Important Sale Week
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Lots to be sold at Uppsala Auktionskammare’s Important Sale Week 10 – 13 December 2024
One day, a young man named Siddhartha Gautama, born in Lumbini in modern-day Nepal, left the confines of his family’s palace. Beyond the palace walls, he encountered human suffering for the first time in his life. Overwhelmed by what he had witnessed, he decided to renounce his way of living, and left his home in the middle of the night. After a period of pursuing asceticism, he sat down in the shade of a tree and meditated. When he awoke seven days later, he had extinguished his oblivion and feelings of loathing that kept the cycle of birth and death going. Gautama had achieved a state of complete spiritual consciousness and was no longer constrained by the physical world. He became the first Buddha, called Buddha Shakyamuni; the word ’Buddha’ being translated from sanskrit as ’Enlightened One’. This was the beginning of Buddhism.
By the second century AD, there were sanctuaries with foreign Buddhist monks established in China, although Buddhism may have been known in the country as early as the second century BC. By the fourth and fifth centuries AD, construction of massive cave temples had begun, with monumental depictions of Buddhist imagery carved out from the rock, with notable sites such as Dunhuang, Yungang, and Longmen.
Buddhist sculptures frequently illustrate interchanges between China, Tibet, Nepal and India. When Buddhism began to disappear from India after the 11th and 12th centuries, China, Tibet and Nepal, as well as Korea and Japan, became focal points for the development of Buddhist imagery. The present auction includes a Nepalese gilt bronze figure dating to the 14th or 15th century, depicting Buddha Shakyamuni, with one hand touching the ground beneath him in bhumisparsha mudra, calling on the earth to witness his enlightenment.
In the current sale, we present objects that would have been worshipped in temples or placed in domestic altar settings. The auction includes a fine gilt bronze figure of the bodhisattva Sitatapatra, set with coral and turquoise beads. According to early Buddhism, bodhisattvas are enlightened beings who refrain from entering nirvana in order to save others. Sitatapatra is a meditational deity, identified by her white parasol, who offers protection to all beings. The present figure is of Tibeto-Chinese descent, produced in China under the influence of Tibetan iconography. The sale also includes a red velvet and gold brocade altar frontal, above which such sculptures would have been placed.