Votive tablet with design of One Hundred Buddhas

Clay votive tablets featuring the Buddha, quotes from Buddhist texts, and divine figures represent significant archaeological evidence of Buddhist art in Southeast Asia. Such tablets were made as objects of offering and as acts of merit-making.This Burmese votive tablet is inset with one hundred small Buddhas in molded low relief, each seated on a double lotus plinth against a beaded mandala. Each Buddha holds the fingers of his right hand in the popular bhumisparsa mudra (gesutre of “touching the earth to witness”). The back of the tablet bears a Pali inscription in Old Mon script, stating that the tablet was commissioned by Kyanzittha, considered to be one of the great rulers of the Pagan dynasty from the eleventh and twelfth centuries.