Buddha

Buddha is a subject in art. The gallery holds 95 works in this subject in art, including works by After Zhao Boju, John La Farge and Jiang Jun.

The Buddha—"the awakened one"—is the central devotional subject of Buddhist art, depicting Siddhartha Gautama, the historical sage known as Shakyamuni, who taught in the Ganges plain of northern India and is traditionally dated to roughly 563–483 BCE. For nearly five centuries after his death, however, no one portrayed him in human form. In the earliest, so-called aniconic phase—lasting until about the first century CE—the Buddha was evoked only through symbols: an empty throne, his footprints, a riderless horse, the Bodhi tree under which he attained enlightenment, and the wheel of the Dharma. These signs animate the great stone railings and gateways of Bharhut, Sanchi, Amaravati, and Sarnath, where his presence is implied rather than shown.

The anthropomorphic Buddha emerged independently in two centers under Kushan rule between the first and third centuries CE. In Gandhara (in present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan), sculptors steeped in Greco-Roman naturalism gave him wavy hair, deeply folded toga-like robes covering both shoulders, and idealized classical features. At Mathura, artists adapted the robust, energetic local yaksha tradition, producing fleshier figures in clinging, near-transparent drapery. Both schools codified a fixed iconography drawn from the thirty-two lakshanas, or auspicious marks: the cranial protuberance (ushnisha), the tuft of hair between the brows (urna), elongated earlobes, and golden skin. Hand gestures, or mudras, encode specific moments and meanings—abhaya (reassurance), dhyana (meditation), the earth-touching bhumisparsha that recalls his victory over Mara at Bodh Gaya, and the dharmachakra of his first sermon.

As Buddhism spread along the Silk Road, this image was carried into China, Korea, and Japan, where it was continually reinterpreted. In Japan the historical Buddha is venerated as Shaka Nyorai, typically shown in a preaching mudra and frequently set within a triad flanked by attendant bodhisattvas, as in the Shaka Triad and the Shaka with Sixteen Arhats held in this collection. A distinctively East Asian type is the nehan-zu, the Death of the Historical Buddha, which shows him reclining between paired sala trees encircled by grieving disciples, animals, and deities; such scrolls were unveiled each year on the fifteenth day of the second month to commemorate his passing into nirvana.

The Buddha image is among the most enduring and widely diffused subjects in world art. The Gandharan synthesis of Hellenistic form with Indian spirituality shaped Buddhist sculpture for a millennium, while the serene, inward-looking countenance perfected across Asia remains one of humanity's most recognizable visual ideals of contemplative calm.