'and what is the sin of the body?'
-- extract from poem in the performance Panji Sepuh

The Buddha sits in meditation--or he is a skeletal frame sitting cross-legged: a pair of eyes like two holes in his skull, a body of virtually just 24 ribs.

The statue of the emaciated Buddha with protruding ribs, at the Lahore Museum in Pakistan, is not easy to forget. We will not find it at the pagodas in Myanmar and Thailand, at Borobudur, or in the famous s