Does the Buddha know wrath?

The stone, rough and heavy, sits atop the worker's back. The weight of it contorts his spine into weird and unnatural shapes. His sinewy thighs tremble. His veins rise up, pressing against his skin, forming hundreds of blue rivers around his limbs. The cuts are fresh and they refuse to clot. A solution of blood and sweat seethes out from those thin flesh crevasses, a wash of red that tastes like salt and iron on his tongue. 

After some hours, he reaches the top. The burning sun singes his hair, and he can finally look out into the endless sky. He breathes in the air, allowing its purity to wash his tainted lungs, and closes his eyes. He dreams briefly for a celestial being, an apsara, like the ones that tried to tempt the Buddha away from enlightenment. She descends behind his closed lids, her robes flowing in the wind and forming long wispy clouds behind her. He opens his eyes and she is gone. 

The stone leaves his shoulders but his work is not done. He brings forth his tools, some long and slender, others round and blunt. They fit nicely in his calloused hands. His fingers transform from brutish devices used for simple tasks of strength and survival into something more. They become artists, delicate and precise, fore-bringers of beauty, channels through which divinity enters the mortal world. He carves serene smiles, closed and kindly eyes, robes that fall elegantly across the humble breast. Through his hand the stone becomes the Buddha. Before his touch the wanderer would step upon it, sit his behind upon its surface, dismiss it for just another part of the world. But now men and women will walk across cities and through forests to bow before its majesty. 

And for what? 

If there were no stone temples, no labour, no penance, would the Buddha show discontent? The Buddha embodies contentment. He is forever compassionate, asking for nothing for himself and everything for others. His lips speak the wisdoms of his Hindu forefathers, but not once did he utter a demand for immortality, through stone or thought or story. Yet we have made countless monuments and poems and songs to his name, forgetting that Siddhartha gave up worldly pleasures long, long ago. 

So why do we build all these things for a man with no desire? Perhaps it is the only way we know to show love. Love and suffering have always been intertwined in the human mind, like tangled serpents. The temples are glorious, and they are testament to the unyielding nature of our hearts and minds. But alas, they are not for the Buddha, but for ourselves. And until we find quieter ways to show our love, they will be all we have to offer.