As one who has meditated most of his adult life and who deals with chronic pain, I have wondered since my stay in China during the 1980's how Buddhist paintings and sculpture have aided the practitioner of meditation. The answer to this question was not something that readily came from my study of Asian art at the graduate level at the University of Kansas. As far as I know, there is a paucity of historical documentation which would directly answer whether the practitioner in China, as opposed to, for instance, Tibet, was aided by Buddhist imagery. In the case of the latter, visualization of the images contained in the mandalas or tankhas was explicitly used,and not just invoked as an abstraction or philosophical principle.
Buddhism is a living religion and something that can be consigned to historical archives or solely elucidated without reference to deeply felt and lived personal experience.
In this light, I would like to bring my own personal insights together with what understanding I have of the historical and visual record to speak to the aforementioned issue.
Even at my stay at the San Francisco Zen Center, it was not clear how the art there was supposed to contribute to meditative practice, other than providing an aura of sanctity or the sacred.
Ditto on my recent trip to Thailand and Cambodia, where I was hindered by my lack of language skills.
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One of the most perplexing questions I have posed myself is why the wide variance in demeanor among the various images of the Buddha(s) or bodhisattvas or arhats, even if one holds as a constant the geographical locus or the approximate time period.
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