Seated Buddha (c. 300 CE): Art, History and Details

Seated Buddha (c. 300 CE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Multiple images of seated Buddhas and related figures surrounded monuments called stupas that enshrined sacred relics. Made of stucco, which is a lime-based plaster material, the backs of the sculptures were fixed to the platform on which the hemispherical stupa was constructed. Visitors would see these images as they venerated the stupas by walking around them reverently, in a clockwise direction. The main stupa at Hadda reportedly contained relics of Shakyamuni Buddha, also known as Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of the Buddhism.

Object facts

• Title: Seated Buddha
• Date: c. 300 CE
• Culture: Afghanistan, Hadda, probably Tape Shotor
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: stucco
• Dimensions: Overall: 36.9 x 26 x 10.1 cm (14 1/2 x 10 1/4 x 4 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art - Kushan, Gandhara
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1967.39

A detail from the museum

The way the Buddha holds his hands on his crossed legs indicates that he is shown in meditation.

Collection credit

Edward L. Whittemore Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• "Year in Review." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 54, no. 10 (December 1967): 302–347.
• Haesner, Chhaya. "A Cultural Diffusion" in India and Greece, Connections and Parallels. Saryu Doshi, ed. Bombay: Marg Publications, 1985.
• Czuma, Stanislaw J., and Rekha Morris. Kushan Sculpture: Images from Early India. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1985.

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.