Provenance:
Arnold H. Lieberman, New York
The Kronos Collections, acquired in 2004
A powerful Buddhist protector deity, Mahakala is a manifestation of divine wrath employed to remove internal and external obstacles. His power is conveyed through the deity’s fierce appearance—bulging eyes, fiery eyebrows, bared fangs, and flaming unruly hair secured by a serpent.
He holds the skull-cup (kapala) and a flaying knife (karttrka) in his raised hands, a rectangular baton (danda) with flaming jewels at the sides is balanced in the crooks of his arms. His ornaments include a tiger-skin loincloth, bone and serpent jewelry, disk earrings, and a crown of skulls and foliate cakras.
This wrathful deity is considered particularly effective in military contexts. Starting in the thirteenth century, the Mongol state leveraged Tibetan Buddhism to consolidate power, both symbolically, through sacral kingship for legitimacy, and practically, through ritualistic magic, most notably Mahakala rites. The Mongol court elevated the wrathful figure of Mahakala in his Panjarnata form ("Lord of the Pavilion") as the state protector and centerpiece of the imperial cult. This form of Mahakala became a symbol of Qubilai Khan (1215–1294), the renowned Mongol emperor and founder of the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), embodying the destructive, wrathful power of the universal ruler (chakravartin).
Anige (1245–1306), a master artist from Nepal and head of the Yuan imperial atelier, created a sculpture of Panjarnata Mahakala for Qubilai Khan's final conquest of China, making it a potent symbol of both Qubilai's reign and the Yuan imperial lineage. This association remained so strong that even four centuries later, when the Manchus conquered China in the seventeenth century, they sought to position themselves as Qubilai's rightful successors. In 1635, they installed what they claimed was the same statue of Mahakala in the Manchu imperial shrine at Mukden.
