Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Buddha Shakyamuni granting boons
India, Nelakondapalli, Khammam District, Telangana
Not on view
This bronze Buddha, recovered in the 1990s by villagers from a rivulet near the monastery at Nelakondapalli, is the largest such bronze image preserved in the Deccan. Portable icons, along with palm-leaf sutra manuscripts, were routinely carried home by foreign monks, as described by the Chinese pilgrim-monk Faxian in the early fifth century CE. (A series of larger metal icons, the so-called Missionary Buddhas, produced in Sri Lanka, have also been found in Southeast Asia.) Such metal images testify to the patronage of the Visnukundin dynasty of Andhra, successors to the Ikshvaku rulers, who made gifts for the maintenance of Buddhist monasteries as late as the sixth century CE.
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