Solar Lineage

In Room 33 of the British Museum you will find a small clay, second century CE Gandharan bas-relief, which represents the Buddha as a stylized image of the sun placed on a seat beneath the Bodhi tree. In the Pali Canon, Gotama describes himself as belonging to the "solar lineage" (adiccagotta), and others call him by the epithet "solar friend" (adiccamitta). A true friend (kalyanamitta), he remarks, is one who casts light on the path ahead just as the rising sun illuminates the earth. Yet as Buddhism grew into an organized Indian religion, it seemed to lose sight of its solar origins and turned lunar. Nirvana is often compared to the moon: cool, impassive, remote, and also—as they didn't know then but we know now—a pale reflection of an extraordinary source of heat and light. Perhaps we have reached a time when we need to recover and practice again a solar dharma, one concerned with shedding its light (wisdom) and heat (compassion) onto and into this world, which, as far as we know, might be the only one that ever has been or ever will be.

~Stephen Batchelor, in Secular Buddhism