CategoriesCultural and Religious Styles
Buddhist Art and Architecture
Sculpture, painting and sacred architecture of Buddhism across Asia, from early Indian stupas to Tibetan thangkas and Zen ink painting.
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Early Buddhist reliefs in India usually avoided showing the Buddha in person. On the carved gateways of the Great Stupa at Sanchi, from the 1st century BC, footprints, an empty seat or a tree mark his presence. By the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, sculptors in Gandhara, drawing on Greco-Roman models, and in Mathura gave him a human body, and Gupta-period Buddhas from Sarnath settled a calm, softly robed ideal.
The faith carried these forms along trade routes. The stupa became the pagoda of China, Korea and Japan; rock-cut sanctuaries spread from Ajanta to the Mogao caves at Dunhuang; and on Java, Borobudur rose around 800 as a stepped mountain of relief-carved terraces. Each region added its own idiom: wood and gilt bronze in Japan, where Unkei and Kaikei carved the muscular guardian kings at Tōdai-ji in 1203; painted scroll thangkas and mandalas in Tibet; and ink painting shaped by Chan and Zen.
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