Eleven bodhisattvas stand in formation, their heads crowned and their almond-shaped eyes and faces dusted with gold.

The scene could be a reenactment of a painting, or a sculpture in a Buddhist temple or museum. But it’s not. It’s a scene beheld one recent Sunday afternoon at the shopping center in Yokohama’s Noge district and the potential Buddhas are in reality just regular Earthlings.

For the last two years, a Japanese artist named Tetta has been working to re-create the 1,000 more than 800-year-old bodhisattva statues in the Sanjusangendo Hall at Rengeoin Temple in Kyoto using people made up and dressed appropriately and that sunny Sunday she’d brought her workshop to Noge, where 11 volunteers awaited her. “Bodhisattvas are those who are undergoing ascetic training to attain spiritual enlightenment,” explained Tetta, of those frequent subjects of Buddhist art and sculpture. She said some people who have taken part in her workshops have described experiencing “instant enlightenment.”

“Spending hours for the makeup and then walking around the streets with the embarrassing stuff on” is akin to ascetic training, Tetta mooted.

The 29-year-old artist based in Kanagawa Prefecture asked the 11 participants, including a university friend and that friend’s friends at a Yokohama samba school, to meet in a municipal facility in Noge for a workshop on Buddha statues and how to make themselves look like bodhisattvas.

The mortal crew’s transformation to near-Buddhahood began with Tetta giving a lecture on four kinds of Buddhist statues including ones of Tathagata (Nyorai in Japanese), who achieved enlightenment, and bodhisattvas (bosatsu), who are humans on the brink of attaining enlightenment. Tetta explained that each of the 1,000 bodhisattvas in Sanjusangendo Hall in Kyoto has a different face, so her plan is to help 1,000 people to transform themselves into bodhisattva lookalikes, then to photograph them and exhibit the pictures in Sanjusangendo-like lines in the future.

“Today, I want each of you to become one of the 1,000 bodhisattvas,” Tetta declared, adding that so far she has taken pictures of 853 people made up to look the part.

After finishing her lecture illustrated with slides, Tetta showed the group how to start their transformations by painting base cream and powdery foundation on the face of one of their group, a man named Kenji Suzuki.

Suzuki said he joined in because he had seen “The March of Human Bodhisattvas,” an installation-like event organized by Tetta and performed at the Yokohama Triennale last October. “I am interested in Buddhism, but I also thought this workshop would be a rare chance to ‘become’ Buddha,” said the 48-year-old welder.

Next, still using Suzuki as a model, Tetta showed how to apply thick eyeliner around the eyes and then paint in the space between the lines and his eyes in black.

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