Buddhist Arts

In Octo­ber, 2008, my part­ner and I spent a week in the Kath­mandu Val­ley. We stayed at the Hyatt over­look­ing the Boud­nath Tem­ple, more cor­rectly spelled Boud­hanath stupa, although you’ll find it both ways. I’ll do another post on Boud­hanath, this post is to write about our visit to Swayam­bunath stupa. Swoy­am­bunath Stupa Both Boudhnath […]

[Read more →]

Nagas are every­where in Bud­dhist art and archi­tec­ture. In order to visit Angkor Thom in Cam­bo­dia, you need to walk across a bridge adorned on either side with the Naga bal­istrade. Here the Naga pro­vides pro­tec­tion from the moat and link­age between heaven and earth. King Jayavar­man VII, who reigned in Cam­bo­dia dur­ing the building […]

[Read more →]

In late 2005, dur­ing a trip to Bangkok, we vis­ited the Prasart Museum on the out­skirts of the city. This con­tin­u­ally expand­ing museum is the real­iza­tion of Prasart Vongsakul. His life­long love of Thai antiq­ui­ties matched with his years of being a suc­cess­ful busi­ness­man allowed him to ful­fill his dream. As he puts it so […]

[Read more →]

Sri Dal­ada Mali­gawa Tem­ple of the Sacred Tooth is the holi­est Bud­dhist site in Sri Lanka. The tem­ple is located within the old Palace com­plex. When we vis­ited, we needed to go through a rig­or­ous secu­rity check­point due to the bomb­ing by the Tamil Tigers on Jan­u­ary 25, 1998. Once again we were also treated […]

[Read more →]

In 1978, UNESCO approved a project to safe­guard the cen­turies of cul­tural achieve­ments of six excep­tional sites in Sri Lanka. They called the sites, bounded by Polon­naruwa, Anu­rad­ha­pura and Kandy, the Cul­tural Tri­an­gle. When South Indian invaders sacked the early cap­i­tal of Sri Lanka, Anu­rad­ha­pura, Polon­naruwa became the sec­ond medieval cap­i­tal of Sri Lanka, from […]

[Read more →]

The Golden Moun­tain Tem­ple We arrived at the Dambulla Cave Tem­ples in the late after­noon. Our dri­ver, Aslam, intro­duced us to our guide, a mid­dle aged wiry Sri Lankan, who we quickly learned pos­sessed a pas­sion­ate wealth of knowl­edge about Bud­dhism and the Cave Tem­ples. I had my cam­era and tri­pod because I wanted to […]

[Read more →]

Hello Bud­dhist art lovers! This is my first post in my Bud­dhist arts blog. I will be post­ing fre­quently with pic­tures I have taken mostly in SE Asia. Each post will con­tain a story about the pic­ture and hope­fully some use­ful infor­ma­tion about it as well. Social Bookmarking

[Read more →]