A History of the World in 100 Objects: Seated Buddha From Gandhara

Director of the British Museum Neil MacGregor retells the history of human development from the first stone axe to the credit card, using 100 selected objects from the Museum. This week Neil looks at how the world's great religions began trying to find the perfect way to visually express the divine, less than 2000 years ago. Today he examines how Buddhism set about creating the classic image to represent the real-life Buddha who lived and roamed around northern India in the 5th century BC. It was not until several hundred years later that the classic seated image of the Buddha was first formulated. Before then the Buddha was represented only by symbols. How did the Buddha image come about and why do we need such images? Neil describes a stone Buddha from Gandhara in present day Pakistan, with help from the Dalai Lama's official translator Thupten Jinpa and the historian Claudine Bautze-Picron