Half Buddha Half Demon Statue

One thought and you are a Buddha. One thought and you are a demon.

That is the saying this is cut from: 一念成佛，一念成魔. It is not good against evil, and it is not two beings fighting. It is one face, and the distance between the halves is a single thought. Chan Buddhism is unusually blunt about this. The demon is not visiting from somewhere else.

The split runs straight down the centre of the face. On the left, tight spiral curls, a lowered eye, a mouth at rest. On the right, flame-shaped hair, a bulging eye with a spiral iris, a bared fang, a hoop earring. Neither half is treated as the lesser one, which is what makes it work.

Below the face, a pair of praying hands. Around them the shoulders and robe break away into ragged, pitted edges, the way the cave-temple Buddhas at Yungang and Longmen have been eroding for fifteen hundred years. It is built to look excavated rather than finished.

Which half people see depends on where you put it. Turn the left side to the room and it is simply a Buddha and nobody is any the wiser. Turn the right side out and it is a demon. Face on, you get the argument. Placement is a decision here rather than a question of what fits the shelf.

It is carved from green sandstone, weathered grey. Go to the close-up and the whole surface is individual mineral grains catching the light at different angles. That is the stone itself. Most Buddha figures at this size are resin with a stone texture sprayed on, and those come out evenly speckled, the same all over. This one does not, because the grain was in the block before anyone touched it.

For a desk, a bookshelf, or a room that is not trying to be serene. It sits better against a plain or dark interior than a busy one, and it is the piece for someone who finds most Buddha statues too polite.