The Gaṇḍavyūha is one of the great Buddhist stories telling of the pilgrimage of the young man Sudhana who wants to find out how Bodhisattvas live and behave, and his multiple encounters with 52 teachers during his quest.
This story is amongst those illustrated at Borobudur, and indeed it has by far the largest amount of reliefs dedicated to it of any story on the monument, there being 460 reliefs. This is the 7th of 9 videos which show the reliefs at Borobudur and tell the story of Sudhana’s journey.
The videos, each around one hour long, are a remarkable feat of dedicated story-telling by Walid Haddad, some of whose other videos I have featured on this site before, and I will show the whole collection over the next couple of months. The story is a great story, the reliefs are some of the finest examples of Buddhist art, and their retelling in these videos is a great accomplishment.
In this video Walid covers all 88 of the panels on the Balustrade of Level 3, which continues the visions of Maitreya that Sudhana is having, we see Maitreya engaging in the world in many and various ways, and Sudhana and his companions watching and learning from him on the Bodhisattva path.
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to see an album of screenshots click here