Ancient Buddhist Statue Made of Meteorite, New Study Reveals
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120926104255.htm
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Photograph of the 'Space Buddha' statue. (Credit: Dr. Elmar Buchner)
ScienceDaily (Sep. 26, 2012) — An ancient Buddhist statue which was first recovered by a Nazi expedition in 1938 has been analyzed by a team of scientists led by Dr. Elmar Buchner from the Institute of Planetology, University of Stuttgart. The probably 1,000-year-old statue, called the "Iron Man," weighs 10 kilograms, portrays the Buddhist god Vaisravana and is believed to originate from the pre-Buddhist Bon culture of the 11th Century. Geochemical analyses by the German-Austrian research team revealed that the priceless statue was carved from an ataxite, a very rare class of iron meteorites.
It sounds like an artifact from an Indiana Jones film: a 1,000-year-old ancient Buddhist statue which was first recovered by a Nazi expedition in 1938 has been analyzed by scientists and has been found to be carved from a meteorite. The findings, published in Meteoritics and Planetary Science, reveal the priceless statue to be a rare ataxite class of meteorite.
The statue, known as the Iron Man, weighs 10kg and is believed to represent a stylistic hybrid between the Buddhist and pre-Buddhist Bon culture that portrays the god Vaisravana, the Buddhist King of the North, also known as Jambhala in Tibet.
The statue was discovered in 1938 by an expedition of German scientists led by renowned zoologist Ernst Schäfer. It is unknown how the statue was discovered, but it is believed that the large swastika carved into the centre of the figure may have encouraged the team to take it back to Germany. Once it arrived in Munich it became part of a private collection and only became available for study following an auction in 2009.
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...and in numerous cultures around the world. I had no idea it was that old and has meant so many different things to so many different people. It has symbolized the sun, the four aspects of nature (sun, wind, water, soil), the four seasons, a (stylized) crane in flight, four birds in flight, our spiral galaxy, the Universe, eternity, infinity, a spoked chariot, Buddhist enlightenment (or "to be good" or to attain higher self), an ancient comet with four tails, a cake (food), tantric joy and more, and has connections to the Star of David, the Celtic Cross, crosses in general (pre- and post-Christian) and to all major religions but especially Hinduism. And ancient artifacts bearing this symbol have been found all over the world, including Africa, with the oldest find in the Ukraine, dated 10,000 BC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika
Its appearance on an item like this--this ancient, meteorite-made statue--is startling and ominous to our modern eyes because of what the Nazis did with this symbol. But we should really think of it the other way around--that the Nazis forever SULLIED a beautiful ancient symbol, used by all of humanity, to symbolize GOOD--whether the highest good (enlightenment, higher knowledge, our place in the Universe) or practical good (food, seasons, farming, calendars, nature, weather).
I wonder if a study of how the swastika (from Sanskrit words basically meaning "well-being" or "good"
came to be placed on the Nazi flag might reveal something important about Nazi psychology--possibly that the often-manifested human desire to be "pure" can lead you astray and the more ferociously that you pursue your own "purity," the more astray do you go--right off the cliff into the most godawful horrors. CAN lead you. Not must lead you.
We've certainly seen this phenomenon in other historical situations--witchburnings, savage puritanism, hatred of women and "the unclean," crusades/bloody wars that are supposed to "purify" the warriors and send them to Heaven, etc., and this mentality is still with us, obviously. This desire to be "pure" can be used by powermongering leaders and dirty greedbags, of course, but it can also be innocent and genuine--people, including future Nazis--sincerely seeking self-improvement, or attainment of the higher self, or enlightenment. How does this human desire go wrong? Where is the borderline between, say, the innocent Cathars who sought purity and enlightenment (20,000 of them slaughtered in one of Rome's first crusades) and the Nazis who adopted an enlightenment symbol and often talked about "purity" but who went so very, very wrong, into the bottom circles of Hell?
I am speaking here of ordinary Germans, civilian and military, who wanted--simply, at first--to improve their own lives and their country and bought into Hitler's "purity" doctrine not really intending it to end in the worst kind of racism and slaughter; I'm not speaking of exploitative leaders, although even they might have been beguiled, early on, by the attractions of "purity," in an innocent, youthful kind of way, unheeding of their darker impulses.
Perhaps the "line" of demarcation is that the Carthars did not seek to impose "purity" on anyone else. This would reflect an inner awareness of "dark impulses" and the depths to which human depravity can go--great wisdom, in other words. I find this wisdom also in Buddhism. FIRST, you have to view your own ego from various angles and let it, say, wither away or dissolve as its false faces present themselves. THEN, "purity" comes to mean something quite different from ridding yourself of other "unclean" people. It means existing truly outside of the "impurities" of the material world, so that they don't and can't affect you except with compassion.
I do believe that many human minds tend this way--toward trying to lift us out of entrapment in physical, mortal bodies--entrapment in time, entrapment in "the world." This has often been interpreted to mean "purity" (seeking to be 'above' the material world, on a higher plane, through self-discipline, meditation, etc.). There is voluminous evidence of it, in religious, spiritual and philosophical endeavors, and even in our sciences, some of which are passionately devoted to extending human life perhaps even to virtual immortality (some day?)--that is, ending our entrapment in time and in bodies that die. And mental illness OFTEN takes the form of misdirected efforts at "purity"--trying to straighten out a non-ideal world by distorting yourself in some way.
Take a kid who maybe seeks out education, and, as a result, gets a notion of enlightenment, seeking "purity" or his higher self, put armor on him, give him weapons and training and tell him to go free Jerusalem from the Infidel. At what point does his impulse to improve himself and do good become slaughter, looting and rapine?
Physical culture might be a good thing for him, even weapons training. Give him self-confidence and focus. An orderly life, mentors, self-help skills, hunting skills, comradeship. But then? I'm thinking of the Nazi youth groups--how they were, on the one hand, rather like the Boy Scouts, and, on the other, poisoned the minds of the young with hatred and militarism. A trained soldier might become enlightened, or at least a good citizen, or he might become a brute and a thug. Similarly a priest can become a child molester, and, indeed, ANY initially good--or apparently good--desire for "purity" or for achieving higher consciousness--transcending our material world or our physical limitations--can turn bad. Maybe the seed of the bad is there at the beginning but hard or impossible to see.
The swastika, symbol of enlightenment and good, all over the world, for ten thousand years--inspiring the death camps, the singularly most horrible human extermination project ever devised by human minds. I'm afraid the symbol cannot be rescued from this--or maybe it will take another 10,000 years to do so--but this surely is an important thing to contemplate. How do we stop harming each other (and ourselves) in efforts to be "pure"--i.e., enlightened, transcendent, good?
This "god" in the meteorite statue--the Buddhist god Vaisravana--has quite a beautiful face and posture. His face looks wise, indeed, in the ways of the world. I love that earring--gives him a slightly piratical or even hippie-ish air, in contradiction to everything else. His ambience is king-like--maybe the "god" was derived from a wise and moderate and generous ruler, at some point. Notice how his limbs almost reiterate the swastika symbol on his chest. But the down-swing of his arms may mean that he is rooted in the earth, in material being, and has not sacrificed anyone to ego-based notions of "purity." The yoga configuration of his legs may mean that he was a meditator, or--given how his feet are portrayed, a dancer-meditator.
Compare and contrast with Hitler--stiff and and unbendable posture, awkward, generally frozen-faced and remote in every way; certainly no earring; the ego gone mad with self-worship in pursuit of "purity." He is ONE LINE of the swastika, not four bending lines. One line = the Nazi salute. Four lines, going every which way = wisdom. Maybe Hitler could have been a Vaisravana--if he had embraced the whole symbol, with its arms swinging and legs a-dancing, poised by gravity but in love with the flight of birds--wise, compassionate denizen of the galaxy.
Well, maybe not. He seems to have been hopelessly insane, and, with an awful lot of people accommodating his insane "straightening out" of a non-ideal world, there seems little likelihood that he could have been anything but what he was. But it's something to consider--how tricky our egos are, especially when we think we are seeking what is good and pure. How to keep all arms of the swastika in motion in this whirligig of a universe?
