Seated buddha,

ca. 510

This graceful figure exemplifies how the artists involved in creating Buddhist imagery in China transformed the Indian and Central Asian models that inspired their artistic production. This buddha was originally attached to a wall in a Buddhist cave-temple, possibly at Longmen, Henan province. Chinese artisans discreetly covered parts of the body that Indian sculptors would have been depicted nude by adding drapery, arranged here in graceful, schematic folds tumbling into regular zigzags over the pedestal. The faint smile reflects a contemporary artistic convention for conveying a figure’s heightened spiritual state. The right hand is posed in the abhaya mudra, a ritual gesture urging the worshipper to have no fear. The downward-pointing left hand represents the bhumisparsha mudra, which calls on the Earth to bear witness to the truth of the Buddha’s teachings.