Buddhist art is a system with a grammar. The hand positions mean specific things, the postures mean specific things, the objects a figure carries identify it, and the conventions hold across a startling geographic range — a hand gesture on a Gandharan relief and on a Japanese temple statue fifteen hundred years and six thousand kilometres apart are the same gesture, meaning the same thing.

Learning perhaps a dozen conventions makes a temple legible.

The aniconic period #

For roughly the first four centuries, Buddhist art did not depict the Buddha.

The reliefs at Bharhut, Sanchi, and Amaravati show his life in detail — the birth, the renunciation, the awakening, the first sermon — with the Buddha himself represented by symbols:

An empty throne beneath a tree. A pair of footprints, often marked with wheels. A parasol, the emblem of royalty, held over an empty space. The Bodhi tree, for the awakening. A wheel, for the first sermon. A stupa, for the parinirvana. A riderless horse, for the departure from the palace.

Whether this reflects a prohibition or simply a convention is debated, and the older confident claims about a doctrinal ban have been questioned — Susan Huntington in particular has argued that some scenes read as aniconic representations of the Buddha are actually depictions of later devotional practice at those sites.

Anthropomorphic Buddha images appear around the first century CE, at Gandhara in the north-west and at Mathura in the Gangetic plain, at approximately the same time. Gandharan figures are visibly Hellenistic — wavy hair, heavy toga-like drapery, Greco-Roman modelling — and are the ancestors of East Asian Buddhist iconography. See Buddhism on the Silk Road.

The mudras #

Hand gestures. The most useful thing to learn, because they identify what an image is depicting.

Bhumisparsha — earth-touching. Right hand reaching down over the knee, fingers touching the ground; left hand in the lap. The Buddha calling the earth to witness at the moment of awakening, when Mara challenged his right to the seat. The single most common Buddha image in Asian art.

Dhyana — meditation. Both hands in the lap, right on left, palms up, thumbs sometimes touching. Meditation.

Dharmachakra — turning the wheel. Both hands at chest height, thumb and index finger of each forming a circle, the other fingers extended. Teaching, specifically the first sermon. The Sarnath Buddha is the great example.

Abhaya — fearlessness. Right hand raised, palm outward, fingers up. Protection, reassurance, the granting of freedom from fear.

Varada — giving. Right hand lowered, palm outward, fingers down. Generosity and the granting of wishes. Frequently paired with abhaya on the other hand.

Vitarka — discussion. Thumb and index finger touching, hand raised. Teaching and debate.

Anjali — palms together at the chest. Greeting and reverence; the gesture a devotee makes, not usually the Buddha.

Postures #

Seated in full or half lotus — meditation, teaching, the great majority of images.

Standing — often with abhaya and varada, blessing or descending.

Reclining on the right side, one foot on the other, head supported on the right hand — the parinirvana. If the eyes are open, the figure is resting; closed, the death.

Walking — relatively rare, and a distinctive Sukhothai-period Thai form.

The marks of a great man #

Buddha images incorporate the lakshanas, the thirty-two marks of a great man, from the canonical descriptions. The ones visible in almost every image:

The ushnisha — the cranial protuberance, signifying wisdom. In Gandharan art it is a topknot of bound hair; later it becomes a distinct cranial bump, and in Thai art a flame.

The urna — a mark between the eyebrows, often a dot or small spiral, sometimes set with a jewel.

Elongated earlobes — the residue of the heavy earrings worn in the princely life, and therefore a reminder of what was renounced.

Wheels on the palms and soles.

Webbed fingers, in some traditions, shown as slight webbing between the digits.

The curled hair, traditionally described as turning to the right, and depicted as rows of snail-shell curls.

The eight auspicious symbols #

Ashtamangala, particularly prominent in Tibetan art, and found across Buddhist Asia. They appear on thangkas, on temple walls, on offering scarves, and on almost everything else.

The parasol — protection from suffering. The golden fish, a pair — freedom and fearlessness in the ocean of samsara. The treasure vase — inexhaustible abundance, spiritual and material. The lotus — purity: rooted in mud, flowering above the water, unstained. The conch shell — the sound of the Dharma, carrying in all directions. The endless knot — dependent origination, the interweaving of wisdom and compassion, and the absence of beginning or end. The victory banner — victory over the afflictions and over Mara. The dharma wheel — the teaching itself.

The wheel #

The dharmachakra is Buddhism’s primary emblem.

Its eight spokes are the Noble Eightfold Path. The rim represents the concentration that holds practice together; the hub, the discipline that is its centre.

It derives from the imagery of the cakravartin, the wheel-turning universal monarch — the alternative destiny prophesied for the infant Siddhartha — and the tradition took the emblem of the rejected option and applied it to the chosen one.

Ashoka’s lion capital from Sarnath, with its wheel, became independent India’s state emblem, and the wheel is at the centre of the Indian flag.

Not to be confused with the wheel of life, the bhavachakra, which depicts samsara and is a very different image.

Colours and other conventions #

The five colours — blue, white, red, green, yellow — appear in prayer flags, in the Buddhist flag designed by Henry Steel Olcott in 1885, and in Tibetan iconography, where they correspond to the five buddha families and the five wisdoms.

Wrathful deities in Tibetan art — fanged, flame-wreathed, trampling figures, wearing skull garlands — are not demons. They are protectors and enlightened beings in fierce form, and their ferocity represents the energy required to cut through obstruction. Reading them as evil is a standard Western misinterpretation.

Union figures (yab-yum), male and female in embrace, represent the inseparability of method and wisdom, compassion and emptiness. The sexual imagery is symbolic in the great majority of contexts, and treating these images as erotica is a persistent and irritating misreading.

Mandalas — geometric diagrams of a buddha-field, used as supports for visualisation practice. Tibetan sand mandalas take days or weeks to construct and are ritually destroyed on completion, which is the point.

Regional styles #

Gandharan (1st–5th c.) — Hellenistic drapery and modelling, grey schist, naturalistic faces.

Mathura (1st c. onwards) — red sandstone, a heavier and more Indian idiom, robes clinging to the body.

Gupta (4th–6th c.) — the classical Indian synthesis, and the model for much later Asian art. The Sarnath Buddha is the exemplar.

Sri Lankan and Southeast Asian — the Anuradhapura seated Buddha; the Sukhothai walking Buddha, with its flame ushnisha and extreme elongation.

Chinese — from the Northern Wei cave temples at Yungang and Longmen, through the fuller Tang figures, to the feminised Guanyin of the Song and after.

Japanese — Asuka period figures under Korean influence; the monumental Nara bronzes; Kamakura realism; and the small roadside Jizo figures with red bibs that are the most visible Buddhist images in the country.

Tibetan — thangka painting and gilt bronze, with a highly codified iconography in which proportion, colour, attribute, and posture are all prescribed. Tibetan artists work to canonical measurement grids.

Common questions #

Why do Buddha images look different in different countries? Because each culture depicted the Buddha in its own idiom, as religious art generally does. The iconographic conventions — mudras, marks, postures — remain remarkably consistent underneath the stylistic variation.

Is the fat laughing Buddha the Buddha? No. That is Budai, a tenth-century Chinese monk regarded as an emanation of Maitreya, the future buddha. The historical Buddha is depicted as slim.

Is it disrespectful to use Buddha images as decoration? Many Buddhists think so, particularly when images are placed on floors, in bathrooms, in gardens as ornaments, or tattooed. Campaigns in Sri Lanka and Thailand have objected to the commercial use of Buddha images as decor, and travellers have been prosecuted in Myanmar and Sri Lanka over Buddha tattoos. The convention within the tradition is that images are kept clean, elevated, and treated with respect.

Why is the Buddha sometimes blue? In Tibetan iconography, the Medicine Buddha is lapis blue; Akshobhya, one of the five buddha families, is also blue. Colour is iconographically specific.

What are prayer flags? Squares of cloth printed with mantras and images, strung in the five colours, hung so that the wind carries the prayers. Tibetan and Himalayan. They are meant to fade — the fading is the prayers being dispersed — and should not be allowed to fall to the ground.

Sources & further reading #

Robert Beer, The Encyclopedia of Tibetan Symbols and Motifs (Serindia, 1999) — exhaustive on Tibetan iconography. Meher McArthur, Reading Buddhist Art (Thames & Hudson, 2002) — an illustrated dictionary of symbols and figures, and the best quick reference. Susan L. Huntington, “Early Buddhist Art and the Theory of Aniconism,” Art Journal 49 (1990) — the article that reopened the aniconism question. Denise Patry Leidy, The Art of Buddhism (Shambhala, 2008) — a good general survey. Donald K. Swearer, Becoming the Buddha (Princeton, 2004) — on image consecration and what images are held to be.