Buddha Amitābha with Two Attending Bodhisattvas (1200s): Art, History and Details

Buddha Amitābha with Two Attending Bodhisattvas (1200s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The supreme deities that rule over the Western Paradise—Amitābha (阿彌陀 in Chinese), Avalokiteśvara (Guanyin 觀音), and Mahāsthāmaprāpta (Dashizhi 大勢至)—are here enclosed within a circle of light. To secure entry into that paradise for Buddhist followers of the Pure Land sect, one must recite the phrase namo amituofo (南無阿彌陀佛, Homage to the Buddha Amitābha). Here the phrase is repeated 10 times in calligraphy above the figures, reinforcing the need for continual recitation.

Object facts

• Title: Buddha Amitābha with Two Attending Bodhisattvas
• Date: 1200s
• Culture: China, Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Hanging scroll; ink and color on silk
• Dimensions: Painting: 134 x 79.7 cm (52 3/4 x 31 3/8 in.); Overall with knobs: 224.5 x 101.5 cm (88 3/8 x 39 15/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1974.35

A detail from the museum

Each line of calligraphy, which invokes the Buddha's name, emerges from a lotus blossom.

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Ho, Wai-kam, Sherman E. Lee, Laurence Sickman, and Marc F. Wilson. Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting: The Collections of the Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1980.
• Shin, Junhyoung Michael. “The Face-to-Face Advent of the Amitābha Triad: A Fifteenth-Century Welcoming Descent.” Cleveland Studies in the History of Art, vol. 6, 2001, pp. 28–47.

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.