Which Buddha is This Anyway? Notes on Identifying the Enlightened Ones

hair between the eyebrows called an urna, and extended earlobes resulting from the heavy stone earrings Siddhartha wore as a young prince living in his father’s palace. After he discarded the earrings as part of giving up the rich life of his youth, the stretched earlobes remained; they also serve as a mark of his nobility. These marks reflect an underlying assumption that the physical body reflects the spiritual qualities of the person, made explicit in the Lakkhana Sutta, thirtieth chapter of the Digha Nikaya section of the Palī Canon, the oldest version of the Buddhist scriptures that survives. Shakyamuni spoke of other Buddhas, beginning with seven Buddhas of the past and one of the future in the Cakkavatti Sihanada Sutta. In other texts, such as the Avatamsaka-Sūtra, the Buddha speaks of hundreds or even thousands of other awakened beings. We don’t need to recognize all of them, but among the most common Buddhas represented in East Asia, we should surely include the future Buddha Maitreya, the Buddha of the West Amitābha, and perhaps a few others. Unless there is an inscription or other document identifying the image, there is no completely foolproof method of distinguishing an image of Shakyamuni from one of Maitreya, Amitābha, or one of the other Buddhas, but there are often clues. Shakyamuni is often shown touching the earth with his right hand, a reminder of the moment of his awakening when he called the earth as witness to his achievement. Maitreya may be shown with flames springing from his shoulders or with swirling hair adorning his ushnisha, as in the small-standing bronze in the University of Pennsylvania Museum (Figure 2). Amitābha, described at length in the Amitābha Sūtra, the Lotus Sūtra, and the Sūtra of Infinite Light, is typically shown with one of his fingers touching the thumb on each hand, forming triangles (Figure 3). He promised, according to the sutras, to help anyone calling on him to be reborn into Sukhavati, his land in the distant west, a land free from all defilements and hence known as a For most American educators, the imagery of Christian, Jewish, and, to a lesser extent, Muslim religious art is relatively familiar. Not only are angels and devils instantly recognized, even when they appear in the context of Saturday Night Live, but many of us heard Bible stories growing up, and some could recite a whole litany of saints and other holy beings. However, in our globalizing times, images from other religions also appear more frequently than ever—particularly in museums and galleries. Though we may think we know a Buddha when we see a Buddha, there is, in fact, a whole hierarchy of beings represented in Buddhist art, some of them familiar and some much less so. This essay should serve as an aid to identification of Buddhist imagery commonly exhibited in many museum collections. Moreover, the notes will help us place each image within the taxonomy of the Buddhist pantheon. Each figure has a name in Sanskrit, and those were translated into Chinese and then transformed into Korean, Japanese, Mongol, and other languages used by the cultures into which Buddhism was carried; for the sake of simplicity, I will refer to the Sanskrit terms below except when there is another name commonly recognized in English. Perhaps the most straightforward of images is that of the Buddha Shakyamuni, the historical personage known as Gautama Siddhartha before leaving his home and family for a life of austerity and meditation in the late sixth century before the Common Era. Most images show him after complete spiritual awakening, typically as an ageless male dressed in priestly robes and exhibiting the signs of a superior being (i.e., a Buddha) (Figure 1).