Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects from BBC Radio 4. It's morning in Battersea Park in London and I'm standing near the river

next to the Peace Pagoda. Every day watched my four gilded Buddha statues, a Japanese Buddhist monk drums his way over the grass.

His name is the Reverend Giorin Agasset, and he knows these gilded biddas very well. But then so in a sense do we all. Here looking

at the Thames is the Buddha sitting cross-legged, his hands touching in front of his chest.

I hardly need to describe the figure any further because the seated Buddha is one of the most familiar and most enduring images in world religion.

Today you can find statues of the centuries he was represented only through a set of symbols. The story of how this changed

and how the Buddha came to be shown in human form begins in Pakistan around 1800 years ago.

The presence of the image of the buller creates a very interesting and deep spiritual and calm

ambience on the side where you have it.

It's really the need for worshipping visual, for seeing the gods, for having them visible. And not only thinking of the Buddha as a man who lived

four or five hundred years before and who have initiated a new way of looking at

life. A history of the world in a stone statue from the second to third century AD.

This week in our history we're with the gods or in this case as near to the gods as it's possible for humans to get

all religions have to confront the key question. How can the infinite, the boundless, be apprehended? How can we, humans, draw near to the other God? Some aim to achieve it through chanting, some through words alone, but most faiths have

found images useful to focus human attention on the divine. In this week's programs I'll be looking at how a little under 2,000 years ago great religions

used the visual as a route to prayer.

Is it more than an extraordinary coincidence that at about the same moment

Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism all start showing Christ, Hindu gods

and the Buddha in human form.

Coincidence or not, all three religions established then artistic conventions

which are still very much alive today. Around 1800 years ago, Buddhism had already been in existence for centuries. The historical Buddha was a

prince of the Ganges region in North India in the 5th century BC, who abandoned his royal life

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