Birth of the Buddha (800s): Art, History and Details

Birth of the Buddha (800s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The historical Buddha known as Shakyamuni was born Prince Siddhartha around the end of the 400s BCE near the border of what is today India and Nepal. His mother, Queen Maya, was traveling from her husband’s capital to her family home to give birth, but the baby came early and was born in a grove of shala trees. The miraculous circumstances of his birth are related in a number of textual sources. They state that he emerged from her right side, so Queen Maya here is shown grasping the branch of a tree with her right hand raised, like a nature divinity. The baby was received by Indra, king of the gods, and immediately he took seven steps. The figure at the lower right is Brahma, the Hindu god of creation. In works of Buddhist art, Hindu gods appear as subservient or inferior to the Buddha. The Sanskrit inscription records a common Buddhist prayer of this period: Phenomena arise from causes; The causes have been revealed by the Buddha, As have the means for their cessation; Thus has been declared by the Great Ascetic.

Object facts

• Title: Birth of the Buddha
• Date: 800s
• Culture: Northeastern India, Bengal, Pala dynasty (730-1197)
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: Black chlorite
• Dimensions: Overall: 46.4 x 27.3 x 11.4 cm (18 1/4 x 10 3/4 x 4 1/2 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1959.349

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Miniatures and Small Sculptures from India. University Gallery, April 10th thru May 29th, 1966. Gainesville: College of Architecture and Fine Arts, University of Florida, 1966.
• Marcus, Margaret F. “Sculptures from Bihar and Bengal.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 54, no. 8, 1967, pp. 240–262.
• Cleveland Museum of Art. Motherhood across Time. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2021.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.