This article is an in-depth study of the Eleven-faced Avalokitesvara statue kept in Tokyo National Museum, which was originally collected in Tōnomine in Nara, and seeks to understand the elements of this artifact’s iconography, form, style, and literary source material. The statue shows an almost word-to-word conformity with descriptive passages in the Ekādasamukha-sūtra, which is closely related to the formation of the concept of dansō (sandalwood statue) in Buddhist art. The author conjectures that the statue was a work by members of a prominent group of sculptors in the Chinese continent, and was made in the Tang Dynasty sometime after the middle of the 7th century when the old and new translations of the Ekādasamukha-sūtra were successively created.
