Tag Archives: Buddha

Bagan – Shwezigon Pagoda (the Golden Platform Temple)

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Yes! It’s another golden pagoda. I think this one is really lovely, but it may fall short of true Burmese elegance in that it manages the transition from the square temple below to the round golden bell of the stupa above a bit awkwardly. But then, it’s the first one (I believe) that made the attempt–somewhere around year 1100AD, and all later stupas were developed from this model, though perhaps with a more graceful segue through octagonal phases.

 

Within, at least one Buddha is of a human scale and all golden, with an inviting smile.

So… what explains why this particular temple has the best collection of nats–pre-Buddhist spirits–that we’ve seen anywhere?

 

This includes a lovely, ancient statue of Thagyamin, king of the nats. (At least, I think this is him!)

 

Yangon – The Reclining Buddha (Chaukhtatgyi Pagoda)

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Just as we entered Chaukhtatgyi Pagoda and removed our shoes, we were assailed by a violent noise like a jackhammer. But louder. It seemed so… irreverent. Not at all right for a pagoda containing a huge image of the Buddha.

“What’s that noise?” I asked our guide Zaw, who knows everything.

He looked at me with a funny, squinty look for just a moment, a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding look. But he saw that I really didn’t know, and so he answered simply, “Rain.”

And indeed it was rain. The most heavens-let-loose downpour of our entire visit to Southeast Asia (and this was the monsoon season) had begun just as we entered the one pagoda on our tour with a metal roof. We had to shout to be heard. It was truly spectacular.

So is the Buddha, of course. Maybe it isn’t the largest reclining Buddha in Southeast Asia, but at over two hundred feet long, it’s large enough to be quite impressive. And certainly it isn’t the oldest Buddha image in Southeast Asia, having been completed originally in 1907 and extensively (entirely???) reconstructed in 1973. But the Buddha’s face is sweet and serene.

And he has the neatest footprints ever. (They indicate all of the [insert large number here–150???] previous lives of Buddha before he was Buddha, only ten of which were as humans. The rest were animals–no dogs or cats, though.)

We weren’t the only ones hanging out in the temple while it rained.

But not to worry: the rain stopped just before we left.

 

Whimsical buddha

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You never know when or where you might get an idea for a new blog post. Or for a new story or novel, for that matter. Or for how to live your life. It’s not just the dark inner creative places where these things bubble up from; it’s also the sum of your experiences and your relationships and your emotions and thoughts and dreams, and your way of making connections among these things.

Looking over the statistics for this blog for the last few days, I noted a search that had resulted in two views. The search term was “whimsical buddha”.

What was this person looking for? And why? Did he find it?

Would I be disappointed if I knew?

Well, I don’t know, but I do have a whimsical buddha for my mystery searcher, wherever he is, if he’s still looking. The buddha sits in the garden at night in the drenching early April rain. “He looks so forlorn,” I say to Dan. “I feel sorry for anyone who has to be out in the rain on a night like this.”

“Oh–just a minute,” replies my kind-hearted husband, and the next thing I know he too is out in the cold rain carrying an umbrella, to lend the poor buddha a hand.

2008-0412 rainy night Buddha