Buddha images, Buddhist art, any prohibitions?

 

Did Buddha prohibit artwork of his image? Short answer, unknown

A user asked:

Just curious, during the time of the Buddha 

where he was physically alive and teaching, 

didn’t anyone had that idea of painting his image or with sculpture one way or another 

because there’s this great teacher that is existing at that moment?

 Considering there were so many monk disciples, 

 lay disciples and kings and royalties whom held him in great regards?

Or did the Buddha purposely didn’t gave the permission for his image to be preserved?

Sujato wrote in this thread: Images of the Buddha  (Nov 2017)

I don’t think there’s any definitive answer to this, 

as it doesn’t seem to come up in any of the early texts.

The earliest images date from a few hundred years later, 

and there the Buddha is depicted with a symbol—the wheel, the Bodhi tree, etc.

 So it seems reasonable to infer that there was some religiously based reluctance 

 to represent the Buddha’s actual image, perhaps out of reverence, 

 the idea that it is not possible to properly capture his image.

Obviously that didn’t last, and not long afterwards Buddha images became common.

 There are some curious myths around that, though, 

 suggesting for example that the original model for the Buddha image was none other than Mara himself.

 This shows that there was a degree of equivocation about this whole process.

Another point to bear in mind is that there is no surviving iconography of any kind from the Buddha’s period, 

or several centuries around it.

 In fact there’s almost a complete gap from the end of the Indus valley civilization 

 until the astonishing stonework of the Ashokan era appears.

 There’s just a few bits of pottery with simple designs, 

 and some isolated remnants of rock painting in one or two places.

So from the Indus valley we have this:

Then nothing at all for a thousand years, except for a few scraps like this, 

some of which may predate the Buddha:

And the rock paintings at Deokothar, which are Buddhist, and perhaps pre-Ashokan:

And then this:

Out of nowhere these unparalleled and perfect expressions of artistic and creative accomplishment just appear.

In any case, clearly there were visual arts in the Buddha’s day, 

but it seems likely they were on perishable materials.

References

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aniconism_in_Buddhism

Sujato wrote in this thread: Images of the Buddha  (Nov 2017)

Buddha images where he looks like a real human

buddha-and-arahant-images

illustration of Buddha Gotoma where he looks like a human being (from BPS postcard)

https://notesonthedhamma.blogspot.com/2021/02/where-are-buddha-images-and-statues.html

How to make any Buddha image look human, in a few minutes, using free windows paint program Krita