Gilt Bronze Standing Buddha with Inscription of the Seventh Year of Yeonga
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A small standing Buddha, barely taller than a hand, raises his right palm in the gesture of reassurance and lowers his left in the gesture of granting wishes. He is wrapped in a heavy robe whose hems flare outward like fins on either side, and behind him rises a flame shaped halo carved with swirling fire and three tiny seated Buddhas. The face is long, the smile is archaic and slightly stern, and the whole figure has a fierce energy out of all proportion to its size.
Turn to the back of the halo, which the museum displays so you can see it. An inscription of four lines gives the date, the seventh year of the Yeonga era, which corresponds to five hundred and thirty nine, and explains that monks of a temple in the Goguryeo kingdom made a thousand Buddhas for distribution and this was the twenty ninth. That makes it the oldest dated Buddhist statue found in Korea. The style, with its stiff symmetrical drapery and elongated proportions, follows the Chinese Northern Wei manner, which reached Goguryeo first among the three Korean kingdoms.
The statue was found by chance in nineteen sixty three in Uiryeong in the far south, hundreds of kilometres from Goguryeo territory, which shows how these small portable images travelled with monks and pilgrims across borders. It is designated National Treasure one hundred and nineteen. Few objects tell so much so economically: a date, a kingdom, a temple, a practice of mass production for the faithful, and the moment when Buddhism was taking root in Korea. Look for the carefully cut characters on the back before you move on to the larger statues in the room.
Did You Know? The inscription says it was the twenty ninth of a thousand Buddhas made by monks in Goguryeo, yet it turned up in a field in the far south of the peninsula in nineteen sixty three.
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