 Hi, and welcome to today's Barns Takeout. My name is Amy Dillet. I'm a collections researcher at the Foundation. Today, we're going to go up to gallery number 15 to look at this beautiful head of a bodhisattva made in China in the eighth century. Let's zoom in a little bit closer. For a Buddhist site called Tianlongshan, which means heavenly dragon mountain, and actually this other head of a bodhisattva, as well as this guardian figure over here, both came from the same site. Now before we look at those more closely, I'd like to take just a second to think about how they fit within this display at the Barns Foundation, which Albert Barns had designed and still is exactly as he left it. And the way he grouped things was on formal terms only. And so something that strikes me right away is color, where we see the white of the stone carried over into the exposed canvas of this unfinished work up here by Paul Cézanne, or if we go in a little bit more closely. Another thing that I see is this depiction of a head up here, looking much perhaps like the Buddhist ones on this Greek face from southern Italy, made in the fourth century, I believe BCE. And one of my favorite connections is just how much the tiara, the dual tiara on this bodhisattva over here looks like the 20th century Navajo silver jewelry that's displayed in the cases around it. So let's go on in then and take a closer look at this bodhisattva. So here it is. Now in Buddhism, a Buddha is somebody who has achieved complete enlightenment and entered a state of nirvana, which means a cessation of being. A bodhisattva is somebody who has achieved sufficient enlightenment in order to reach nirvana, but stops himself short of that to stay in the world and help others along their own paths to enlightenment. And I just love how this really compassionate function we can see manifest in the face of this bodhisattva with this gentle smile and very serene kind eyes. If we look a little bit closer, we can still see the delineation of the pupils in a darker pigment, as well as other traces of the original polychromy or multicolored paint that would have enlivened it originally. And in art, one of the ways in which bodhisattvas are distinguished from Buddhas is things like their princely jewelry, their elaborate coffures. So you can see that they're still retaining traces of roofliness. And one good way to look a bit further into that is we do have a photograph from the early 1920s. Here's the head of the bodhisattva we've been looking at on its original body as an attendant to a Buddha in cave number 14 at Tianlongshan, the site from which it came. And here we can see, let's look a little closer, the Buddha unadorned the only loincloth frontal, very relatively simple coffure hair, a big nimbus straight around him sitting down. The bodhisattva, on the other hand, attending him, we can see looking toward him in a sort of a three-quarters view, a nimbus still not quite as big, these rather relatively fancy clothes as compared to the loincloth, and then this gorgeous, tremendously elegant, sinuousness curved to his body that traces to Indian art as an original inspiration from, and Indian and Central Asian art as inspiration from, for a Buddhist art of the Tang dynasty during this period. And the ways in which people would have engaged with these statues is either the monks who lived at Tianlongshan or other members of the Buddhist faithful could come to the caves which were guarded outside by guardians such as the figure that also is in the caves at the barns. They'd go into these caves and be able to engage with these sculptures as guides for meditation and devotion that would help them work toward their own path toward enlightenment, but also in cases offer more tangible benefits like health or good fortune. And something I was fascinated to learn is that these statues weren't simply instructive or didactic, but there are plenty of miracle tales from our period that describe these statues coming alive, talking, even walking around by means of a kind of force in the world that was activated in the interaction between the deities and the faithful person channeled through these statues. And so they were tremendously active agents along the path to salvation. And of course, they're not in the context, in this original context of the cave anymore. The Qing dynasty fell in 1911 and soon after that, the statues were popularized by photographs such as these and taken out and dispersed to many, many museums worldwide. And as a matter of fact, the head of ours on its back has a Mandarin Chinese word that means beautiful in a kind of supernatural sense. So it's not here, like many others from Tianlongshan, it's on display in a museum case. With that said, I think that these beautiful heads still offer wonderful opportunities for meditation, thinking about the types of contemplative and perhaps devotional practices that can unite us around the world today. So thank you so much for listening. That's it for today's Takeout. I'm Tom Collins, New Bauer family, executive director of the Barnes Foundation. I hope you enjoyed Barnes Takeout. Subscribe and make sure your post notifications are on to get daily servings of art. Thanks for watching and for your support of the Barnes Foundation.