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

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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