ART AS SPIRITUAL PRACTICE
ART AS TRANSMISSION
ART AS AGENT OF CHANGE

The words of the African-American writer and social activist Toni Cade Bambara inspire this project when she wrote, “The role of art is to make revolution irresistible.”

Artists wield a particular alchemical power not just to expand our vision and awaken our imagination, but to transform our mode of being in the world. In 2023, we called on artists across Spanish-speaking Buddhist communities to apply art’s alchemical powers towards making revolution irresistible—a revolution away from a human-centered vision of what is meaningful, toward a decentered experience of spiritual groundedness in the more-than-human world. A revolution away from a world of independent atomistic entities vying for dominance to an interdependent world of relatedness.

Within Dharmadatta Community, we do not see the spiritual path as individual or exclusively contemplative. We see Buddhism’s artistic traditions as integral to spiritual practice, to the transmission of Buddhist worldviews and to the creation of construction of community through a shared visual language.  An online course in Buddhist Art for Artists and Practitioners taught in Spanish by our main teacher Damcho, and offered through Instituto Budadharma, provides training in Buddhism’s visual idioms, making classic Buddhist art legible to us today and empowering artists to engage with that idiom, rather than appropriating or mimicking.

We created the Dharmadatta Ecodharma Juried Art Exhibition, with generous support of the Kalliopeia Foundation. We sought with this project to open a space for Latinx artists to share their vision of a Buddhist spirituality rooted in Latinx and Iberian ecosystems, cultural and physical.

Anyone first exposed to Buddhism in the Americas or anywhere else outside Asia is bound to think of it as essentially a contemplative tradition. Yet over the course of its 2,600-year history, Buddhism has been a visual tradition as much as a contemplative tradition. Perhaps more, for in many places and times in its long history, people connected more deeply and more often with the Buddha and his teachings through art than through meditative practices.

As the message of the Buddha spread from its birthplace in northern India outwards across Asia, Buddhist communities created, valued and honored artistic manifestations of the sacred. If you think of Asian art, there is a very good chance that what comes to mind is actually Buddhist art. Of course, local artistic traditions developed regional dialects, but Buddhist art also communicated in a shared visual idiom that was intelligible to practitioners whether in Afghanistan or Japan, Tibet or Indonesia.

In our EcoDharma Art project, as we invited Latinx artists to envision a Buddhism naturalized in their own homelands, we encouraged them to remain in visual conversation with the artistic traditions of Buddhism’s ancestors in Asia. To that end, we offered an open course in Spanish on Buddhist Art for Practitioners and Artists, to give a grounding in the grammar and vocabulary of Buddhism’s visual language.

Buddhist art defies many of the assumptions we may have when we approach a work of art.

Buddhism, like many traditional cultures, does not speak of “art for art’s sake.” Instead Buddhist art supports meditation practice, communicates key concepts, depicts important narratives, and most of all, brings us into relationship with the sacred.

The artist and what they have to express is not a major focus in Buddhist visual traditions. Instead, the experience of the person who will view the art is placed at the center. Buddhist art developed within India’s Sanskritic cultures and is therefore indelibly marked by the Sanskrit notion of “darshana” in which we are understood to be profoundly shaped by what we witness. Whenever we see something, a relationship is established with what we have observed and that relationship changes us for better or worse. Witnessing beings of spiritual power and goodness awakens our own goodness and spiritual power.  It makes new modes of being possible for us.

As you connect to the works shared in this exhibition, we invite you to open yourself to the alchemical changes that Buddhist art is seeking to bring about in its audience. As you enter into receptive relationship with the visions created by these artists, don’t resist the revolution.