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image and then bringing that image of the Buddha within themselves in a sort of mental image. And then they reflect upon the qualities of the Buddha – Buddha’s body, speech and mind. The image of the Buddha plays a role of recalling in the mind of the devotee, the historical teacher, the Buddha, his experience of awakening and the key events in his life. There are different forms of the Buddha that actually symbolize those events. For example, there is a very famous posture of the Buddha seated but with his hand in a gesture of preaching. Technically this hand gesture is referred to as the gesture of turning the wheel of Dharma: Dharmachakra.

This is the hand gesture of our seated Buddha. The Dharmachakra, or ‘Wheel of Law’, is a symbol that represents the path to enlightenment. It’s one of the oldest known Buddhist symbols found in Indian art. In the sculpture Buddha’s fingers stand in for the spokes of the wheel and he’s ‘setting in motion the Wheel of Law’ to his followers, who will eventually be able to renounce the material states of illusion, suffering and individuality for the immaterial state of ‘the highest happiness’ – Nirvana. The Buddha teaches that:

It is only the fool who is deceived by the outward show of beauty; for where is the beauty when the decorations of the person are taken away, the jewels removed, the gaudy dress laid aside, the flowers and chaplets withered and dead? The wise man, seeing the vanity of all such fictitious charms, regards them as a dream, a mirage, a fantasy.

All Buddhist art aims to detach the faithful from the physical world, even if it uses a physical image like our statue to do so. In the next chapter we have a religion that believes in the delights of material abundance, and it has a profusion of gods: it is Hinduism.

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Gold Coins of Kumaragupta I

Gold coins, from India

MINTED AD 415–450

In north-west London is what must be one of the most startling buildings in the capital, indeed in the whole of the UK. It’s the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, the Neasden Hindu temple – a huge white building, made of marble quarried in Italy, elaborately carved in India by more than 1,500 craftsmen and then shipped to England.

After taking their shoes off, visitors enter a large hall, sumptuously decorated with sculptures of the Hindu gods, carved in white Carrara marble. They cannot enter in the middle of the day – at that time the gods are asleep, and music is played every day, at around 4 o’clock in the afternoon, to wake them up. Images like these sculptures, of Shiva, Vishnu and the other Hindu gods, strike us now as timeless, but there was one particular moment when this way of seeing the gods began. The visual language of Hinduism, just like Buddhism and Christianity, crystallized somewhere around the year 400, and the forms of these deities now in Neasden can be traced back to India’s great Gupta Empire of around 1,600 years ago.

Gold coin showing a horse on one side and a goddess, probably Lakshmi, on the other

To interact with gods we need to be able to recognize them – but how are they to be identified? Hinduism is a religion that, although it has its ascetic aspect, acknowledges the delights of material abundance, and it has a profusion of gods, to be found in temples covered in decorations, flowers and garlands. The great gods Shiva and Vishnu are easily recognizable, Shiva with his wife Parvati and his trident, and Vishnu sitting with his four arms, holding discus and lotus flower. Often found nearby is a god who was particularly important for the Gupta kings of some 1,600 years ago, Shiva’s son Kumara (more familiar now as Karttikeya). All these Hindu gods began to assume the shapes we recognize today in the brand-new temples built by the Gupta kings of northern India around the year 400.

In the Coins and Medals Department of the Museum we have two coins of the Indian king Kumaragupta I, who ruled from AD 414 to 455. They show very different aspects of this king’s religious life. They are each almost exactly the size of a 1p coin but are made