Trish Pearce talks about her paintings of Amitabha which hang in the Sangha Room.
Amitabha

Bodhivamsa asked me to paint the Amitabha image a few years ago, based on a well-known vision Sangharakshita had meditating in the Virupaksha Guha caves in India in 1949. Amitabha came to his mind sitting on a red lotus with his right hand holding up another lotus flower, rather than typically resting in his lap. I read more about what Sangharakshita saw in his memoir to help clearly visualise what he was saying. In particular, I remember he said he was sitting in an unusual cross-legged position, which I tried to capture in my own way. Amitabha also represents the setting sun, so you’ve got the sun behind him across the sea. I really wanted to get the feeling of sunset and reflections on the water within the image. I also wanted his face to look kind, young and knowing in some sort of way. I’m not quite sure what was going on in Sangharakshita’s vision, but the only thing that came to me was that Amitabha is Sangharakshita, and the lotus in his hand is him setting up his Buddhist order, offering a new tradition, Triratna.
”One night I found myself as it were out of the body and in the presence of Amitābha, the Buddha of Infinite Light, who presides over the western quarter of the universe. The colour of the Buddha was a deep, rich, luminous red, like that of rubies, though at the same time soft and glowing, like the light of the setting sun. While his left hand rested on his lap, the fingers of his right hand held up by the stalk a single red lotus in full bloom and he sat, in the usual cross-legged posture, on an enormous red lotus that floated on the surface of the sea.
”Excerpt From: The Rainbow Road from Tooting Broadway to Kalimpong, Complete Works, p.345
Amitabha and Manjushri
I was on this retreat several years ago where I had a realisation that you can’t have wisdom without compassion. That idea stuck with me and I thought I needed to depict that in some way. So you have Amitabha in this boat. There’s a parable that says that you only need the raft to cross the water, once you get to the other shore you no longer need to carry it, you simply leave it behind. And so on the other shore you have wisdom. You’ve got Amitabha on the boat, and Manjushri on the other side as wisdom. And once compassion meets wisdom, you reach enlightenment. That’s what I was trying to represent, compassion and wisdom coming together.

Continues next month with ‘Padmasambhava’