Symbols of Reverence — Ritual & Devotion : Artwork 20

The prabhamandala — the circular halo that appears behind the Buddha's head in every major Buddhist artistic tradition — was not originally a decorative convention. It developed from earlier Kushana-period representations where light was understood to radiate physically from the body of an enlightened being, a teaching found in both Buddhist and Hindu sources about the luminosity of the awakened state. The Pali texts describe the Buddha's presence as literally radiating light. By the Gupta period, the halo had been formalised as a compositional device that separated the sacred head from the world behind it — a boundary between the ordinary space and the enlightened presence within it. This piece places the Bodhi tree canopy as a second, larger halo behind the first, so the figure sits at the centre of two concentric fields of protection and meaning: the tree that witnessed the awakening behind the light that resulted from it.