Why are so many of the tallest statues related to buddhism?
In: Culture
The east has been richer and more civilized than the west for most of history. They can farm rice which produces more food per farmer which allowed them to have more non farmers. This allowed them to have bigger cities, larger temples, statues, etc. And buddhism has been important throughout east and southern asia so when they built statues in that area they were usually Buddhist
I think this is actually a question better stated as “why do other religions *not* have many giant statues?”. I’ll try to answer, although I have limited perspective because buddhism is fucking huge and fucking complicated.
I think this stems from the core difference between Buddhism and western religions. Western religions, including Islam (which in the religious sense, is definitely much more western than eastern), focus on organisation. When you’re a Christian or a Muslim, you’re a member of this organisation. It’s important that you’re a member of this organisation, and if you’re not, then bad things will happen to you. In western religions, the religion is more important than the faith when it comes to doctrine. Buddhism is a much more personal religion. In fact, I’d be hesitant to call it a religion at all. What’s important in Buddhism is your own personal exploration and understanding, and your own journey to escape samsara, and particularly in Mahayana Buddhism, the all-importance of Daibutsu, the cosmic buddha (long story very short, Mahayana buddhism is interested in the science and philosophy of buddhism, rather than Gautama buddha himself, so ended up inventing a huge pantheon of different buddhas. The cosmic buddha is the conglomerate identity of all of those buddhas, if I’m understanding correctly, and is therefore very big and important).
In Mahayana buddhism, the branch most practiced by the countries that have the big buddha statues (China, Japan, Thailand and so on), it’s all about Cosmic Buddha and you. There’s no centralised religion, really, so when you want to honour your cosmic buddha, you tend to build a statue. A really big one, if you can afford it and *really* like Cosmic Buddha. It’s also due to circumstance, I think. When buddhism was being introduced to Japan from what is now Korea, the emperor at the time was finally getting his shit together and trying to take control of the entire Japanese archipelago (which at the time was still split a few ways between the Yamato people (the people we consider to be Japanese today) and some native cultures like the Ainu). The Emperor has always been a religious figure in Japan, but that emperor was trying to project an image of himself of basically a super-all-powerful-deity-guy, which is very similar to the portfolio of the cosmic buddha, so he decided to build a big-ass buddha statue to say “hey look how great I, the emperor, am!”. As a side note, Kannon and Guanyin (the same deity) are also Buddhist and take up many, many positions on the tallest statue list because she’s a hugely important deity in many far-east divisions of Buddhism.
Western religions *don’t* have massive statues, because they’re not really about their figures, they’re about their organisations and doctrines. Even Jesus is more of a symbol and image than a massively important figure – certainly nowhere near as important as the various big-buddhas are in buddhism. Western religions still make big financial gestures of course, but they do so in the form of buildings – giant cathedrals and mosques – rather than statues, because these religions are focused on bringing people to a central location for purposes that you can describe in many ways depending on how cynical your perspective on western religion is. There is an exception to this in Christianity in primarily Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries, it seems. No idea why. Note also that Muslims pray towards Mecca, a sacred *location*. Then of course, there’s the fact that Islam literally doesn’t let you depict the prophet, so I would be quite surprised if Islam *ever* had a spot on the world’s biggest statues list. Even on a smaller level, the same fundamental difference between western religions and eastern religions exists. Every religion has gathering places, but the gathering places of western religions are designed to seat many people, usually an entire community, for the sake of worship, while gathering places of eastern religions tend to be much smaller. In Buddhism, only monks live and work in the temples, and most people have their own buddhist monuments at home.
Like previous commenter said, the East has had significantly more wealth than the west, at least until the 1600s. Buddhism as a religion was very popular with merchants, as East Asian merchants were the first to adopt Buddhism. The religion is popular with farming families, because they believe that faith in the Buddha’s teachings brings good harvests, an ideal not popular in Western/Middle Eastern religions. In short, the two main socioeconomic classes in the Far East were majority Buddhists, and they also controlled most of the wealth, so they directed it towards massive shrines and statues.
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