The paper aims to study an inscribed Śākyamuni sculpture, which has been kept in the Palace Museum in Peking since 1959. Despite a lack of information about its past, it can be determined that the bronze statue was preserved in Tibet once (§1). Some stylistic features, which are in classical Kashmir style (§2) and the inscription, which is written in proto-Śāradā (§3.1), allow for a probable dating of the bronze to the first half of the seventh century, during the time of the Kārkoṭa Dynasty (approx. 625–855). The name of the donor, a Buddhist monk (śākyabhikṣu) named Vīryaśanti, appears for the first time in the inscription published here thus adding to the category of monks as a particular donor group alongside royals, officials, upāsakas, and other lay people (§3.2). Thanks to a close cooperation between Peking and Freiburg, the corpus of bronzes originating from historical Northwest India has been greatly expanded in recent years. The final part of this article gives an overview of the recent publications concerning nine inscribed bronzes, which have been newly found in China (§4).
目次
§1. Some Basic Information about the Buddha Statue 57 §2. The Size and Some Stylistic Features 58 §3. 1. The Inscription and its Dating 59 §3.2. The Monks as Donors of Buddhist Sculptures 60 §4. An Overview of the Studies on Nine Inscribed Bronzes newly found in China 62
