 The rich and complex mythology associated with this image includes episodes that parallel other stories about the Buddha ... The rituals and myths of Mahamuni thus accomplish two aims simultaneously : they place local contexts and actors within a universal Buddhist cosmology , and they locate a continuing biography of the Buddha in the Buddhist politics of Arakan and Upper Burma . Theravada politics characteristically extended the biographical mode of recreating the Buddha 's presence and associated with it the power of kings and other patrons of this image . The veneration of this Buddha image is thus informed by local conceptions of religious patronage in sociopolitical domains . 
