Minor Assignment - Video Quiz & Response - Early Buddhist Art (18 min video)

So, Buddhism is a religion that begins around the sixth century BCE and it's based around the teachings of a guy named Siddhartha Gautama. Siddhartha is a prince in Nepal, he's the eldest son of a clan called the Shakaya clan. But the legend goes there's a prophecy that he would either grow up to be a great conqueror or a religious leader and the idea is that Siddhartha grows up spoiled and sheltered. He lives the life of luxury, he's this pampered prince who basically has this life of ease and no cares and sort of decadence.

At the age of 29, he leaves the palace for the first time and he sees real life. He sees sickness, he sees poverty, and he sees old age and he's disturbed by it and even more than that, he's sort of curious why there is suffering. As a man who has more or less been sheltered from suffering his whole life and now that it's he's kind of been hit in the face with it, he doesn't understand it. He wants to get to the sort of root nature of it, he wants to know why and he goes out to seek the truth and so he leaves his family behind. He even leaves his wife and his son, he leaves his princely duties behind to go seek spiritual enlightenment.

There was, there is a tradition in India established at this point called asceticism and ascetics are people who practice self-denial. They often live really harsh lives. They will live away from civilization in the woods or in the desert. They will deprive themselves of food or sleep, they will perform acts of lengthy meditation, also acts as sort of like self-punishment but the idea is that by sort of denying the world around them, they will sort of find this kind of spiritual enlightenment and so he does this and he does it for quite some time. He has it over for five or six years and he realizes that he's no closer to finding the answer about why people are suffering and so he goes to this place Bodghaia and he goes to a basically a nature park, a forest preserve where there's deer, this deer park and he sits under this tree, this Bodhi tree and he's sitting there and he already has some followers with him and he and he starts to contemplate and all of a sudden he reaches this stage of enlightenment. The answer comes to him after seven days and he becomes the Buddha.

Buddha is a title right, it is not Siddhartha Gautama is a Buddha. He's the main Buddha, he is sort of the progenitor of Buddhism but he is not the only Buddha. He's just an enlightened one but so after 49 days, he travels through this place Sarnath and he meets some followers and they see this change in him. So anyway, he experiences enlightenment and he finds the path to what he calls in Buddhism is called Nirvana, the cessation of this endless cycle of Samsara. And Buddha says basically there's a middle path, that there are these two extremes that are not to be indulged in. The one that is devoted to sensual pleasure with reference to sensual objects, base, vulgar, common, ignoble, and unprofitable, and that which is devoted to self-affliction, painful, ignoble, and unprofitable. In other words, he said don't let this pendulum swing to one way or the other but you should find this sort of middle path because any sort of extreme, extreme denial and asceticism will lead you nowhere and indulging every sort of pleasure will lead you nowhere. So, this will lead to calm, a direct knowledge, to self-awakening, to unbinding yourself from this reality and this endless sort of cycle.

So, what was revealed to Buddha then? What were the four noble truths? These are the pathway out to this sort of endless cycle and so the four noble truths are realizing first of all that life is suffering. And then the second is the cause of that suffering which is our own desires, our desires for wealth, our desire for pleasure, our desire for power. These desires cause this suffering but the good news is found in number three that we can overcome these desires. And how do you overcome them? Well, the way is shown in the fourth noble truth. We can overcome these desires by following what is known as the eight-fold path. The eightfold path consists of eight sorts of ways of navigating the world, the eight ways of seeing the world which is through right understanding, using right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. And if we sort of right ourselves, literally then we can break this in the cycle of Samsara of birth and death and rebirth and we can reach this state of Nirvana, this state of the cessation of this cycle and reach sort of this sort of kind of perfect understanding. We are, we've removed ourselves then from the endless fruitless cycle. So, pretty powerful stuff, right?

Buddhism remained a relatively small religion until the third century BCE during the reign of a dynasty called the Mauryan dynasty and especially under the rule of a leader by the name of Ashoka. And Ashoka had was this great military leader and he had just conquered this region called Kalinga but in doing so, something like and I've read numbers from 100,000 to 150,000 people were killed. And when he heard about these numbers or when he saw these numbers because he fought too, he was horrified at the death and destruction that he had wrought and he embraced pacifism and he embraced Buddhism. He embraced this middle way and he banned hunting, he banned violent sports, he banned hard labor and servitude because he wanted to create a life of balance and goodness. But what he did is using his considerable wealth and power, he spread Buddhism through both legislation but also through art.

So in the wake of this conversion, he creates all of these different kinds of monuments. One of these monuments is called the great stupa. A stupa is basically a mound but it contains relics, it contains some of the ashes of the Buddha. But the great stupa comes from sort of earlier Indian religious practices and traditions and this is something we're going to see is that Buddhism like all religions borrows heavily from other religions that have come before. And so Buddhism certainly does this but this is at the end of a pilgrimage route to the Buddha and so you can imagine pilgrims walking hundreds and hundreds of miles and they get to this stupa and what are they confronted with? A gate and a fence. And this gate basically operates as sort of an opening between the spiritual world and the secular world, the earthly world. And this fence sort of separates those two worlds but this is a place where those two worlds come together and you pass under this gate filled with symbols relating to the Buddha.

Now notice there's no images of Buddha himself and we haven't seen images of Buddha himself because in the earliest centuries of Buddhism, Buddha is a teacher. He has not yet sort of reached a divine sort of, Buddhism as it doesn't treat Buddha necessarily as a divine figure or certainly as a god-like figure. And so the emphasis here is not on Buddha himself but on his teachings and so here is a shrine about Buddha containing the ashes of Buddha and yet there are no images of Buddha not yet anyway not at this early stage in the artistic development of the religion. This is the east gate and we see a lot of symbols here dedicated to representing Buddhist life, the Buddha's life, and Buddhist thought.

But pardon me, guys, if you look over here we have something rather interesting. This is something called a Yakshi and a Yakshi is a well a fertility figure that comes from pre-Buddhist religious practices and as you can see she is rather sexualized here and that seems rather odd for a religion that focuses on moderation that focuses on sort of rejecting desire and we have an image here that in many ways represents sexual desire in a rather almost explicit sort of way. So what's going on? Well, so first of all religions often adopt symbolism of the cultures that came before and they changed the meaning of those symbols but what we're seeing is seeing this fertility goddess, this Yakshi basically being turned into a symbol for spiritual growth because as she touches this tree as a fertility symbol the tree blossoms and blooms and produces heavy fruit and this fruit though becomes spiritual fruit and so the concept here is that you're looking at spiritual growth and these fertility symbols imply that following this path of Buddha will produce spiritual fruits.

Ultimately, you know, this one large Mauryan dynasty sort of breaks up and dissipates into a bunch of smaller empires. I want to now look at some art from Pakistan around from around the second century CE and these are some of the earliest images of Buddha. So we start to see images of Buddha around this time because of the religion changes. Buddha is now not just a teacher but he's also now divine and so we start to see these figurative pictures of Buddha because of the exploits of the ruler Alexander the Great. Greek art spread through a big portion of the ancient world and it spread from Greece to the Middle East and to the border of India on the Indus River. And Alexander and his army brought with them Greek culture and Greek art so we're going to see a big Greek influence on the art of places like Gandhara in Pakistan because of the influence of Alexander the Great. We see an image of a standing Buddha and then we see a Buddha in a day in a mudra and holding his hands in this symbol of meditation in the meditating Buddha and I've given some examples of some Greek sculpture here so you can see the similarities in the drapery and in the way the figures are depicted just in general. There is a real sense of realism in these sculptures that very much come from the Greek tradition. I love especially in this standing Buddha you can see his belly through his garment, you can see his knees poking through. There is a realism here that we often associated with Greek art and it's certainly here in this tradition. So these, like I said, are some of the earliest images, these second-century images of second and third-century images of Buddha are some of the first figurative images of Buddha.

And then we have a later tradition, a tradition called the Mathura. This comes from an empire in India called the Kushan empire and these are influenced heavily by traditional Indian religious imagery especially Yakshas and Yakshas are the male version of what we saw earlier, the Yakshis. But there are these kind of central figures and here we see a Buddha sitting under a Bodhi tree, this is a Yaksha over here and you can see it's in sort of a kind of a central dance pose similar to the Yakshi we saw earlier. Notice there's a more kind of a rubberiness to the way Buddha's limbs are depicted, it's there's a sort of a fleshiness to the skin. The realism isn't quite the level of the Greek inspired art, that's because this is coming from a different tradition with sort of an emphasis more on kind of a fluidity of the form.

And then we have the Gupta empire, this is a new empire that rises in the 4th century and they kind of saw themselves as the successors to the Mauryan empire of and especially the era of the rule of Ashoka that we saw earlier. It was during this time that images of Buddha really kind of become canonical and we start to see these two older traditions, this Mathuran tradition, this fleshy rubbery tradition and this Gandaharan tradition, this more Greek this Greco-Roman tradition sort of come together. And so we see the fleshiness of the limbs of the Mathuran tradition but we see the posture and the elegance of the Greek tradition that we saw in the Gandharan sculpture. And you can see all three of them together here.

Now so you know what I basically want you to kind of get out of this is that there is a sort of an evolution if you will of the images of the Buddha until we sort of that is kind of brought together and sort of codified in the Gupta period where these two traditions are brought together. And so let's look at the symbols or Lakshanas of the Buddha that tell us well a lot of things about the Buddha. We see the Ushnisha, the Ushnisha is a cranial bump that is meant to represent an expanded consciousness. We see an Urna, it's hard to see in this picture but a literally sort of the third eye which initially was took the form of a curled hair between Buddha's eyes which is meant to represent expanded sight. We see stretched earlobes which represent the Buddha having once been an adorned prince who wore heavy jewelry and now he has removed it because he has sort of given up and eschewed his wealth and his desire for wealth. We often see images of deer which are of course associated with his moment of enlightenment at the deer park. Lotuses of course are symbols of birth and death and rebirth and then we see his hands in a position called a Mudra, this one's called the Dhamma Chakra Mudra but Mudras in general are hand gestures that tell you what Buddha is doing whether he is trying to offer a gesture of charity or he is giving you the fee you know telling you not to fear or the Dhamma Chakra where he is teaching. This is meant to resemble the wheel of law, the Dharma but these all have different meanings and if you of course if you grew up in the Buddhist tradition you would understand what these different Mudras or different hand gestures meant.

And that wraps up this video on Buddhist art. The questions are below so good luck guys, I will see you sooner than later.