Mod 10-World Religions and Art-Video review

Buddhism and Hinduism

                                            

I selected the Buddhism and Hinduism videos because they are the only ones that sounded somewhat appealing to learn about.

The key elements/concepts that I learned from both videos:

Buddhism: Bodh Gaya is sacred to Buddhists, Jains and Hindus. Stupas are memorial burial grounds and each brick tells a story. The gates of Buddha’s stupa tell the story of his life, yet he is not in bodily form. In the East, a pilgrim must always walk clockwise on temple or on a stupa, It allows the pilgrim to let go of material things for the intent of virtue. Buddhism is a child of Hinduism and India. Borobudur is a place of pilgrimage. These pilgrims would see some 1400 carvings of peace and enlightenment on the trip up the temple. The temple of the countless buddhas had 432 buddhas in all. It is a standing proof of the spreading of Buddhism throughout Asia. In Carmel New York, there is a collection of buildings dedicated to Buddhism. Using the glulam style, we are able to create buildings without internal pillars. The narrator asked the question: what have I discovered about Buddhism and all the other religions? His answer: They unraveled the tangled question of the afterlife and wove the art and architecture from local materials to create the monuments that are truly heaven on earth.

Hinduism: Like the Muslims, the Hindus can pray anywhere. Hindu worship does not focus on temples, yet Hindus invest so much in their elaborate decoration. Where the Ganges runs into stone, the story is carved into the cleft of the rock. There were other buildings carved out of the rock underneath the mountain.

Related to readings:

Buddha attracted followers from all walks of life, from beggars to kings, both men and women. After his death, his cremated remains were distributed among eight memorial mounds called Stupas. Four gateways erected late in the 1^st century B.C. punctuate the outer enclosure at Sanchi. Their crossbars are carved in relief with stories from the Buddha’s life. Interestingly, the reliefs at Sanchi that narrate the story of the Buddha do so without showing the Buddha himself.

The three deities of Hindu are the god Shiva, the goddess Devi or Shakti (Durga) and Vishnu. The temple Kandariya Mahadeva is dedicated to Shiva and the temple rests on a stone platform that serves to mark out a sacred area and separate it from the everyday world. Indian architects worked with post-and-lintel construction techniques, and thus the interior spaces of Hindu temples are not large.

What do i think?

I think that the videos were fairly informative and I learned about these culture’s art and religion. I liked looking at their stone carvings and I liked learning about how their stone sculptures meant something in one way or another in their religion.