strongly the Buddhist intuition that the natural and animal worlds are closely related to humankind through great cycles of reincarnation: a neglected Elephant Queen in the earliest murals of the Ajanta Caves may be reborn as the Queen of Varanasi, yet she remains the same essence. Animals are therefore depicted with the same love and respect as humans. After all, in a world where trees could be spirits and the waters are alive with sentient beings, ethical living requires treading softly on this earth, guarding the purity of water and preserving the life of both trees and animals.
This is really fascinating. One thing that struck me from my studies of #Buddhism is just how rich the cosmology is. It makes sense that a faith rooted in reincarnation would have a different relationship with the natural world.
#India #Books #Bookstodon #ReadingNow #AncientHistory #VisualArt #Art #Religion @histodon@a.gup.pe @antiquidons@a.gup.pe
