Symbols of Reverence — Ritual & Devotion : Artwork 2

A Buddha head in which the ushnisha — the cranial protuberance that signifies enlightened wisdom, one of the 32 mahapurusha lakshana — is rendered as a dense spiral of organic coils, closer to the Gandharan school that absorbed Hellenistic influence than to the more restrained Thai or Chinese schools. The face below is completely still, which makes the elaborate crown above it more charged rather than less. In Buddhist iconographic theory, the tranquil face and the complex ushnisha represent the attained state and the path that produced it: one is the arrival, the other is the accumulation.