Fasting Buddha

    Fasting Buddha, Wat U-Mong, Chiang Mai, Thailand

    Comments and faves

    1. ★

      ng.a, mickeymao, hubs, Michael LaPalme, and 2 other people added this photo to their favorites.

    2. baidege125 (7 months ago | reply)

      This is an image of Siddhartha Gautama during the period of his extreme asceticism after he renounced his life as royalty & left the palace. For 6 years in the forest, Siddhartha practiced extreme self-denial in his efforts to learn the truth about the human condition and a method of escape from its endless round of suffering in the 6 realms of samsara. Eventually, he realized that this path of fanatical asceticism was as unproductive in his search for the ultimate truth as his previous life of luxury had been. With the help of Sujata, he gave up the ascetic life and discovered the Middle Way, between extreme luxury and extreme austerity.

      A presence of a beard on the face of the Buddha-to-be is particularly unusual, and indicates his complete disregard of his own body during this period of his life. The extreme realism in the treatment of the Buddha's emaciated body is characteristic of Gandharan art, but not commonly employed in the rest of India, where there is a much stronger tenedency to idealize and generalize in the depiction of deified beings. The sinews and bones of the Buddha's body are revealed beneath the barest amount of flesh that still remains. The realism characteristic of this work, and in particular the familiarity with the details of human anatomy, is inherited from art of the Hellenic world, in which there was a preoccupation with detailed depictions of physical reality.

    Want to format your comment?
    keyboard shortcuts: ← previous photo → next photo L view in light box F favorite < scroll film strip left > scroll film strip right ? show all shortcuts