They strikingly proclaim the Buddhist character of the sculpture. The thousand arms it was endowed with form an amazing fan, splayed out like a peacock’s outspread tail. The twenty-two pairs of principal limbs suggesting various but symmetrical movements are matched by hundreds of small arms. Handled more schematically, they form two half-moon-shaped groups on several rows placed on each side of the shoulders.
Everything here calls to mind a familiar image of the Buddhist pantheon, the Avalokiteshvara or Lokeshvara bodhisattva, “the Lord of the Worlds”, the one “who sees and who hears”, held to be the incarnation of one of the most important Buddhist virtues: Compassion. Here, more specifically, he is the “Lord of the Worlds endowed with a thousand hands and a thousand eyes,” a clear symbol of the infinite Compassion towards the faithful in their quest for Buddha’s Way. This Buddhist entity enjoyed incomparable fervour throughout the Asian world, from India to Central Asia, wherever the schools of the Great Vehicle were adopted. His worship was the object of great favour, particularly in the context of the development of Zen Buddhism, by the 9th-10th centuries.
Represented standing, in Glory, in a frontal position, it is entirely coated with a gold lacquer that confers on it a highly spectacular cosmic dimension.
The sculpture belongs to a complete Vietnamese Buddhist pantheon, unique outside of Vietnam, that Gustave Dumoutier (1850-1904) had offered to the Musée Guimet by the end of 1889, when the Paris World’s Fair closed down and where he had presented a “Tonkinese Buddhist pagoda” fitted with all the cult furnishings and enlivened by priests from Hanoi.
