Buddha in Vatican

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truthbeautygoodness

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Just saw a documentary on Vatican Museum at Vaticano and had to stop and search online about Buddha in Vatican when I saw a Buddha being restored in the museum. Saw the previous discussion about this topic unfortunately its closed already. I was supposed to post the link here but it’s not allowed. Just search “Inside the Vatican Museums/ EWTN Vaticano Special” at 24:36.

My question is: What is that Buddha doing there? Why does a Vatican museum has that kind of possession?
 
The Vatican has a very large collection of items in ts museums relating to a very wide range of religions. I think it has books about other religions in its libraries. And I think it teaches about them in the learning institutions it supports. And gets visitors from them. I think that is what the statue (not an actual Buddha I imagine) is doing there.
 
The Vatican Museum is just that, a museum. It contains works of art. As FiveLinden said, the art comes from a variety of religious and cultural traditions. It’s not all Catholic art and there are statues of other religions’ deities included among the art, for example the Egyptian collection contains a statue of the god Anubis, the Roman collection contains statues from a temple to Zeus, etc. Nobody is worshipping this stuff or having any kind of religious ceremony with it; like I said, it’s a museum, you learn about art and culture looking at the stuff on display.

And yes, non-Catholic people including Buddhists visit the museum. When I was there, a half-dozen Buddhist monks in orange robes were in the visitors’ line right behind my group.
 
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I have news for you. One of the famous statues in the Vatican Museums is that of the Roman goddess Minerva. We are talking about one of the greatest art museums in the world; it is a museum…not a church!
 
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truthbeautygoodness said:
My question is: What is that Buddha doing there? Why does a Vatican museum has that kind of possession?
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I would say after watching the video, for art and historical reasons. As long as it is in a museum and not in the sanctuary but it is a little disturbing, especially after watching the video where she says he represents the Lord of the heaven in the East.
 
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FiveLinden said:
I think that is what the statue (not an actual Buddha I imagine) is doing there.
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I don’t know anything about Buddhist theology, but in the real world there is no such thing as an “actual Buddha”. A statue that is worshipped as a god is the very definition of an idol…
 
TheMortenBay said:
in the real world there is no such thing as an “actual Buddha”
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I’m guessing that @FiveLinden refers to the fact that for (some?) Buddhists, anyone who reaches enlightenment is, actually, a Buddha. I understood his statement as referring to a living person, not a statue.
 
Just as an aside, I could be wrong, but I don’t think Buddhists worship the Gautama as a god. The statues are merely devotional items, much as we might have a statue or icon of a saint in our home.

Years ago, I had a small ceramic Buddha that I’d acquired in my teens (don’t remember where or how I got it), and I had always kept it, just as a kitschy home decoration, a conversation piece, with no religious intent. At a time in my life when I developed a more keenly developed sensus catholicus, I became convinced that it was an idol, and I smashed it to pieces in the back yard. I needn’t have bothered. I should have kept it for the kitsch factor. Would have been very cute with a small Santa hat on it at Christmas.
 
HomeschoolDad said:
Buddhists worship the Gautama as a god.
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This is correct, as he did not consider the question of whether or not a Creator God exists as important. It varies depending on what type of Buddhist you are talking to, but Buddhism is de facto agnostic
 
Erm… it did at one point. At least the Pope did. A few months before he died, Pope Sixtus V suffered brain damage after a severe fever. In the following nights, he personally ran through the hallways of the Papal palaces with a chisel and castrated the genitalia of every male statue he could find, yelling that the unnatural pagan lusts of the ancient Romans and Greeks were perverting nuns and corrupting the clergy. This is why 99% of the male statues in the Vatican Museums have plaster fig leaves covering where their genitalia used to be. They were added later to hide the damage Pope Sixtus V did to them.

Thankfully, the College of Cardinals were able to somewhat confine him in his apartments and instructed his secretaries to pass on his decrees to them instead of sending them out. One of these decrees was the destruction of all pagan art in Christendom. The College held his decrees, unsigned and unsealed, until he died a little over two months later. Sixtus’ successor reviewed the decrees and did away with them.
 
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Don’t forget lawn jockeys and pink flamingos, too! 🦩
 
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It is indeed disturbing, the reason why I had to stop watching the video and research on Buddha in Vatican. I understand museums are for artifacts, arts, culture, etc. However, it is mentioned in the video that the mission of the Museum is for evangelization. In that sense, I don’t quite see the wisdom why a Buddha has to be displayed there if it is meant for Christian evangelization.
 
Well, you can’t really talk about evangelization without talking about the people who are being evangelized and their culture.
 
I would spare the pink flamingos but not sure about the lawn jockeys!
 
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