Illustration to the Travels of Sudhana from the Gandavyuha of the Avatamaska Sutra
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Sages and Heroes: Storytelling in Asian Art, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, April 12, 2025–November 30, 2025, no cat.
Sudhana is a beloved prodigy in China. Perhaps because a child symbolizes the purity of mind, he is often depicted as a pre-teen boy. The boy is often seen as an acolyte of Guanyin.
Guangsheng Monastery, Hongdong, Shanxi province, China, early 14th century-probably 1927 [1];
With Hua Ku Shan Fang, Peiping (today Beijing), by 1933 [2];
Purchased from Hua Ku Shan Fang by the dealer Otto Burchard (1892-1965), Peiping (today Beijing), 1933-1947 [3];
His gift to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1947.
NOTES:
[1] This painting was installed on the south wall of the main hall, the Mahavira Hall (Daxiong baodian), of the Guangsheng monastery’s lower temple. A stele in the temple, dated 1929, described how the temple’s abbot sold paintings from the temple in 1927 to raise funds for repairing the building. The pictorial narrative of The Pilgrimage of Sudhana, of which this painting was part, was divided into pieces and sold as individual episodes. At least four of them remain in the Mahavira Hall. For more about the mural’s history, see Ling-en Lu, “Pigment Style and Workshop Practice in the Yuan Dynasty Wall Paintings from the Lower Guangsheng Monastery” in Original Intentions: Essays on Production, Reproduction, and Interpretation in the Arts of China, eds. Nick Pearce and Jason Steuber (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2012), 74-137.
[2] According to Otto Burchard, in a letter to Laurence Sickman, Curator of Asian Art, October 17, 1933, Nelson-Atkins Archives, MS001, box 1a, folder 34.
[3] This painting was on loan from Burchard to the Nelson-Atkins from 1934-1947.
