Of Gods and Squiggles

Today's Photo of the Day at Beth Whitman's travel-guide blog "Wanderlust and Lipstick: Inspiring Women's Travels" shows a stupa in Kathmandu, Nepal, that is unidentified, but is clearly the ancient, holy stupa Swayambhunath in the city's northwest section. Terrific. You go, Girl.

But as part of her description of the eyes and nose bridge painted in the middle section of the stupa, Whitman writes, "The large eyes on each side of the stupa represent God's ability to see all. The symbolic number "1″ between the eyes represents the one path to enlightenment."

This description of the symbols seems certainly to be skewed through a filter of Christianity -- common in old brochures, carried over to the Internet -- to make things more easily understandable to Western group tourists.

A more-accurate description of the Buddha Eyes or "Wisdom Eyes," as they're also called [which include not just two big eyes, but a third, a dot found just above the nose bridge] can be found elsewhere as "representing both the exterior world for the illusion that it is, and the interior world that is the path to awakening and Enlightenment." The squiggle-shaped Nepal numeral one represents not any "one path," for in Buddhism there are many paths, but "the unity of all things."