Visualizing the Evolution of the Sukhothai Buddha

Abstract

IntroductionAs Buddhism spread outward from India to cover much of Asia, both the teachings of Buddhism and the religious art evolved. The central artistic focus in traditional Buddhist practice is a statue that represents the Buddha, the historical figure of Siddhartha Gautama of the sixth to fifth century BCE. While Buddha sculptures follow common iconographic conventions (Rowland 1963, 12-14), the artistic style varies across regions and cultures, reflecting the local artistic interpretation of this iconography (Leidy 2008). This paper focuses on the evolution of the Buddha statue in the Sukhothai period (1238-1438 CE), during which a distinct style developed; this style is still characteristic of Thailand today (see Fig. 1). This style was not the first, nor the last, distinctly Thai artistic style, but it remains the most important: remarkable image, which combines Thai ethnic features with yogic tranquility and inner power . . . in a unified blend of grace and abstraction (Fisher 1993, 178).Like organic forms that evolve over time, an artistic style can be viewed as undergoing an evolution from its precursors, with moments of innovation and periods of stability. Unlike living organisms that evolve from a single precursor organism, artistic style often evolves by blending multiple precursor styles. In a sense, the successor style has the opportunity to borrow features or traits selectively from multiple parents, along with incorporating new features.Conventionally, artistic style is analyzed through a written discourse with reference to illustrations of representative examples (e.g., photographs or drawings of museum artifacts). Differing styles are then compared by a differential analysis. However, an appreciation for these differences requires the reader's imagination, and this is particularly challenging when analyzing style changes over time, wherein the reader must construct, from the chronological sequence of images, a sense for both the style and how it evolved.In analyzing Buddha statues, it is conventional to start with the Buddhist iconogra- phy that is conveyed by, for example, the pose of the hands; the direction of gaze; and traditional elements of the head and face, including the presence of an ushnisha, the design of the finial (e.g., a lotus blossom or flame), the shape of the nose (e.g., a hooked or hero's nose), the hair (small snail-like coils of hair), and the shape and expression of the mouth (e.g., warm and serene). Such a visual vocabulary has been used to broadly distinguish Buddha styles across cultures, such as Subhadradis's (1991, 19) use of these phrases when comparing the Indian Pala style with the later Sukhothai style, or to make finer distinctions in the development of the Buddha style across periods within a given culture (see Galloway 2006, 198-204 regarding the Burmese).When comparing two styles, it is common to supplement the written description with images, such as a photograph of a representative example of each style. The reader can then refer to these images, shifting gaze from one to the other to observe the prominent differences between the two. This task is not always easy, as the viewer must attend only to the differences in style and ignore differences in lighting, material composition, physical condition, size, camera perspective, and so forth. It would be preferable if all those irrelevant factors were removed and one could focus only on how the Buddha's form and style changed. The central objective of this research is to explore a technique that allows one to visualize shape change without such distractions. Rather than static illustrations of reference material, digital animation is used to convey style differences. With this method, a viewer can appreciate style differences between two objects, A and B, not by shifting gaze from A to B but by watching A become B.As is traditional, this study begins with a written analysis using a conventional vocabulary. …