An important small gilt-bronze figure of seated Buddha Korea, Unified Silla period, 8th Century

seated upon a circular base with the left hand resting upon the left knee and the right hand raised in abhayamudra, the 'fear not' gesture, the long robes draped diagonally across the bare chest and knotted with a ribboned belt across the waist and cascading in smooth and even folds down the shoulders and spreading around the crossed legs, the large rounded head finely cast with arched brows and elongated eyes and child-like smiling mouth, the flat hair set with a high domed usnisha

Brown stains on the hair and right part of the head and other parts, the gilt is lost on right and left cheeks, around the chest and some on the lobe. There is a break on the right knee (1cm x 8mm. and about 0.5mm. thickness).
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Seated Korean gilt-bronze Buddhas are relatively rarer than their standing counterparts and appear more closely influenced to their Chinese Tang period prototypes of the seventh and eighth centuries, in contrast to the elongated and slender Three Kingdoms period standing bodhisattvas and pensive Maitreya images which were so strongly influenced by the attenuated early Northern Wei dynasty of the late fifth century.

In its fuller proportions of the upper body and head, and in the sensitively layered drapery, the present figure appears closely related to a seated Amitabha image with original aureole and lotus base, excavated from Hwangbok-sa, 'Temple of Imperial Happiness,' Kuhwang-dong, Kyongju, which was dedicated before 706 AD by King Hyoso, and again by his son, King Songdok, see Pak Youngsook & Roderick Whitfield, Handbook of Korean Art. Buddhist Sculpture, Seoul, 2002, no. 38, pp. 204-217. It is also interesting to compare these smaller gilt-bronze votive images to their much larger counterparts executed in stone, such as the famous Sokkuram Buddha, seated in bumisparsamudra and clearly influenced by the High Tang 'International Style' of eighth century China, illustrated ibid., no. 48, pp. 250-9.