TWO world faiths focus devotional practice on the contemplation of single male bodies: the Buddha and Jesus. The canonical accounts of their lives have much in common. After a miraculous birth had marked them out as beings apart, each, as adults, underwent a profound moral and spiritual experience that opened a latest chapter of their lives — for the Buddha, it was the sight of human suffering; for Jesus, baptism. Both then spent self-denying ascetic time within the wilderness, were tempted by devils, and performed miracles. And each subsequently inspired their followers by teaching a radically latest strategy to live.
For neither do we now have a up to date description, even less a likeness, of their actual appearance. Yet, in each Christianity and Buddhism, the body of the founder emerged, centuries after their death, because the privileged focus for meditation and prayer. More: across huge distances, in largely illiterate societies, the image of that body effectively became the central message of the religion.
Thousands of miles from the places where that they had lived and taught, these “likenesses” took on local characteristics, as on this small gilt-bronze sculpture of the ascetic Buddha, about 55cm high, and the more intimate print (about 12cm high) of the suffering Christ. The engraving is dated 1517, and bears the trademark “L” of the Netherlandish artist Lucas van Leyden. The bronze, by an unknown sculptor, was forged in China one or 200 years later. Neither is conventionally beautiful, perhaps because each address the identical query: can bodily pain serve a spiritual purpose?
I SUSPECT that many readers of the Church Times shall be surprised by this Buddha: torso emaciated, arms reduced to matchsticks by long fasting, and eyes closed as if in a trance — a far cry from the familiar plump figure who smilingly teaches the law, reassures a devotee, or generously grants a boon. Many Buddhists may additionally be surprised; for this can be a moment of the Buddha’s story that, although well-known, is never represented.
WikiThe Buddha Shakyamuni as an ascetic. Bronze, China (1600-1700), within the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco
When the young prince first relinquished wealth and position to hunt enlightenment, he lived for a while as a hermit, as we see him here, ravenous himself and practising self-punishment. But he got here to understand that extreme asceticism could distract, often leading the mind to think about the very body that it was attempting to subdue. This insight was the topic of his first sermon, during which he urged disciples to follow the Middle Path — one rejecting each self-denial and self-indulgence. Physical pain risks inhibiting the spirit’s quest for compassion with all living things; a body comfy allows a spiritual focus beyond the self. Hence the gentle, tranquil Buddha that the entire world knows.
IN CHRISTIANITY, essentially the most familiar image now’s, in fact, Jesus on the cross. But in Western Europe, within the many years before the Reformation, images reminiscent of Lucas’s, showing Jesus below the cross, surrounded by the instruments of his torment, had grow to be extremely popular. While the Orthodox tradition often preferred to point out God’s loving purpose completed in Christ transfigured or triumphantly resurrected, the Roman Church had increasingly focused on the heavy blood-price of redemption.
By 1500, low-cost wood-block printing, especially in Germany and the Low Countries, had managed an astonishing feat: it had turned the abstruse theology of the atonement into arresting, affecting, and intensely popular paper images. Often garishly colored, showing Christ bruised and bleeding (the Man of Sorrows of Isaiah’s prophecy), the prints were produced of their 1000’s for personal contemplation in home, monastery, or convent. Most have disappeared. But expensive copperplate engravings, by sought-after artists reminiscent of Lucas, were prized and punctiliously preserved.
THESE images are an anthology of unimaginable pain — itemising “the stripes by which we’re healed”. Between the cross and the column, Jesus looks out at us: within the tomb, neither dead nor resurrected, yet still suffering. He wears the crown of thorns, bears the lethal wounds of crucifixion, but holds the flail and scourge of his flagellation. Around him are mnemonics of his torture. Lucas’s “L” hangs from the tongs used to wrench out the nails. There, too, are the lantern of his betrayal and violent arrest, the lance that pierced his side, the sponge of vinegar, the 30 pieces of silver, the dice thrown for his garment: the totality of his collected suffering.
Time is dissolved on this image of overlapping, simultaneous, unending anguish, voluntarily borne. Such, the Church taught, is the worth God requires to forgive the ever-increasing sins of the world, amongst them yours, the spectator’s. Our wrong-doing causes this, and is redeemed by it. The immense distress and limitless love of God are crystallised — one might say collapsed, reduced — into the pains of this endlessly wounded body.
Such high-keyed imagery sought, in fact, to impress repentance, and thus amendment of life. But much more, it aimed to induce an emotional meditation so intense that the viewer could imaginatively enter into the torments of Christ, and — by sharing his suffering — experience ecstatic union with God. It was an approach proclaimed with particular eloquence by the Franciscans. As the climax of Francis’s meditations on Jesus’s love and suffering, he was privileged to share the very wounds of the Crucifixion: the stigmata. To aspire to suffer like Christ was the best strategy to imitate and follow him. Images like this helped you in your way.
AS THE Church of England prepares for Easter 2025 with no Archbishop of Canterbury, there was much discussion of the systemic shortcomings that didn’t stop a dangerous sadist. There has been less consideration of how plenty of highly educated and thoughtful young men got here to imagine that voluntarily submitting to physical pain would bring them closer to God.
Today, paintings and prints reminiscent of Lucas’s appear to many viewers, especially non-Christian ones, rebarbative and distant. Yet the thought world from which they got here — the doctrine that the prime purpose of the incarnation was an atonement, effected through Christ’s bodily suffering — still informs each Catholic liturgies and Protestant hymns. And, in the five hundred years since Lucas’s engraving, the Western Church has didn’t develop any comparably popular imagery inviting the spectator to mimic Jesus in his acts of affection, healing, and forgiveness — or, as with the photographs of the Buddha, to ponder his teachings of a latest strategy to live.
Neil MacGregor is a former director of the British Museum and the creator of Living with the Gods (Allen Lane, 2018).
