Some things really amaze me while travelling

[The_Traveler]

I may have shown this before but came across it again.

In a rural area of Burma (I know that seems like an oxymoron) there is this very, very large statue of the Reclining Buddha representing the historical Buddha during his last illness, about to enter the parinirvana or nirvana after death.

• Within the Buddhist tradition, nirvana has commonly been interpreted as the extinction of the "three fires",[4] or "three poisons" passion, aversion and ignorance When these fires are extinguished, release from the cycle of rebirth (saṃsāra) is attained.
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• In the Buddhist view, when an ordinary person dies and their physical body disintegrates, the person's unresolved karma passes onto a new birth; and thus the karmic inheritance is reborn in one of the six realms of samsara. However, when a person attains nirvana, they are liberated from karmic rebirth. When such a person dies, their physical body disintegrates and this is the end of the cycle of rebirth.

(from Wikipedia on nirvana and parinirvana)

This area of Myanmar is fairly wealthy, decent roads and a military presence, probably due to intense amount of cross-border smuggling of drugs into Thailand.

The funds for this Buddha were a donation to gain merit.

The scale of the statue is apparent in the second picture where you can see two people descending the stairs.

 

[JacaRanda]

Looks crazy large on the photo. I can't imagine how intimidating and awesome it would look in person.