A BLACK STONE STELE DEPICTING MAHAKALA PANJARANATA, TIBET, 13TH-14TH CENTURY

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A BLACK STONE STELE DEPICTING MAHAKALA PANJARANATA, TIBET, 13TH-14TH CENTURY Mahakala holds a ritual knife over a skull bowl, while clutching the skull-scepter in the crook of his left arm. He is clad in snakes and wears a tiger skin, a garland of severed heads around his neck. This corpulent and hieratic bronze figure of Mahakala standing on a corpse closely follows formal iconographic conventions for the protector deity established in Pala and Licchavi art. Dimensions: Height 19 cm A powerful Buddhist protector deity, Mahakala is a manifestation of divine wrath employed to remove internal and external obstacles. This wrathful deity is considered especially effective in military applications. Beginning in the thirteenth century, the Mongol state employed Tibetan Buddhism as a means to power, both symbolically, as a path to legitimation via sacral kingship, and literally, as a ritual technology to physical power through the use of magic, which was most clearly demonstrated in Mahakala rites. The Mongol court singled out the wrathful figure of Mahakala in his form as Panjaranatha (“Lord of the Pavilion”) as state protector and focus of the imperial cult. This variant of Panjaranata Mahakala represents his form in the Arya Nagarjuna tradition. Rather than depicted in a squatting position, Mahakala is deliberately modeled without a wooden bar across his arms and both knees locked in a rigid yet powerful stance. Believed to have lived around the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, Arya Nagarjuna is a legendary Indian Mahasiddha credited with founding the Middle Way (Madhyamaka), a fundamental text for Mahayana and Vajrayana philosophy which expounds on the emptiness (shunyata) of all phenomena as the ultimate nature of reality. Likewise, this form traces its earliest known roots to Pala and early Nepalese art. A Pala precedent for this mode of depiction is exemplified by a c. 11th-century stele of Mahakala from Lakhi Sarai (see Bautze-Picron, "An Indian Site of Late Buddhist Iconography and Its Position within the Asian Buddhist World", in Silk Road Art and Archaeology, vol. 2, 1991/2, p. 277, fig. 16). Meanwhile, a 9th-century Licchavi stele in the Syambunath Museum, Kathmandu, provides a precedent for the subject in Nepal (see the Huntington Archive, scan number 50555). Auction result comparison: Type: Closely related Auction: Sotheby’s New York, 15 March 2017, lot 207 Mid-Estimate: USD 25,000 or approx. EUR 30,000 converted and adjusted for inflation at the time of writing Expert remark: Compare the related modeling, manner of carving, stone, and subject.

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