The Marble Bust of the Buddha: The Awakened Master

Essentially a piece for decorating a drawing hall and for inspiration, this excellent marble bust represents the Buddha, the Great Master awakened to light : the truth of life and the universe. One of the greatest teachers the world has ever produced, Buddha, one woken up to the realities of life – the ultimate knowledge, and the founder of Buddhism, the world’s third largest religion, was born in 563 BCE, that is, over two and half millenniums ago at Lumbini in Himalayan foot-hill region, now a part of Nepal, to Sakya king Shuddhodhana of Kapilavastu and his queen Mayadevi. When seven days old, his mother passed away leaving him to the care of his stepmother Gautami. Whatever its impact on his mind, his encounter with the facts of life : old age, illness and death, he had when yet quite young, led him to realise the futility of this material world resulting in his renouncement of it.

Named Siddhartha when born and subsequently Gautam, he set out in quest of truth and wandered from one place to other and from one religious teacher to another indulging in rigorous penance though only to realise that whatever he sought beyond was only within him. One day when quite tired, he halted on the bank of river Nairanjana close to village Uruvila to wash his feet and rest for a while. He sat under the Pipal tree on its bank and began meditating. There emerged in his mind a feeling that he was close to the right path. He decided to keep seated there and meditate. For six years he sat there when he felt a divine light emerging within him. Now he was woken up to ultimate knowledge. He was ‘Buddha’, the Knowing One. He then decided to share his divine experience with the world for redeeming all from the pangs of illness, old age and death. For rest of his life, about forty years, he moved from one place to other teaching people the path of redemption. When the last hour came, he was as composed as ever, a face with rare lustre and divine quiescence on it.

Buddha’s life had a series of experiences that his statues and other artifacts represent; however, as conditions its form, a bust statue does not represent an event or act, nor even a particular state of mind but rather the aggregate or totality of the represented personality, the face being its index. The world of art has two perceptions in regard to representing an image, one contending that the face – the head, mind and the total thinking power alone is relevant for representing a person; and the other, that the image should be full and accomplished. This view goes as far as to hold that an incomplete image is as impious as one with limbs broken and is not worth a sanctum. This being the reason, votive icons are always complete images irrespective whether conceived standing, seated or reclining, or as engaged in some role, but not partially representing the deity as do busts.

Obviously this Buddha bust is not a votive image. It might be for a monk’s house or monastery but not for the monastery’s shrine or the monk’s rituals. A rare art-piece apart, something like the Buddha’s Middle Path, this image inspires spiritually transcending, even for the time being, the mind to a world beyond but by its aesthetics not conditioning it to any restrictions a votive image often does. An excellent art-piece, it can suit many spaces in a sitting hall or a medium-size sitting chamber, as also many sectarian lines for unlike a votive icon that leads the mind to a particular set of beliefs, even those not commonly shared, this bust statue – an aesthetic image with rare quiescence enshrining its face, transcends the mind from the material to trans-material zones, not via any sectarian line. Though an accomplished image representing complete anatomy might be seen as a more difficult and time taking exercise, but to represent such image as this, the represented person’s aggregate, totality and entire intrinsic being, and that too of none than the Buddha who was beyond form and colours – a pure spiritual being, indexing him entirely through his face was far far difficult.

This description by Prof. P.C. Jain and Dr. Daljeet. Prof. Jain specializes on the aesthetics of literature and is the author of numerous books on Indian art and culture. Dr. Daljeet is the curator of the Miniature Painting Gallery, National Museum, New Delhi. They have both collaborated together on a number of books.

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