Bodhisattva with 1000 Arms in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, February 2008

Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara with One Thousand Arms (Qianshou Guanynin)
Liao dynasty (907-1125), 10th- 11th century
Gilded bronze

Accession # 56.223

The prayerlike position of the two central hands, and the additional twenty-two arms, help to define this sculpture as a powerful form of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, the Buddhist personification of the virtue of compassion. Texts indicate that Avalokiteshvara can take as many as thirty-three different forms to help and guide the faithful, and the one with a thousand arms was particularly important in China from the tenth to the fourteenth century.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art label.