Word: buddha
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...young art critic Theodore Duret on a world tour, during which he focused on collecting Asian art. Voraciously acquisitive, he was as likely to buy whole collections-even an entire museum-as a single work of art. One of the 5,000 pieces he brought back, a bronze Japanese buddha, was so enormous that he built an elegant Paris residence around it. For years, Cernuschi allowed visitors to see his vast collection by special request. Before his death in 1896, he bequeathed the building and its contents to his adopted city, which made it a public museum...
...That Japanese buddha now reigns over a newly renovated Musèe Cernuschi. After nearly a century of refining and adding to Cernuschi's acquisitions, plus a three-year, $9 million refurbishment, the museum has reopened as one of Europe's premier collections of Chinese art-a coherent, chronological trove of works from the Neolithic period to the 13th century...
...sacred tree at Bodh Gaya is holy ground, but pilgrims also went to see Sarnath, where the Buddha preached his first sermon; Rajgir, where he came to meditate during the monsoons; Vaishali, where the beautiful courtesan Amrapali made him a gift of a mango grove; and Kushinagar, where, lying on a bed under two trees, he died. Buddhism withered in India in the Middle Ages; the great temples and monasteries were destroyed by invaders and the pilgrims stopped coming. In the 19th century, pilgrims from Burma and Sri Lanka rediscovered the trail, renovated and rebuilt ruined monasteries and temples...
...another no-hope town: many of the sugar mills that employed the townspeople have recently closed, and unemployment is rampant. Yet the town is seeing a real estate boom, roads are markedly better than anywhere around and children go to well-maintained schools. Kushinagar is where the Buddha died, and pilgrims come to see the gilded statue that commemorates the spot where the Buddha attained nirvana as well as a brick monument built in the field where he was cremated. "The only improvement we have seen here is because of the monasteries and the Buddhists," says Laldhar Yadav, who owns...
Still, amid the hassles and dangers, there are, for the faithful, moments of transcendent beauty. Second only to Bodh Gaya in importance on the pilgrimage circuit is Sarnath, where the Buddha went after his enlightenment to meditate in a deer park and preach for the first time. By daytime the deer park is unimpressive. As the sun sets, though, the brick ruins of the monasteries glow incandescently amid the lush green grass. Just beyond the park's walls, a peacock climbs the roof of a Burmese Buddhist monastery to watch the sunset. In the other corner, near a statue...