Buddhist Art and Culture Symbols and Significance

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Buddhist art & culture is a huge topic with an enormous range of material available for discussion. Buddhist art refers to the rich and diverse representations of religious images, sculpture, dance, visual mythology, and symbols deriving from the various Buddhist communities found around the world. Buddhist culture is exemplified through Buddhist art, Buddhist architecture, Buddhist music and Buddhist cuisine. As Buddhism expanded from the Indian subcontinent it adopted artistic and cultural elements of host countries in other parts of Asia Buddhist art originated in the Indian subcontinent in the centuries following the life of the historical Gautama Buddha in the 6th to 5th century BCE, before evolving through its contact with other cultures and its diffusion through the rest of Asia and the world. From that time, Buddhist art diversified and evolved as it adapted to the new countries where the faith was expanding. It developed to the north through Central Asia and into Eastern Asia to form the Northern branch of Buddhist art, and to the cast as far as Southeast Asia to form the Southern branch of Buddhist art. In India, Buddhist art flourished and even influenced the development of Hindu art, until Buddhism almost disappeared around the 10th century with the expansion of Hinduism and Islam. In the earliest form of Buddhist art, the Buddha was not represented in human form but instead was represented using signs and symbols such as footprints or an empty throne. From the fifth century BC. to the first century B.C.. Indian artists would make scriptures which revolved around the themes of the historical life of the Buddha and the previous lives of the Buddha.

Buddhism, which is also the first Indian religion to require large communal and monastic spaces, inspired three types of architecture; the first is the stupa, a significant object in Buddhist art and architecture. The Stupas hold the most important place among all the earliest Buddhist sculptures. On a very basic level, the Stupa is a burial mound for the Buddha. The original stupas contained the Buddha's ashes. Stupas are dome-shaped monuments, used to house Buddhists' relics or to commemorate significant facts of Buddhism. The second type of architecture unique to Buddhism is the Vihara, a Buddhist monastery that also contains a residence hall for the monks. The third type is the chaitya, an assembly hall that contains a stupa (without relics). The central hall of the chaitya is arranged to allow for circumambulation of the stupa within it.

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