A limestone sculpture with traces of pigment, China, Hebei province, Southern Xiangtangshan caves, Northern Qi dynasty, c. 550, showing Mahakasyapa, the disciple of Shakyamuni, standing in meditative concentration with closed eyes, holding a cylindrical reliquary for the Buddha's ashes. Held today by the Cleveland Museum of Art under accession 1972.166, Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund.
Facts
Custody
Custody HistoryLike most Xiangtangshan Buddhist sculpture now in Western and Japanese museums, this figure was cut from the cave temple complex during a wave of plundering that began around 1909, amid the political upheaval surrounding the fall of the Qing dynasty, and stripped the caves of most of their sculptural decoration by the 1930s. Since 2003 a University of Chicago research team has used three dimensional scanning to identify dispersed Xiangtangshan sculptures in collections worldwide and digitally reunite them with the cave niches they were removed from. 1 Physical Form
MediumLimestone with traces of pigment, Northern Qi dynasty, c. 550, Cleveland Museum of Art 1972.166 1 Medium (class) Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Source Standing Disciple Mahakasyapa Holding a Cylindrical Reliquary, accession 1972.166 (Cleveland Museum of Art)
Depicts
The Cleveland Museum of Art's own title and description name Mahakasyapa directly, the disciple of Shakyamuni holding a reliquary for the Buddha's ashes, standing in meditative concentration, from the Southern Xiangtangshan program whose Ananda figure the predecessor lane closed at the Metropolitan Museum.
Source Standing Disciple Mahakasyapa Holding a Cylindrical Reliquary, accession 1972.166 (Cleveland Museum of Art)
Sources
1. National Endowment for the Humanities, "Worshipped, Plundered, and Digitized" (2010)
National Endowment for the Humanities, Humanities magazine (neh.gov), 2010catalogue record, medium/object-type descriptionQuote, catalogue record, medium/object-type description
A limestone sculpture with traces of pigment, China, Hebei province, Southern Xiangtangshan caves, Northern Qi dynasty, c.
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