Cleveland Museum of Art
Miniature Votive Stupa
- Date
- 435 CE
- Medium
- steatite
- Culture
- China, Gansu province, Northern Wei dynasty (386-534)
- Department
- Chinese Art
- Institution
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Object ID
- 155644
From the Cleveland Museum of Art record
This sutra pillar, inscribed with a sacred Buddhist text, belongs to a group of miniature stupas ( jingta ) that were found exclusively in the Gansu corridor, Northwest China. Ranging in date between AD 426–36, some of them bear the names of the lay Buddhist donors who commissioned them. A stupa is an architectural round structure built for the veneration of Buddhist relics. Miniature stupas may have commemorated the visit of a sacred site or represented donations to religious communities and sites. There are trigrams, three horizontal lines, broken or continuous, above each of the eight bodhisattvas in the stupa's lower section.
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Provenance & credit
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- Credit line
- Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
- Provenance
- ?-1990: (Compagnie de la Chine et des Indes, Paris, France, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art) | 1990-: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
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