Maitreya Gilt copper with painted details Mongolia, School of Zanabazar

The Buddha of the Future stands with elegant poise, flexed at the waist with the left leg taking his weight. He holds the kundika, sacred water flask, in his lowered left hand with the right held up in the gesture of argumentation, vitarka mudra. He wears a close fitting diaphanous dhoti tied at the waist, a sash tied around the hips and falling to the right ankle, and with his upper torso naked but for a Brahmanical beaded cord and an antelope skin over his left shoulder. Maitreya is identified by the stupa set into the plaited locks covering the tall ushnisha, topped by a flaming jewel finial.

The great sculptor, engineer and Mongolian religious hierarch Zanabazar (1635-1723) introduced the cult of Maitreya to Mongolia after his journeys to Tibet and his seminal exchanges with important Tibetan religious leaders. It is said that Zanabazar himself concentrated his worship on Maitreya and he is reputed to have cast at least two important images of the Future Buddha in the style of the present sculpture; see Berger and Bartholomew, 1995, no 100, and fig. 2, pp. 280-1. He derived inspiration for his sculptures from the medieval period Nepalese and eastern Indian images that were housed and revered in the Tibetan monasteries that he had visited. The sensuous form and graceful movement of this sculpture of Maitreya echo Licchavi and Transitional Period (c. 300-1200) ideals of Nepalese art as expressed in an important gilt copper sculpture of Maitreya now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; see Pal, 1978, no. 95a, p. 164. The faces of Zanabazar sculptures are also modeled on early Indian and Nepalese sculpture that feature the Gupta influenced ideal of a long aquiline nose and protruding lower lip. The hair is plaited in similar style to the Metropolitan Maitreya with tresses falling to the shoulders. Reference to early Nepalese models, including the Metropolitan Maitreya, is seen in the way that the sacred cord forms a loop where it passes beneath the sash tied around the hips. Where the Metropolitan Nepalese Maitreya wears a small tiara, the Zanabazar statues have no crowns but show a stupa in the hair, as seen on another early Nepalese seated Maitreya; see ibid., no. 95b, p. 165. 

Apart from the present sculpture and the two Maitreya bronzes in Mongolian temple collections, only one further large and important Maitreya image from the school of the renowned artist Zanabazar is published, and is now in now in the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University; see Rhie and Thurman 1991, no. 32, p. 141.