Seated Guanyin (觀音菩薩)

This small-scale altar depicting the bodhisattva Guanyin was made about two hundred years after the other devotional statue of the same Buddhist deity on view in this case. Offering us insight into the way such devotional statues were originally seen and experienced by worshippers, both works also chronicle shifts in style and iconography over time within this beloved genre of Chinese Buddhist statuary. Unlike the informal "royal ease" pose of the earlier Guanyin, for example, the goddess now assumes a rigid frontal position while seated cross-legged in the so-called "lotus position" (fujiazuo). She sits perched atop a lotus seat—symbolic of spiritual enlightenment and rebirth in the paradisiacal gardens of Buddha’s heaven—supported by a pillar fashioned in shape of a gushing spring. Deep in meditation, Guanyin's head bends slightly down to the front and her eyes are closed, thereby avoiding eye-contact with the worshipper.