A silk votive painting from the cave-temple library at Dunhuang, showing two standing figures of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara facing each other in near mirror-image — the figure on the left holding a flower, the one on the right a vase. Between them a central cartouche carries paired dedicatory inscriptions, each read outward from the middle. They record the wishes of the donor, a man named Yiwen, who had fallen under Tibetan rule and prayed above all to return to his home, and who dedicated the image so that his deceased parents might escape the lower realms and be reborn in the Pure Land. One of the grandest of the Dunhuang paintings attesting to the popularity of Avalokiteshvara among individual devotees, it is rendered in fine ink outline with delicate colour shading.
