A silver-inlaid bronze figure of Khasarpana Lokeshvara, Pakistan, Swat Valley, 8th century

Acquired circa 1980s.

Khasarpana Lokeshvara, or 'Sky-Flier' Lokeshvara, has origins rooted in the Garandavyuha Sutra, an important Mahayana Buddhist text. In this sutra, Khasarpana is described as a bodhisattva who possesses the ability to traverse the sky. The name 'Khasarpana' is derived from Sanskrit, where 'khasar' means sky and 'pana' means to traverse or move through. This title, meaning 'Sky-Flier' for the significant deity, is also described by 16th/17th-century Tibetan lama and historian Taranatha as originating with a story of the bodhisattva flying to meet and support an early Indian Buddhist practitioner named Shantivarman.

While various texts describe Khasarpana, he is typically portrayed in the Action Tantra class with a crown featuring an image of the Buddha Amitabha. He is depicted as white, adorned with ornaments, wearing an antelope skin over his shoulder, with his right hand in the boon-granting mudra, and holding a lotus flower in his left hand. He is seated on a moon disc atop a lotus in the posture of royal ease. Like most Vajrayana deities, there are multiple self-contained practices where the deity is known by the same name but appears slightly different. Sculptures of these deities may not capture all the nuances that distinguish them as described in their source texts.

The present sculpture fits very well within the sculptural milieu of the Swat Valley with its extremely tapered waist, silver-inlaid eyes, deeply incised and highly arched brows, and simplified lotus petals adorning the figure’s base. This figure likely exhibited a pointed halo behind the deity’s head, as indicated by a metal loop at the back of the sculpture into which this would have been affixed. A sculpture of the future Buddha Maitreya in the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art (accession no. 66-22) is worthy of direct comparison to the present figure. Linrothe describes the figure as originating in 'Greater Kashmir', or west of Kashmir in the Swat Valley where 'softer definition of parts of the torso and the long and broad lotus leaves' can be seen. 

According to Linrothe: “Those tendencies were also felt in Gilgit, which probably had direct trade and cultural relations with the Swat Valley, to which it was closer geographically than the Kashmir valley” (see R. Linrothe, Collecting Paradise: Buddhist Art of Kashmir and its Legacies, Rubin Museum of Art, New York, 2014, pp 64-65, fig. 1.33). The material culture of the Swat Valley, which has similarities to that of Kashmir, evidently has similar hallmark qualities; as such the present sculpture is worthy of comparison to an image of Sugatismarsana Lokesvara attributed to Kashmir in the Brooklyn Museum of Art (accession no. 84.144).