Face of Buddha

Ironically, the most often seen face in Myanmar would no doubt to be the face of Buddha.

Life in Myanmar appeared to be quite simple, centered around their religion, and after 11 days of travel, I lost my interest to even to find out what is the percentage of monks or nuns on this Buddha’s land, not that I lost my interest in search of something meaningful, rather, after witnessed the religion is so much blended into the life in Myanmar, such statistic becomes pointless.

Monasteries and Nunneries everywhere, Buddha statues everywhere, big or small, ancient or rather new, defected or perfect; yet even in such large number, one would still find all the faces of Buddha are not all the same. Obviously due to many different sculpturers, some made better and some less, from fine craftsman and from less capable ones, different regions or even perhaps slightly different believes.  Typical oriental style of Buddha sculpture is also quite different from the golden ratio influenced the western art for so long. The Buddha tend to have proportionally larger head, as well as the center portion of the body, which suggests “richness” to some older generations, no doubt less shaped than common preference in this modern time. But the art of sculpturing a Buddha hardly change.

The look of the face is also very much light dependent, the face of Buddha would project differently under different light therefore the very best Buddha sculpturer would request to design the light as well, and so on and so on. 

Since this is a blog about faces of Myanmar, it just came up to me that I should start it with the face of Buddha.  And this one, shot at the Shwedagon Pagoda in late afternoon, my first visit in this Myanmar trip.