TWO world faiths focus devotional practice on the contemplation of single male bodies: the Buddha and Jesus. The canonical accounts of their lives have much in common. After a miraculous birth had marked them out as beings apart, both, as adults, underwent a profound moral and spiritual experience that opened a new chapter in their lives — for the Buddha, it was the sight of human suffering; for Jesus, baptism. Both then spent self-denying ascetic time in the wilderness, were tempted by devils, and performed miracles. And both subsequently inspired their followers by teaching a radically new way to live.
For neither do we have a contemporary description, even less a likeness, of their actual appearance. Yet, in both Christianity and Buddhism, the body of the founder emerged, centuries after their death, as the privileged focus for meditation and prayer. More: across huge distances, in largely illiterate societies, the image of that body effectively became the central message of the faith.
Thousands of miles from the places where they had lived and taught, these “likenesses” took on local characteristics, as in this small gilt-bronze sculpture of the ascetic Buddha, about 55cm high, and the more intimate print (about 12cm high) of the suffering Christ. The engraving is dated 1517, and bears the trademark “L” of the Netherlandish artist Lucas van Leyden. The bronze, by an unknown sculptor, was cast in China one or two hundred years later. Neither is conventionally beautiful, perhaps because both address the same question: can bodily pain serve a spiritual purpose?
I SUSPECT that many readers of the Church Times will be surprised by this Buddha: torso emaciated, arms reduced to matchsticks by long fasting, and eyes closed as though in a trance — a far cry from the familiar plump figure who smilingly teaches the law, reassures a devotee, or generously grants a boon. Many Buddhists might also be surprised; for this is a moment of the Buddha’s story that, although well known, is rarely represented.
WikiThe Buddha Shakyamuni as an ascetic. Bronze, China (1600-1700), in the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco
When the young prince first relinquished wealth and position to seek enlightenment, he lived for some time as a hermit, as we see him here, starving himself and practising self-punishment. But he came to realise that extreme asceticism could distract, often leading the mind to concentrate on the very body that it was trying to subdue. This insight was the subject of his first sermon, in which he urged disciples to follow the Middle Path — one rejecting both self-denial and self-indulgence. Physical pain risks inhibiting the spirit’s quest for compassion with all living things; a body at ease allows a spiritual focus beyond the self. Hence the gentle, tranquil Buddha that the whole world knows.
IN CHRISTIANITY, the most familiar image now is, of course, Jesus on the cross. But in Western Europe, in the decades before the Reformation, images such as Lucas’s, showing Jesus below the cross, surrounded by the instruments of his torment, had become extremely popular. While the Orthodox tradition often preferred to show God’s loving purpose accomplished in Christ transfigured or triumphantly resurrected, the Roman Church had increasingly focused on the heavy blood-price of redemption.
By 1500, cheap wood-block printing, especially in Germany and the Low Countries, had managed an astonishing feat: it had turned the abstruse theology of the atonement into arresting, affecting, and extremely popular paper images. Often garishly coloured, showing Christ bruised and bleeding (the Man of Sorrows of Isaiah’s prophecy), the prints were produced in their thousands for private contemplation in home, monastery, or convent. Most have disappeared. But expensive copperplate engravings, by sought-after artists such as Lucas, were prized and carefully preserved.
THESE images are an anthology of unimaginable pain — itemising “the stripes by which we are healed”. Between the cross and the column, Jesus looks out at us: in the tomb, neither dead nor resurrected, yet still suffering. He wears the crown of thorns, bears the lethal wounds of crucifixion, but holds the flail and scourge of his flagellation. Around him are mnemonics of his torture. Lucas’s “L” hangs from the tongs used to wrench out the nails. There, too, are the lantern of his betrayal and violent arrest, the lance that pierced his side, the sponge of vinegar, the 30 pieces of silver, the dice thrown for his garment: the totality of his accumulated suffering.
Time is dissolved in this image of overlapping, simultaneous, unending anguish, voluntarily borne. Such, the Church taught, is the price God requires to forgive the ever-increasing sins of the world, among them yours, the spectator’s. Our wrong-doing causes this, and is redeemed by it. The immense distress and limitless love of God are crystallised — one might say collapsed, reduced — into the pains of this endlessly wounded body.
Such high-keyed imagery sought, of course, to provoke repentance, and thus amendment of life. But even more, it aimed to induce an emotional meditation so intense that the viewer could imaginatively enter into the torments of Christ, and — by sharing his suffering — experience ecstatic union with God. It was an approach proclaimed with particular eloquence by the Franciscans. As the climax of Francis’s meditations on Jesus’s love and suffering, he was privileged to share the very wounds of the Crucifixion: the stigmata. To aspire to suffer like Christ was the highest way to imitate and follow him. Images like this helped you on your way.
AS THE Church of England prepares for Easter 2025 with no Archbishop of Canterbury, there has been much discussion of the systemic shortcomings that failed to stop a dangerous sadist. There has been less consideration of how a number of highly educated and thoughtful young men came to believe that voluntarily submitting to physical pain would bring them closer to God.
Today, paintings and prints such as Lucas’s seem to many viewers, especially non-Christian ones, rebarbative and remote. Yet the thought world from which they came — the doctrine that the prime purpose of the incarnation was an atonement, effected through Christ’s bodily suffering — still informs both Catholic liturgies and Protestant hymns. And, in the 500 years since Lucas’s engraving, the Western Church has failed to develop any comparably popular imagery inviting the spectator to imitate Jesus in his acts of love, healing, and forgiveness — or, as with the images of the Buddha, to ponder his teachings of a new way to live.
Neil MacGregor is a former director of the British Museum and the author of Living with the Gods (Allen Lane, 2018).
