Religious Contextual Analysis

Words: 919
Pages: 4

An art piece does not classify as religious just because it is related to a specific religion. Art can be religious even if it does not directly relate to a religion. For an art piece to be religious, it has to evoke some kind of spiritual experience or feeling of the Holy. Just like what Erich Neumann writes in his, “Art and the Creative Unconscious,” symbolic expression of numinous is through experience of the collective consciousness and unconsciousness, and through this an individual is able to experience something religious. The art piece does not have to be the divine or the Holy, but it could be a representation that pushes and allows the audience to have that experience of the Holy.
In the Asian Society, in the Unknown Tibet exhibition,
…show more content…
Through this painting, an individual is able to understand and experience what it means to reach enlightenment. With the indefinite background, the calming colors of green, blue and shades of light pink, and the lack of movement, the audience is able to experience what it is like to go through meditation and reach enlightenment, like the Buddha. Just like what David Tracy writes in this “The Religious Classic and the Classic of Art,” “...a religious classic, as religious, provoke is a claim that discloses to the interpreter some realize experience bearing some sense of recognition into the objectively awe-some reality of the otherness of the whole as radical mystery...do experience that reality of mystery as the reality of the holy bearing overwhelming and life-transformative force” (Tracy 238). Tracy is saying that for something to be religious it provides a sense of mystery, and that mystery becomes the idea of the Holy or the ultimate …show more content…
Tracy writes, “...the religious classic expresses the power of manifestation of a ‘limit-of’ experience, an experience of a self-manifesting power, an eruption of both radical participation and nonparticipation in the whole” (Tracy 243). He further explains that this radical participation and nonparticipation seem to “force the genuinely religious person to an experience of awe beyond anxiety, an experience of radical reverence beyond wonder, an experience of fascination…” (Tracy 247). This painting of Kanakabharadvaja Arhat does all of this because it provokes the individual to experience and think about the ultimate achievement in Buddhist religion, which is Nirvana and enlightenment. Through this painting, Kanakabharadvaja represents meditation and internal peace, but at the same time, the overall calmness and tranquility of this painting allows the audience to question and wonder about the ultimate reality and its