Thousands of visitors express their faith in Buddhism at Shwedagon every day. Here a family mediates before an altar of eleven Buddha images. It has often been said that Burma is the most profoundly Buddhist country in the world, and Shwedagon is Burma’s largest temple complex. This photograph expresses the magnitude of that devotion. Sacred objects such as these are similar to monuments in that they honor and remember the past and illuminate the present. These statues venerate a deity. Like many monuments, they are associated with immorality and express the essence of a culture, in this case Buddhism. As scale incongruity, eleven Buddha images overwhelm the seven people that sit before them, in both size and grandeur. Golden patterned walls and lavishly carved padlocked wooden chests, decorated in flowers and pale green umbrellas, surround ten golden figures and one wearing a red robe. A worshipping monk sits before it. I abstract all of these people, showing them from behind, inviting the viewer to participate, in a sense, with them. To understand the complex beauty and meaning of this striking scene, is to understand Burma itself.