This excellent statue of Lord Buddha absorbed in deep meditation is unparalleled in its quality, elegance, stylistic versatility and spiritual fervour. It is cast in brass but is so well anodized to create copper effect that only an expert eye would detect that it is not copper. The spiritual fervour that this Buddha image is endowed with, is a divine phenomenon, which characteristic Buddhist images inherited from a long prevailed tradition of spiritual thought. In these images, as also in this one, there reveals the real face of the Buddha, the supreme spiritual being. One school of Buddhist thought claims that the Buddha's images inherited this spiritual character from Lord Buddha himself, as once, when in his absence king Udayana commissioned his image and showed it to him on his return, the great Master preached how a Buddha image be sculpted. The other school does not accept that the Buddha's images came into being in the Buddha's lifetime. However, it far more expressly acclaimed that an image of the Master was expected to depict him beyond mere physical features 'the picture that is not in colours'. What decisively influenced Buddha's iconography and realism of his images is the total ethos of Buddhism. It perceives Buddha the Enlightened one, as Dharma-kaya, law-incarnate, and not as jeeva-kaya, physical being. Obviously, the class Buddha images, as this one exemplifies, are the representation of Dharma-kaya Buddha and not of mere physicality.
