David Weldon and Jane Casey Singer, The Sculptural Heritage of Tibet: Buddhist Art in the Nyingjei Lam Collection, London, 1999, fig. 61.

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 1996–2005 (on loan).

The Sculptural Heritage of Tibet: Buddhist Art in the Nyingjei Lam Collection, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 1999.

Arte Buddhista Tibetana: Dei e Demoni dell' Himalaya, Palazzo Brich🐽erasio,Turin, 2004, cat. no. IV. 51.

Ru🌺bin Museum of Art, New York, 200⛄5-2018 (on loan).

Lama, Patron, Artist: The Great Situ Panchen,🐼 Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 2010.

Casting the Divine: Sculptures of the Nyingjei Lam Collection, Rubin Museum of Art, New York, 2012-2013.

The master’s cap is a type worn by the Karmapa and Sharmapa lineages of the Kagyu order, with upturned lappets, a visvavajra at the front, and an emblem above depicting the sun and a crescent moon. The lama is dressed in monastic robes with what appears to be a purba secured in the waist band, and is seated on a lion throne with hands folded together holding a gem-filled kapala. A large dharmachakra wheel is placed before the throne. The bodhisattva Manjushri appears beneath flanked to the left by a tantric adept wielding a purba, a Kagyu lama to the right, and two monks beneath. The carving represents a mountain setting with peaks enveloped in clouds above, a diminutive figure of Buddha at the apex flanked by bo𒈔dhisat🎀tvas, and monks and Kagyu lineage holders surrounding the central figure.

The cloud design at the apex of the carving and the style of the central figure suggest a date of around the fifteenth century. Fine grained beige stone carvings are rare in Tibet during this period but a similar colored stone is used in a thirteenth century Tibetan carving of Vaishravana which is identified as possibly phyllite, see Ulrich von Schroeder, Buddhist Sculptures in Tibet, Hong Kong, 2001, vol. II, pp 894-95, pl. 207C. Compare a fourteenth or fifteenth century Tibetan stone figure of Acala in Gilles Béguin, Art sacré du Tibet: Collection Alain Bordier, Paris, 2013, cat. no. 55. See also a miniature ivory roundel formerly in the Wesley and Caroline Halpert Collection, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (acc. no. 2003.495) (fig.1), that depicts a Kagyu hierarch surrounded by Kagyupa lineage holders and deities, Marylin M. Rhie and Robert A. F. Thurman, Wisdom and Compassion:

The Sacred Art of Tibet, Tokyo, 1997, p. 139.