WEI dynasty Maitreya sculpture

#Wei #dynasty #china #buddhist #sculpture #maitreya

Perhaps one characteristic of chinese sculpture that rarely gets commented on is the tendency to "frame" images even freestanding ones and how auras and thrones become part of the support structure whether the material is stone or metal yet the clothing becomes simpler with more drapes and folds and less jewellery. 

Note the date WEI dynasty. These are "ancestors" of those elaborate Qing Tibetan influenced pieces.

Perhaps the relative simplicity of paintings and ceramic sculptures featuring Budai / Hotei is a response or reaction to this?

Maitreya in Indian Sculpture

#maitreya #kushan #gupta #indiansculpture #buddhistsculpture

Google Plus brilliantly showed the bottom image of the prior blog post as the top image instead of this!

Note how in Indian art Maitreya is masculine  

Now this Gupta  sculpture is from a couple of centuries later!

Still male but the mo has gone and if you've seen Khmer or Thai images of Maitreya you can see the links and the beginnings of a succession of changes to later versions in SE Asia and China

Next time back to China!

Maitreya One

The first known images of the #Boddhisattva #Maitreya are Indian or #Kushan #sculptures to be more precise.

Clearly a North Indian aristocrat but the first Chinese sculptors to create Buddhist images made this WEI dynasty stele.





And later we get a divergence between images like this but also identifications and depictions of Maitreya as Budai / Hotei.

Budai is an odd blend of Chan eccentric and Taoist Sage.

More about this next time.