Footnotes

A COPPER ALLOY FIGURE OF VAJRAPANI
TIBET, 12TH/13TH CENTURY

西藏 十二/十三世紀 金剛手菩薩銅像

Provenance:
With Claude de Marteau, Brussels, by 1970s

This early Tibetan bronze offers a spirited depiction of Buddhism's primary protector deity, Canda Vajrapani (lit. 'fierce thunderbolt-wielder'). His large belly and disproportionate head convey a dwarfish appearance that betrays Vajrapani's ancestry as a yaksha in Indian Buddhism. (In the Sadhanamala, an important Vajrayana treatise on iconography composed between the 5th and 11th centuries, Vajrapani is referred to as a yaksha-general.) With snakes underfoot and left leg fully cocked, he leans on his right knee in "warrior pose" (pratyalidha), while brandishing a nine-pronged vajra and displaying the gesture of expelling harmful phenomena with his left hand (karana mudra). His bulging eyes stare intently as he snarls. Heightened by the contrasting orange and cold gold paint, his expression bears a ferocity dispelling any doubt that he would not subdue whatever threatened the Buddhist follower. The orange pigment, along with the flame-like serrated edge of the oval mandorla behind him, allude to fire's symbolic power to consume and transform, like Vajrapani's capacity to purify negative ailments obstructing the practitioner.

Inspired by the many portable bronzes that Tibetan pilgrims brought from Northeastern India, this sculpture represents an early Tibetan image drawing heavily on the models of the Pala style of the 12th century. Examples of such Pala bronzes preserved in Lhasa monasteries are published in von Schroeder, Buddhist Sculptures in Tibet, Vol. I, 2001, pp. 302-3, nos. 102A & C. Compared with later Tibetan bronzes, the present figure exhibits a restraint of ornamentation that was informed by an Indian emphasis on the beauty, strength, and power of the relatively unclad divine body. This connection is also evident in the broad, flattened lotus petals around the base. Two early Tibetan bronzes of Acala also preserved in Lhasa monasteries form good points of comparison for the present bronze (ibid., Vol. II, p. 1113, nos. 291B-D).