Buddha's Life In Various Depictions

Our D alerted us to an archeological find of an ancient wall mural depicting the life of Buddha in an inter-connected cave system up in the mountainous region of northern Nepal.

The ancient mural purportedly dates back to the 13th and 14th century, and its relatively intact condition is attributed to the remote location of the cave system, helped no doubt by its high altitude at 4,300m. This is a 2D rendition of Buddha’s life.

I have been scouting the Internet to locate images of the mural art and found one here as shown below.


Then I located another in the Chinese World Journal newspaper, today (May 6, 2007)’s issue, as per the scanned image below.


Earlier on I have already blogged about the depiction of the different phases of Buddha’s life from birth to nirvana in 3D, one in Clearwater, and the other one at Portland, Oregon, both sited at a much more down-to-earth elevation as well as contemporary in time.

I’ve also previously alluded to the Buddha, a manga (Japanese comics) series by Osamu Tezuka. And I bought the first volume, out of 8, about a week ago from Barnes & Noble, in the graphic novel section. After going through the first few pages of it, I admit that I must reevaluate my earlier recommendation in the above blog, when I said:

“But I have no qualms in recommending OT’s Buddha to followers of other faiths if that is what it would take to propagate the teachings of Buddha so that others could benefit, notwithstanding the fact that I am yet to read them.”

Not from the perspective that OT has willfully intertwined fiction into the story telling for dramatic effects, but more so from the graphic rendition. More specifically, the graphic details of certain anatomy of a human body deemed private have been taken too liberally by OT that they might infringe on the sensitivity of certain class of readership. Let’s put it this way, it will be ill-advised for them to be used as assigned children reading. But I will read on to arrive at a balanced view of the manga series, albeit my personal one.