A magnificent inscribed gilt-bronze votive figure of Padmapani, Eastern Wei dynasty, dated wuding 2nd year, corresponding to 544

Collection of Sato Gengen (1888-1963).

Collection of Sakamoto Gorō (1923-2016).

Sotheby's Hong Kong, 5th October 2016, lot 3212.

Reflection and Enlightenment: Chinese Buddhist Gilt Bronzes from the Jane and Leopold Swergold Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2017-2018. 

Beatrice Chan, 'Reflection and Enlightenment: Chinese Buddhist Gilt Bronzes from the Jane and Leopold Swergold Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston', Arts of Asia, January/February 2018, pp 58-65.

Standing firmly yet elegantly before a flaming mandalora, this remarkable figure depicts Padmapani, the lotus-bearing manifestation of the bodhisattva Avalokitshvara (known in Chinese as Guanyin), as the embodiment of regal splendor and tranquility. Adorning the base of the stele, below an intricate carving of the Buddha, lies an inscription dating the piece to the Eastern Wei dynasty. Following the disintegration of the Northern Wei around 534 CE, the Eastern Wei took up the mantle of governing northern China. Although sculpture from this period retained some of the Indian influences of its predecessor, Eastern Wei figures like the present Padmapani have a number of more sinicized features. While the Gandharan-inspired works of the Northern Wei generally feature more rigid draping robes, curvilinear contours, slim bodies, and gently tilted heads, the current figure stands tall and straight. 

Similar depictions of Padmapani from this period are rare. Compare another gilt-bronze figure of Padmapani, dated to 543, in the Tokyo National Museum, illustrated in Mayuyama, Seventy Years, Tokyo, 1976, pl. 117; and a related Eastern Wei gilt-bronze figure of Maitreya, dated to 536, formerly in the collection of Duanfang (1861-1911) and now in the collection of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia (accession no. C355.1), illustrated by Osvald Sirén, Chinese Sculpture from the Fifth to the Fourteenth Century, New York, 1925, pl. 158. Other similar gilt-bronze figures of Padmapani dated to the Northern Wei can also be found in the Kuboso Memorial Museum of Arts, Izumi, Japan, illustrated in Rikuchou Jidai No Kondoubutsu [Gilt-bronze Buddhist figures from the Six Dynasties], Izumi, 1991, cat. no. 48; preserved in the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, from the collection of Grenville L. Winthrop (accession no. 1943.53.81); and in various important collections of early Buddhist bronzes in Saburō Matsubara, Chūgoku Bukkyō chōkoku shiron [History of Chinese Buddhist sculpture], vol. I, Tokyo, 1995, pls 73, 74, and 86-88.