Anonymous Korea, Choson Dynasty, 17th century

hanging scroll format, ink and color on silk, finely painted with the Buddha Sakyamuni seated on a lotus throne, with hands in bhumisparsa mudra and face in authoritative expression beneath an usnisha with jewel finial, framed by a mandorla of lotus scroll and a peaked nimbus with jeweled borders radiating light, flanked by Ananda and Kasyapa dressed as monks behind larger figures of Manjusri and Samantabhadra, dressed in long robes adorned with jewels and holding a lotus bearing a sutra and a scepter respectively, with a smaller image of Avalokitesvara seated in dhyanasana within a circular aureole floating before the throne of Buddha, shown in three-quarter view with a small Buddha Amitabha in its crown, all within a simple frame border with a pair of textile banners painted as if suspended from the top edge of the picture plane

The shaped mandorla and peaked nimbus appear particular to Choson dynasty images of the historical Buddha, Sakyamuni, also identified by his 'earth-witnessing' mudra recalling the episode of 'The Assault of Mara', Mara-vijaya. Compare the central Sakyamuni image within a painting of the Buddhas of the Three Worlds, from the seventeeth or eighteenth century, in the collection of the Ho-Am Museum, South Korea, exhibited Art of Amitabha's Pure Land: Longings for Rebirth in Paradise, Seoul, 1998, cat.no.16. However, ibid., cat.no.10, also bears the unusual feature of Avalokitesvara Potalaka floating within a nimbus before the Buddha throne, and may suggest an identification of the central Buddha with that of Amitabha. Compare also a slightly earlier related painting, exhibited at the Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum of Art, Buddhist Art of Koryo and Choson Dynasties, Korea, Yamaguchi, 1997, pl.29. The present painting bears the unusual painted detail of a rectangular frame with 'textile' banners, suggesting that the main image is to be contemplated as a metaphysical mandala, rather than mere pictorial representation, thereby enhancing its didactic power.

Icons depicting Sakyamuni attended by Manjusri and Samantabhadra may derive their iconography from the Lotus Sutra and the Avatamsaka Sutra. The Lotus Sutra, one of the earliest and most closely associated with Sakyamuni was first translated into Chinese in the year 255. In Korea, it became the doctrine for the Ch´ont´ae sect which was founded by Monk Uich´on in 1097. The innumerable paintings of the so-called Sakyamuni preaching at Vulture Peak, a composition favored by the Choson patrons and painters, depicts Sakyamuni preaching the Lotus Sutra in front of a large assembly. A triad of Sakyumuni and his two attendant bodhisattvas appears at the center of nearly all of these "assembly" paintings. For an eighteenth century example with the same subject, see Hongnam Kim, The Story of a Painting. A Korean Buddhist Treasure from The Mary and Jackson Burke Foundation, The Asia Society Galleries, New York, 1991, fig. 14, no. 17.