Buddha Statues’ Heads: What it actually means.
Yesterday, I went shopping at Homegoods with my mom for some interior decorations and a few gifts. And what do you know: Buddha’s heads, either in brass and sold as “antique” or dipped in bright neon paint. My mom shook her head in disapproval and laughed. This really got my mind thinking that shoppers have literally no clue what these statues’ heads are really about.
This really got my mind thinking about that Thai movie “Ong-Bak“ about how a group of thieves decapitated a Buddha statue’s head & how a Muay Thai skilled warrior volunteered to return it before it is sold in the black market. Cutting off that religious statue’s head is seen as an act of vandalism & violence. It is one of the utmost disrespectful marks one could do in the religion. The original heads were stolen from respected places of worship. Cutting off Buddha statues’ heads have been happening for who-knows-how-long originally by greedy thieves.
And now they are replicated into fashion statements or interior decorating. They really have such a dark history behind them that nearly a lot of people had forgotten. (None of those pictures belong to me.)
The Buddha bust, usually in a faux Thai or Indonesian style, is one of the ugliest and most ignorant bourgeois accoutrements one can posses. Not only is it a bland and obvious attempt to purchase the appearance of spiritual depth, its presence immediately belies a total ignorance of the context and history of Buddhist images themselves! A severed Buddha head, plundered from Borobudur, in the corner of a gentleman’s study is a romantic relic from a bygone age when the world considered genocide and forced military conquest a viable means of affairs. To keep a stolen cultural artifact as a trophy is to deny a sovereign people access to their own cultural heritage to satisfy one’s own ego. That the idea of the severed Buddha head as decoration flourishes today is a disappointing remainder that the aesthetics marketed towards the middle class are a cheaper version of those objects collected by the wealthy, further divorced from their original context.
The Buddha is not an accessory or a complement for your decor.
Reblogging for historical context I didn’t know about.
