Buddhist votive stele with carved Buddhist figures and inscriptions

Abstract

This is a Buddhist votive stele made in the sixth century in north central China. It probably stood either in the courtyard of a Buddhist monastery, or in a public place such as a market square, or at a major crossroads. It is iconographically complex: the two dragons at the top are decorative and conventional (more or less), but they enclose an image of the infant Buddha being bathed by nagas just after his birth. Working downward from the viewer’s perspective, the stele introduces a vinescroll border almost certainly adapted from Silk Road textiles; two rows of unnamed Buddhas, probably as a reference to the multiplicity of Buddhas described in many Chinese Mahayana sutras; a principal niche with a main Buddha icon, in this period probably Sakyamuni, surrounded by attendants, lions, guardians, and worshiping figures; then two rows of donor figures; and at the very bottom, an inscription about the circumstances of the stele’s dedication in year 529 by a Buddhist charitable society made up of laymen, laywomen, and monastics.