Buddhist Art and Paintings

Buddhist art means the images made in the service of Buddhism, the religion that began in India with the Buddha in the fifth and fourth centuries BC: paintings and sculptures of buddhas, bodhisattvas, deities and teachers, and the stupas built over the Buddha's relics. The images were made to be worshipped and to support meditation; the Met says a Tibetan image became a base for the presence of the deity in the worshipper's mind. From India the tradition spread with the faith to Nepal and Tibet, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, and along the Silk Road to China.

Sources: The Met: Buddhism and Buddhist Art · The Met: Tibetan Buddhist Art

Buddhist art began in India in the first century BC, when stone railings and gateways carved with scenes from the Buddha's life and previous lives were added to stupas, the mounds that held his relics. In this earliest art the Buddha was not shown in human form but by a sign, such as a pair of footprints, an empty seat or a parasol. His human image appeared in the first century AD, in Gandhara on India's northwestern frontier and at Mathura.

Sources: The Met: Buddhism and Buddhist Art

A thangka is a Tibetan hanging scroll, usually painted on cotton and mounted in silk brocade, with a wooden dowel at the bottom so it can be kept rolled up, as the Rubin Museum of Art defines it. The Getty's art vocabulary traces the word to the Tibetan for "something rolled up" and says thangkas were hung in temples or carried in processions. Almost all show religious subjects; similar paintings from Nepal are called paubha. Our collection holds about two dozen.

Sources: Rubin Museum of Art: Thangka (glossary) · Getty AAT: tankas (scrolls or banners) · Rubin Museum of Art: Paubha (glossary)

In Buddhist art a mandala is the cosmic abode of a deity, usually drawn as a circle with a square inside that stands for the deity's palace, with the deity enthroned at the center and the retinue around, the Rubin Museum of Art explains. Mandalas can be painted, built as models or temples, or arranged as groups of images; they are used in initiations and in meditation, and offered as images of the whole universe. The Getty describes them as deities in purified geometric precincts, often circular and symbolic of the universe.

Sources: Rubin Museum of Art: Mandala (glossary) · Getty AAT: mandalas

The Buddha is shown as a monk in a plain robe, seated or standing, often with his hands in a fixed gesture (mudra). The Met traces three early types: in Gandhara, youthful Buddhas with wavy curls like statues of Apollo and a robe in heavy folds like a toga; at Mathura, a body expanded by sacred breath with the right shoulder bare; and in the Gupta period (4th–6th century), an "ideal image" with tiny curls and a downward glance that became the model for later artists in India, Nepal, Thailand and Indonesia.

Sources: The Met: Buddhism and Buddhist Art · Rubin Museum of Art: Mudra (glossary)

Greco-Buddhist is a common name for the art of Gandhara, the region of present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan at the heart of the Kushan empire. The Met says that there, in the first centuries AD, artistic elements from the Hellenistic world combined with Indian Buddhist symbolism: some of the first images of the Buddha in human form and the earliest bodhisattvas date to the Kushan era. Gandharan artists worked in stone and stucco, so this art is mainly sculpture rather than painting.

Sources: The Met: Buddhism and Buddhist Art · The Met: Kushan Empire

In Buddhist art a bodhisattva is usually shown as a princely, jeweled figure, unlike a buddha in a plain monk's robe. The Met describes Maitreya, the Buddha of the Future, shown as a princely bodhisattva before his enlightenment, and says later Buddhism added heavenly bodhisattvas and goddesses, of whom the most popular was Tara. On the Art Institute of Chicago's thangka of Maitreya, he stands with Manjushri and Vajrapani, who embody the Buddha's compassion, wisdom and power.

Sources: The Met: Buddhism and Buddhist Art · Art Institute of Chicago: Bodhisattva Maitreya Surrounded by His Retinue · Art Institute of Chicago: Amitayus Buddha Surrounded by One Hundred Buddhas

Tibetan Buddhist art is the painting and sculpture made for Buddhism in Tibet, which was introduced by the seventh century and revived from the late tenth. The Met says Pala India was the main influence in the late 11th and 12th centuries, Nepalese artists worked for Tibetan patrons from the 13th, and by the 15th century Nepalese and Chinese styles had fused into a truly Tibetan synthesis. Images were made as aids for meditation and to mark births, deaths and wishes for long life, and commissioning one was believed to bring merit.

Sources: The Met: Tibetan Buddhist Art

Chinese Buddhist painting ranges from huge temple murals to small hanging scrolls. The Met's Buddha of Medicine Bhaishajyaguru, a wall painting of about 1319 from Shanxi, is more than 15 meters wide. Southern Song painters made ink scrolls of the White-Robed Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion venerated in Chan Buddhism, and scrolls of Amitabha for the Pure Land faith, whose followers recite his name to enter his Western Paradise, the Cleveland Museum of Art notes.

Sources: The Met: Buddha of Medicine Bhaishajyaguru (Yaoshi fo) · Cleveland Museum of Art: White-Robed Guanyin · Cleveland Museum of Art: Buddha Amitabha with Two Attending Bodhisattvas

In Japan, Buddhism inspired icons of buddhas and bodhisattvas, sutras copied in gold and narrative scrolls of temple legends. In the late 12th century, the Art Institute of Chicago notes, aristocrats who felt they lived in an age of Buddhist decline commissioned sutras copied in gold, believing that all involved gained merit. Zen, which took root in Japan in the 13th century, brought ink painting: the first Japanese artists in the medium were Zen monks, the Met says.

Sources: Art Institute of Chicago: Jingoji Sutra and Wrapper · The Met: Zen Buddhism

Zen art is the art of Zen (in China, Chan) Buddhism, and today ink monochrome painting is the art form most closely linked with it, the Met says. The first Japanese painters in ink were Zen monks who painted quickly to express their convictions, and their favorite subjects were Zen patriarchs, teachers and enlightened individuals. Images of patriarchs such as Daruma (Bodhidharma), the semilegendary founder of Zen, were revered because the bond between master and disciple carried the teaching, the Art Institute of Chicago explains.

Sources: The Met: Zen Buddhism · Art Institute of Chicago: Daruma

Most Buddhist paintings were made by anonymous artists. In Tibet, the Met says, numerous monks were artists, and lay artists also traveled from monastery to monastery; few signed their work, though some names survive in texts, inscriptions and murals, including Indian, Nepalese, Central Asian and Chinese artists. In Japan, the first painters to work in ink were Zen monks, the Met says.

Sources: The Met: Tibetan Buddhist Art · The Met: Zen Buddhism

Many of the famous Buddhist paintings on this page still belong to temples in Japan, such as Tō-ji and Kōzan-ji in Kyoto, and several are kept at the national museums of Kyoto and Nara, like the Legends of Mount Shigi. In the United States, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York shows the wall painting of the Buddha of Medicine Bhaishajyaguru, about 7.5 meters high and 15 meters wide; the Art Institute of Chicago holds most of the thangkas on this page, and the Cleveland Museum of Art holds a central Tibetan Green Tara of the 1260s.

Sources: Asian Art Museum of San Francisco: Mandala of the Womb World (Google Arts & Culture) · Kyoto National Museum: Legends of the Kegon Sect · The Met: Buddha of Medicine Bhaishajyaguru (Yaoshi fo) · Art Institute of Chicago: The Medicine Buddha Bhaishajyaguru · Cleveland Museum of Art: Green Tara

Yes, almost all of it. The works in this collection were made centuries ago, mostly by anonymous artists, so they are in the public domain in the United States and in countries where copyright ends 70 years after the artist's death. Most of our images come from the Art Institute of Chicago, which releases its public-domain images under a CC0 license for free, unrestricted use. A few countries have their own rules on photographs of artworks, so check them if you publish outside the U.S.

Sources: Cornell University Library: Copyright Term and the Public Domain · Art Institute of Chicago: Open access images