ABC
Religious texts
Religious schools and traditions
Heavenly beings and deities
Legendary and historical figures
Legendary and real places
Symbols and art
Doctrines and rituals
- Awakening
- Community
- Compassion
- Craving
- Dependent origination
- Dharma
- Eightfold Path
- Emptiness
- Five Precepts
- Four Noble Truths
- Happiness
- Heavens and hells
- Impermanence
- Karma
- Koan
- Kung fu
- Meditation
- Merit
- Mindfulness
- Nirvana
- Non-self
- Om (mani padme hum)
- Parinirvana
- Pilgrimage sites
- Prajnaparamita
- Puja
- Pure lands
- Realms of existence
- Rebirth
- Recitation
- Renunciation
- Ritual
- Self
- Suffering
- Tales of rebirth
- Three Jewels
- Three-body doctrine
- Universal ruler
- Vesak
- Ye-dhamma formula
- Yoga
Nimbus
Symbols and art
A nimbus (Lat. ‘cloud’) refers to a luminous cloud or halo that surrounds the head or the whole body of a depicted figure. In art, the nimbus distinguishes particularly powerful or spiritually advanced figures such as kings, gods, saints, or enlightened beings.
In Buddhist art, buddhas, bodhisattvas, deities, and great masters are embellished with a nimbus in the shape of a disc of light or a wreath of rays or flames. The motif probably reaches back to ancient Persian art where it symbolized a ruler’s unsurpassed ‘glory’.