Thousand-Armed Avalokiteshvara, Bodhisattva of Compassion (Philadelphia Museum of Art)

A Himalayan Buddhist cast metal sculpture of the early fourteenth century, held by the Philadelphia Museum of Art as object 105992, showing Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, in his eleven-headed, thousand-armed form. Two of the sculpture's original three tiers of cast arms survive together with the body, an unusual state of preservation for a multipiece work of this kind; a third layer of hands originally fanned across the back to complete the full count of one thousand. Each of the countless hands traditionally carries an eye in its palm, together standing for the bodhisattva's power to see, hear and act on behalf of every suffering being everywhere, a form whose textual basis lies in the Lotus Sutra and the Karandavyuha Sutra and which became, across Tang and Song dynasty China and the wider Himalayan Buddhist world, one of the most widely venerated images of compassion in the tradition.