A BRONZE FIGURE OF A BUDDHA SHAKYAMUNI, LACKING THE HEAD, GANDHARA OR SWAT VALLEY OR LATER

拍品描述

A BRONZE FIGURE OF A BUDDHA SHAKYAMUNI, LACKING THE HEAD, GANDHARA OR SWAT VALLEY OR LATER Cast in the round and seated in dhyanasana upon a stepped rectangular throne raised on a double-lotus pedestal, the figure preserved from the shoulders downward. The body is enveloped in a closely pleated sanghati covering both shoulders, the drapery rendered as a dense series of parallel ridges that fall in cascading U-shaped folds across the chest and pool over the crossed legs, with the hem fanning out in finely incised striations to either side of the ankles. The right hand extends over the right knee in bhumisparshamudra, the gesture of touching the earth, while the left rests in the lap, palm upward. The throne front is articulated with a recessed rectangular panel flanked by two small standing lions or attendant figures at the corners, their forms abraded but still legible. Beneath, a row of bold lotus petals encircles the plinth, set above a plain rectangular base. The surface carries a heavy green patina with malachite-toned accretion across the throne and base, and warmer reddish-bronze tones disclosed on the high points of the drapery and the dorsa of the hands. The iconography places the image within the established type of the earth-touching Buddha, the moment at which Shakyamuni, seated beneath the Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya, called the earth to witness his right to enlightenment against the assaults of Mara. The bhumisparshamudra is the defining gesture of this episode and the most widely reproduced of the Buddha's hand-positions in the eastern Buddhist world. The throne supported by lions identifies the seat as the simhasana, the lion-throne, a marker of the Buddha's status as Shakyasimha, the Lion of the Shakyas, and a convention by which the historical Buddha is set apart from other meditating figures. The double-lotus base below carries its own meaning, the lotus being the emblem of purity arising uncontaminated from the mud of samsara, here serving as the cosmological support of the enlightened being. The treatment of the drapery, in tightly ribbed concentric folds that obey the geometry of the body rather than the weight of cloth, belongs to the post-Gandharan idiom of the northwestern subcontinent, in which the late classical conventions of Gandhara passed into the workshops of the Swat Valley and the western Himalayan foothills. Bronze, in this context, was the medium of portable devotional sculpture, intended for household shrines, monastic cells, and pilgrim use, and the small scale of the present figure is consistent with that function. Surviving Swat Valley and related northwestern bronzes are typically of modest size, cast solid or with minimal core, and frequently show the characteristic loss of the head where the casting was thinnest at the neck or where the figure was deliberately defaced. This figure exemplifies the small-scale bronze devotional production of the northwestern subcontinent in the transitional centuries between Gandharan late antiquity and the mature Kashmiri and Swat traditions. The ribbed drapery convention, the lion-throne with corner supporters, and the prominent lotus base together register a vocabulary that would carry forward into the Buddhist bronzes of the wider western Himalayan region.

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