Arhat Chudapantaka

Chudapantaka is one of the sixteen arhats, the original followers of the Buddha. He can be recognized by his distinctive hand gesture, two hands placed in his lap in meditation. Typically the arhats are depicted as a group, so this painting is likely part of a larger set of up to twenty-three paintings.Arhats represent the monastic ideal and preservers of the monastic code of conduct (vinaya). The arhats are often invoked in rituals of confession and mending vows, performed before images such as these. Tibetan artists adopted Chinese conventions of depicting arhats as wizened sages with exaggerated features, living in secluded mountain caves, drawn from Daoist immortal imagery. As a genre arhat painting often carries with it aspects of Chinese artistic and material culture.This Tibetan painting closely follows an early fifteenth-century composition produced in the Chinese Ming court. The early Ming emperors gave many such paintings on silk to high-ranking Tibetan religious clerics. This Tibetan painting faithfully reproduces many aspects of the Chinese model, from figures to landscape, though somewhat more schematically. However, in the highly polished Chinese court productions, the opulence of ornamentation often competes for the viewer’s attention, whereas in this Tibetan work the divine figures are more emphasized. This painting also includes a Tibetan innovation to this genre, a long-life deity, the Buddha Amitayus, hovering in the sky.