Buddhist art largely began in the south. That's the thesis of a show on now through mid-November, 2023 at the Metropolitan Museum in NY. I visited the show recently and will discuss some highlights of the exhibit as well as what they tell us about early Buddhism.

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✅ Video:
Have We Found the Buddha's Bones? Two New York Exhibitions --    • Have We Found the Buddha's Bones? Two...  

✅ Link to the exhibit webpage and a couple of writeups in the NYTimes:
https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/21/ar...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/25/ar...

✅ Relevant essay from the exhibition catalogue:
John Guy, “Early Buddhist Landscape of Southern India.” In John Guy, Tree and Serpent, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2023. https://amzn.to/48yNZcg

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00:00 Intro
01:03 Some nice news for the channel
01:59 The Met exhibit’s focus
03:36 Earliest art: stupas
05:06 Nature deities
08:35 Reasons behind the art
11:07 Aniconism: representing absence
16:00 Cross-cultural influences
17:37 Representing the Buddha figure

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