The cosmic Buddha Amitabha

In early Buddhist literature, only a single Buddha may be present in any given universe in any given period of time. In Mahayana Buddhist texts, however, a number of apparently ‘new’ Buddhas appear. Mahayana texts solve the problem by describing these Buddhas as presiding over their own universes, each of which appears in one of the five directions of space and is associated with a specific color.

Here, the red Buddha of the West dominates the composition, but if you look closely at the top of the painting, you’ll see his other directional Buddhas are here too. Left to right, they are Akshobhya, Ratnasambhava and a smaller Amitabha; white Vairochana is at the center and green Amoghasiddhi ends the series. These five Buddhas are often arranged geometrically as a quincunx, a central axis surrounded by the four cardinal directions. In this painting, they appear in linear form. In either configuration, these five Buddhas comprise the skeleton of the geometric meditation diagram called a mandala.