This expressively sculpture depicts the head of a luohan (the Chinese transliteration of the Sanskrit word, arhat), originally a term referring to those that had achieved a certain degree of enlightenment, but by the Tang dynasty in China (AD 618- 907), considered the disciples of Buddha Shakyamuni who maintain his teachings until the coming of the Future Buddha, Maitreya. The political strife of the seventh and eighth centuries left many devotees calling for Maitreya’s arrival, and thus elevated the importance of the luohan. That popularity endured for centuries after, even during times of relative peace and prosperity in China.
Prior to the seventh century, images of luohans were generally represented as a pair flanking an image of Buddha, usually identified as Kasyapa and Ananda, and were both two of the ten principle disciples of Buddha and important figures in the early Buddhist sangha (monkhood). In these depictions, the figures are usually shown with foreign, “Indian,” features with one, as in the present case, demonstrably older than the other. Such an arrangement can be found in the Northern Wei-era Central Bingyan Cave at Longmen as illustrated by A. Howard, et al. in Chinese Sculpture, New Haven, 2006, p. 238, fig. 3.39 and a niche at the Huangze Monastery in Sichuan Province, carved in the Northern Zhou period in ibid., p. 289, fig. 3.94. By the Tang dynasty onwards, however, the group of luohan had grown to at least sixteen and in some cases much more.
The present work likely dates from the Ming dynasty, and an exact identification other than potentially Kasyapa, is not possible. Compare with a stone head of a luohan with similarly rendered facial features but a more joyful expression in the collection of the Rijksmuseum, illustrated in Hai-Wai Yi-Chen (Chinese Art in Overseas Collections; Buddhist Sculpture), National Palace Museum, Taipei, 1986, p. 150, no. 140; and another similar head of a luohan, sold at Christie’s New York, 21 March 2000, lot 206.