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Mahasthamaprapta In Penn Museum

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Sculpture Mahasthamaprapta in Penn Museum
-- Its Iconology and Possible Time Period

On either side of the entrance door of Chinese section in Penn Museum are two particularly charming life-sized Bodhisattva statues in gray limestone, C111 and C112, which are considered as a pair and most likely to be made by the same artist. They belong to the T’ang dynasty, that period in which Buddhist sculpture reaches its height of perfection.
C111, the left side one, with a headdress, is the main sculpture that I want to discuss in this paper. Being purchased from C. T. Loo , who’s been considers as the leading Chinese artifacts dealer in the twentieth century , the statue, combines a bodhisattva image with a lotus base, is in excellent condition, although …show more content…

Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara and Mahasthamaprapta are repeatedly referred to in the Amitayurdhyana Sutra (The Buddha Speaks of Amitabha Sutra), which was translated from Sanskrit into Chinese in the third century A.D. According to the Contemplation of Mahasthamaprapta, the 11th Chapter of the Amitayurdhyana Sutra, the crown of the Mahasthamaprapta is described as follows: His heavenly crown has five hundred jewel-flowers; each jewel-flower has five hundred jewel-towers, in each tower are seen manifested all the pure and excellent features of the far-stretching Buddha countries in the ten quarters. The turban on his head is like a lotus-flower; on the top of the turban there is a jewel pitcher, which is filled with various brilliant rays fully manifesting the state of Buddha. Whereas in front of his headdress Avalokitesvara usually displays a small standing image of Amida, from whom he emanates , the iconography of Mahasthamaprapta's is a small water vase, which symbolizes wisdom. All the elements for a crown of Mahasthamaprapta can be seen from the picture of C111’s on the right. The Sutra also says: All his other bodily signs are quite equal to those of Avalokitesvara, which is proved by the similarities between C111 and C112, if we assume C112 is the image of Avalokitesvara though his crown is …show more content…

Let’s compare his face with the head of a bodhisattva statue from Longmen Cave. The sharp-ridged eyebrows, the contemplative almond eyes, the triangular nose, the pointed chin, comprised this typical Northern Wei and early Eastern Wei style head. All of these facial features differ from the soft and round ones in C111. Moreover, from another comparison with the beautiful limestone head from the cave temple of Xiangtangshan, we can see that this more contemporary one is still with sharper contours, especially of the eyes and the mouth. Here the idealized face of a full-blown Tang beauty from Tianlongshan, with a small, slightly opened mouth, is so expressive that it seems as though he is about to speak. The shape of the head is rounder and the carving for facial features is softer with time going by, so the bodhisattva is more and more nearly human looking. By executing vertical comparison with Wei Dynasty, Northern Qi and Middle Tang’s bodhisattvas’ heads examples, we could perhaps draw a conclusion that C111’s style is Early

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