Canonical Proportions

Posted on March 29, 2004 in Culture Myths & Mysticism

I decided to go on a hunt for my Buddha nature.

By the 16th century, Buddhist and Jain art had become fixated upon the concept of canonical proportions, the idea of the geometrically-correct depiction of the perfect figure. Symmetry, careful measurement of distances between the points, and the proper angles all contributed to a subtle regularization of sacred images. The practice sprang out of that obsession of mathematicians with a perfect form. What is most to be emulated — to be entirely conformed to — must be measureable and consistent in all its dimensions:

A piece of sculpture may be made according to one of the ten main divisions of proportions. Each main division can be further subdivided into three other types. A basic type is the madyma navatala (or the standard nine face-length). The face is of length one tala, (or twelve angulas) the length from throat to navel is two tala, from navel to top of knee is three tala, from the lower knee to ankle is two tala making a total of eight tala. One tala is distributed equally between the heights of foot, knee, the neck and topknot. The nava tala thus has a total of nine tala units, in height (108 angulas). There are two other types in the nava tala division. The uttama nava tala type is four angulas taller and the adhama nava tala type is four angulas shorter. The four angulas are distributed evenly between the heights of the foot, the kneecap, the neck and the topknot.

Dr. Gift Siromoney’s website shows how the imposition of the letter-perfection on representations of the Buddha, Jain, and their attendants led to sculptures and paintings that subtly distorted the human figure long before the supposed decline of Indian art.*

To illustrate how symmetrical design alters the truth of the human face, I produced these pictures using Jasc Paint Shop Pro. The middle picture is my natural face. The other two simply marry mirror images of one or the other side of that image:

    

The realignment of my visage causes a conflict within my brain. My precise, exacting self — resident in the frontal lobes — finds beauty in the regularization of my features. My metaphorical self — the one that is most at peace with uncertainty and irregularity, living in the temporal lobes — balks. The first and the third pictures aren’t me nor are they quite human, handsome as the second may appear.

It’s my metaphorical self who then lifts the template and refits it to the questions of our age, the obsessions with beauty that lead prepubescent girls to aggressively refuse food until they look more like Britney and boys to press at weights until their bodies attain wirey recastings of Ahnold. Taking this out of the visual entirely: and what of the perfect workers we’re supposed to be? What about the ideas of “conforming to Christ” or the Buddha? What is our Buddha Nature? Is it what appears when we take Prozac™ or spend long hours running around the track? Is it perfect equanimity, the polished ice of the mythic Viking warrior who is never rattled, never anything but what it takes to lift and sword and place it between the fourth and fifth ribs on our opponent’s left hand side?

The lesson of the photos is that our nature, contoured by the random forces of life, is irregular. Though I am not about to stop taking my Effexor™, I do remember that the goal here isn’t to become an emotionless drone, but a varied creature. (Depression consists of a slate gray sameness.) Give me imbalance of form, centered from within, able to walk a straight line but not so based on that line that I become indistinguishable from others. Let me be a man, a breathing, perspiring, and ephermeral collection of cells, a summation that doesn’t add up mathematically but in its roughness retains for itself a unique, harmonious identity.

Let us not desire perfection, but a sense of how we actually fit in this universe and base our inner harmonies on that.

* Western artists, musicians, and architects became obsessed with the imposing the doctrine of the Golden Mean which might also be characterized as the obsession with the most aesthetically perfect rectangle