The Value Of Statues
View of Sri Dalada Maligawa thru statue’s hands, Castle Hill
When I told my grandmother I was a Buddhist she asked me what color the flag was. I didn’t know. I thought it a silly question. Now I am not so sure. The dispute in the news was about statues. My first instinct is to dismiss it as irrelevant, as idol worship. However, I went to Kandy and worshiped both the Buddha’s tooth and an amazing statue at Lankatilake. For all the ritual and objects that have surrounded this faith, this has still preserved a rare form of Buddhism that has made a great difference in my life. So I wonder, what do I know?
I was sitting at breakfast with an American. She was here for a meditation retreat. What she said struck me and for a rare moment I stopped thinking of what I was going to say next. She said what she found in meditation was that things come and go, thoughts come and go, likes and dislikes. And that she could watch them go. That in her daily life she has tried to apply those lessons, and that this is why she came here. This I agree. It is impermanence and attachment, and this leads to suffering. So why are we attached to statues and teeth?
So I’m sitting directly in front of, ostensibly, the Buddha’s tooth. I try to mediate but I can’t. It’s hot. There’s a constant murmur of voices punctuated by children. A mosquito is biting my arm. Taking my stillness as weakness, he bites some more. I can’t focus and give up. To my left a woman is prostrating herself. A child is mimicking the motions, prostrating, or perhaps it just can’t walk. Oh wait, it’s picking up some dirt to give to its mother. But still. Perhaps that’s it.
For all the non-meditation, these are still the people and places that preserve the faith such that I can stumble on it at age 18 in West Virginia. For all of my self-criticism and personal practice, there is little that I could pass on for 2,500 years. But this has been preserved. One man’s way out of suffering has been preserved such that I may find it centuries hence. Which is a blessing.
I can question the attachment to statues and people and places and things. Indeed, I do. But I realize that I should respect and thank them for what they’ve done, however they’ve done it. Like my Achchi, who has given me life, perhaps I should be grateful for the statues that have preserved a way out.
Refreshingly non-extremist.
Feel grateful to you for bringing this often forgotten fact to light, in a society where the supposed elitist crowd scoff at what they regard as the delusions of the inferior. That the practice of worshiping statues has more meaning than that can be seen on the surface.
Lord Buddha never asked people to make statues of him and worship them. But like you, I’m grateful that people did, so that the great philosophy was preserved for us mere mortals to better ourselves.
the illiad has been preserved for 2500+ years without a statue dedicated to it. Ever thought why?
The Iliad along with a whole host of other things. You are going off on a definite tangent and your argument is not valid. Nowhere is it said that statues are imperative for something to survive for 2500 years. But the fact remains that the presence of such symbols aided in the preserving of the philosophy. Maybe you disagree, and I respect that. Nobody can prove or disprove the fact.
Disagreeing with something just doesn’t give anyone the license to insult it, which is at the root of all this discussion.
I don’t think the illiad example is a tangent. What it shows is philosophy or literature can survive on it’s own merits without institutions and traditions. Do you think relativity will be forgotten because we didn’t build statues for Einstein. What is of value will simply persevere. I think statues & the monastic order did a good job of organizing society and presenting meaning and value to the masses. However, this is no longer necessary. we have secular institutions to do those, which don’t carry the supernatural baggage. Today those religious institutions and practices simply inhibit society from escaping the 10th century world view.
I also disagree with you about the bit about preserving the philosophy. the bottom line is that Buddhism is more about worship and less about meditation. Infact, there is very little to distinguish Buddhist worship from the Judaic traditions. What is to say that modern populist interpretations of Buddhism has & won’t seep into the core philosophy. It is important to understand that religious philosophy, especially Buddhist philosophy, isn’t immutable. it is always in conversation with in the community which practices it. Pureland Buddhism is an excellent example of this.
Swastika will be there for couple of hundred years to come as same it was before. But now it does not represent what it used represented couple of hundred years ago. It is not the statue. It is not the art. Its what that stand for. Can one say Buddhist statue represent peace and contentment today. I think still one can, with whole lot of explanations and apologies.
Regarding insults, any philosophy, a religion or a statue that promote or represent counterproductive unnecessary violent, such as throwing stone at people or murder them or jail them for writing a book, must be ridiculed and insulted if not totally demolished.
//But I realize that I should respect and thank them for what they’ve done, however they’ve done it.//
How they did it matters. Matter a whole lot.
So I guess Christianity in Sri Lanka should be ridiculed, insulted and totally demolished then.
Why only in Sri Lanka? Would you support child molesters?
is sri lankan Christianity different from any other christianity
Sri Lankan Christians are some of the most fundamentalist Christians I’ve come across. Even the Portuguese who have a record of brutality in the name of Catholicism are today much less fundamentalist and extremist than a lot of Sinhala Christians. Most of the fanatical evangelical groups that have mushroomed in Sri Lanka are run by Sinhala Christians and populated by Sinhala Christians.
Meanwhile while the Akon controversy rages:
—–
Pope at centre of child abuse storm
The child abuse scandal rocking the Catholic Church has homed in on Pope Benedict XVI, who’s been labelled the “biggest sinner” in one newspaper, but the Vatican says his handling of the crisis will only strengthen his authority.
As allegations piled up of sexual molestation by priests in the scandal that has swept the United States and Europe, the media expressed shock and bewilderment in comments and editorials on Saturday.
“How could the Catholics do such a thing?” asked Britain’s The Independent newspaper.
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The Iliad is not the best example. There are countless representations of the Iliad in art, most notably in vases, but also paintings and sculpture. The version I read was actually illustrated with vase style drawings.
Those characters were human and not worshiped per se, but the Gods in those stories had plenty of statues, temples, etc.
//One man’s way out of suffering has been preserved such that I may find it centuries hence. Which is a blessing.//
One does not necessarily have to support the Buddhist institutions and their practices, or appease them or tread carefully not to offend them, just because one is fascinated by the Siddartha Gotama’s vision. (Or at least the written and oral traditions depicting his vision). To draw a parallel; I do not know much about Carl Marx’s communist manifesto, but I have a friend who does. According to him there has never been an honest implementation of Marx’s theory anywhere in the world. So one does not have to approve of Russian, Chinese or Cuban implementation, if one is fascinated by Marx’s theory.
arh… my posts don’t work. Or is Indi censoring me. :)
i guess not. But i can’t reply to comments :(
Buddhism survived for hundreds of years (600?) before the first statues appeared, and those were from Greek influence: Wikipedia
The Dharma survived through the ages because of people who learnt it well and practiced it, not because some sculptor represented the Buddha as a man of his race.. If anything, idols probably add to delusion and ignorance – take the SL Buddhists who think their land is the Dharmadeepa because they’ve put statues in every junction and street corner, and they have big, old stupas.
I was upset when the Taliban blew up the Bamiyan statues (they were at it for weeks! :\ ), but obviously the statues had done nothing to preserve Buddhism in that region. The only positive from that incident was that we could later look back on it and think – well, at least the Buddhists of the world don’t get riled up, violently protest, and plot assassinations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy), no matter how upsetting the provocation.
This was before Sinhala-Buddhists mobbed up to throw rocks at a media organization, ostensibly because of a statue in a music video (which had plenty other offending things about it) that would only have been noticed by a teenage boy who watched it about a hundred times.
Slavery was also preserved fro milennia before anyone dared challenged it. In fact Carl Sagan sayins in Cosmos (Who speaks for earth?)
Alexandria was the greatest city the Western world had ever seen. People from all nations came here to live to trade to learn, on a given day these harbours were thronged with merchants and scholars and tourists, it’s probably here that the word Cosmopolitan realised its true meaning of a citizen not just of a nation but of the Cosmos, to be a citizen of the Cosmos. Here were clearly the seeds of our modern world, but why didn’t they take root and flourish why instead did the Western world slumber through a 1000 years of darkness until Columbus and Copernicus and their contemporaries rediscovered the work done here? I cannot give you a simple answer but I do know this, there is no record in the entire history of the library that any of the illustrious scholars and scientists who worked here ever seriously challenged a single political or economic or religious assumption of the society in which they lived. The permanence of the stars was questioned, the justice of slavery was not.”
Everyone has a right… no… responsibility – to question. Especially when your gut tells you that there’s something wrong about what’s going on though everyone else may seem oblivious.
Its just a way of expressing religion etc in tangible art form. Much of religion has translated itself in various forms of what we consider art – theatre, songs, frescos, paintings, stupas, etc. so why not statues.
Its purpose is not to Preserve that religion. They are a form of expression of that religion.
They have no doubt left us with what we identify an entire culture with. (or make money out of by citing as tourist attractions.)
Whether one decides to view it & appreciate it as a work of art or venerate it as a religious symbol, that’s based on individual belief.
Each religion has its own monuments whether in statue form or not. Who is anyone else to judge what each of us adhere to? Just because you choose not to and do not understand it doesn’t mean it shldn’t be done.
That was dumb ass way of colonizers who dismissed every kind of worship in place they invaded.
Comparison of slavery to the worship of religious stautes is just dumb.
“I can question the attachment to statues and people and places and things. Indeed, I do. But I realize that I should respect and thank them for what they’ve done, however they’ve done it. Like my Achchi, who has given me life, perhaps I should be grateful for the statues that have preserved a way out.”
Deep stuff. Damn, how old are you Indi?
There won’t be a Buddhism or Christianity for us to follow if it weren’t for the big and corruptible social institutions that propagated them. We need to respect them whether we like them or not.