From Sacred Voice to Wearable Form: Material Translation and the Kalavinka as Jewelry in the Song–Liao World

Abstract

This article examines the transcultural and transmedial transformation of the kalavinka motif along the Silk Road, situating its development within the interpretive framework of the Indian kinnara/kinnarītradition. It asks how a figure associated with wondrous sound and devotional praise in Buddhist cosmology came to function as a wearable ornament without losing its religious identity. Through close formal analysis of Dunhuang murals from the Tang period (618–907 CE), the study identifies three interrelated visual processes that prepared the motif for mobility across media: the fusion of gendered pairs into an androgynous form, the progressive elongation and ornamental stylization of the tail, and the reorientation of bodily pose into compact, suspension-friendly configurations. These mechanisms are then examined in relation to eleventh-century painted and excavated materials, including donor adornment in Western Thousand Buddha Cave 16, a Khara Khoto scroll, a Liao (916–1125 CE) gold kalavinka earring, and a Western Xia linked-pearl headdress. Comparative visual and material analysis shows that kalavinka imagery circulated in parallel across mural, painted, and metal media, where scale, material, and bodily placement re-coded rather than erased its sacred associations. The study argues that this process is best understood as material translation, and it proposes a model for linking formal change, sensory affordance, and religious function in the arts of the Silk Road.

1. Introduction: From Iconographic Origin to Material Translation

The kalavinka (Skt. kalaviṅka) is a divine avian being in Buddhist cosmology, frequently glossed in Chinese through semantic translation as the “bird of wondrous sound.” In canonical discourse, the kalavinka is not merely an auspicious creature but a vocal agent of Buddhist truth (Dharma). Its singing functions as a mode of praise and aural offering, disseminating the Dharma and harmonizing the Buddha realm. Within visual culture, most prominently in the Dunhuang murals, the kalavinka commonly appears as a human-headed (or human-torsoed) bird (Sun 2021). It is often shown with musical instruments and situated within the pictorial and ritual ecology of Buddhist Pure Land scenes and preaching tableaux. In these settings, it typically operates as a commendatory presence within larger iconographic programs rather than as an autonomous narrative subject, and it frequently accompanies other auspicious birds (e.g., parrots, peacocks, cranes, and the jīvamjīvaka1). This combination of strong religious association and visual adaptability would later prove crucial to the kalavinka’s ability to migrate beyond painted and sculptural settings into the domain of luxury ornament.

For the purposes of this study, several key terms require clarification. Material translation refers to the reconfiguration of a graphic motif in response to the physical properties, techniques, and modes of use associated with a new medium. Transmedial transformation describes the migration of a Buddhist iconographic motif across material supports, from scriptural discourse to mural painting and subsequently to metal ornament. This shift is accompanied by structural adjustments that allow the image to operate within new spatial, tactile, and sensory conditions as its functional emphasis changes. Religious identity here denotes the continuity of a figure’s recognized sacred role, specifically the kalavinka’s association with wondrous sound and devotional praise, even as increasing emphasis is placed on its decorative function. Such continuity may be evaluated through observable formal and material indicators, including the incorporation of sound-producing elements in jewelry, the persistence of Pure Land visual vocabulary (e.g., lotus forms, auspicious cloud motifs, and offering gestures), and the placement of kalavinka ornaments near the ears, aligning the motif’s sonic identity with the embodied site of hearing.

1.1. Research Gap

Scholarship on the kalavinka has primarily concentrated on two areas: its debated iconographic origins and its stylistic development within mural traditions, especially at Dunhuang. Studies of architectural and roof ornament, for example, have sometimes interpreted the kalavinka’s increasing decorative prominence in built contexts as indicative of a shift in emphasis away from strictly liturgical function, framing such changes in terms of secularization. These interpretations, however, remain largely tied to architectural settings (Y. Yang 2024). Meanwhile, the motif also appears in excavated jewelry from the Song (960–1279 CE) and Liao periods (916–1125 CE), as well as in painted representations of adornment. Yet the question of how its earlier religious associations were preserved, transformed, or re-coded when translated into wearable form has rarely been treated as a central problem in its own right. Existing studies tend either to subsume such objects under the broad category of decorative religious art or to describe them primarily as “religious symbol,” without analyzing the textual, formal, and material processes that enabled this transmedial shift.

1.2. Research Question

Proceeding from the stronger explanatory power of the kinnara/kinnarī2 framework, this article asks: how did a sacred Buddhist figure, originally embedded in narrative and ritual pictorial contexts, become a wearable object without losing its religious identity?

Rather than treating jewelry as a secondary or derivative medium, this study approaches wearable forms as the culmination of a long process of material translation, in which visual form, medium, and function were progressively reconfigured. The central concern is not simply when the kalavinka appeared on jewelry, but what formal and conceptual changes enabled its migration from painted contexts to wearable objects that ornament the body while preserving its sacred role.

1.3. Argument and Contribution

This article argues that the kalavinka’s transformation into jewelry does not represent a straightforward process of secularization. Instead, it constitutes a material relocation of sacred function. As a celestial musician associated with wondrous sound and praise of the Dharma, the kalavinka retained its religious identity even as its visual form was adapted to the constraints and possibilities of wearable media.

Three interconnected formal mechanisms made this relocation possible:

• Fusion and de-gendering from its kinnara/kinnarī prototype, through which paired figures were consolidated into a single, transferable form;
• Stylization and elongation of the tail, allowing it to function as an autonomous ornamental structure;
• Postural reorientation toward decorative function, enabling the figure to operate within the material language and bodily frameworks of jewelry.

By foregrounding these mechanisms, this study shifts attention from iconographical origin to transmedial transformation, and it proposes a model for understanding how Buddhist visual forms along the Silk Roads became mobile across materials while preserving religious meaning.

1.4. Materials and Methods

Close formal analysis is paired with attention to medium-specific constraint, bodily placement, and sensory function. To enhance methodological clarity, I distinguish between demonstrable evidence, namely features that can be directly observed, measured, or securely documented, and interpretive inference, which proposes meaning or function through contextual and comparative reasoning.

The primary materials examined in this article are Song–Liao and Western Xia (1038–1227 CE) ornaments featuring kalavinka imagery, including excavated gold earrings and headdress ornaments. These objects are analyzed in relation to painted representations of adornment, most notably a Uyghur donor depicted wearing kalavinka earrings in the Western Thousand Buddha Cave 16.

Earlier mural traditions at Dunhuang and Indian prototypes are considered not as parallel case studies but as formative visual stages that established the structural conditions for later material translation. Close formal analysis is combined with attention to medium, bodily placement, and sensory function. This approach situates jewelry within broader systems of religious visuality rather than isolating it as purely decorative art.

1.5. Structure of the Article

This article unfolds in five stages. Following the introduction, Section 2 situates the kalavinka within a broader historical and iconographic framework, discussing the Indian kinnara/kinnarī prototype and examining how the motif entered and was received in China. It first analyzes transregional transmission and cultural adaptation and then traces the motif’s formal transformation in Dunhuang mural painting, with particular attention to the ways in which the kalavinka’s morphology became increasingly suited to ornamental and portable contexts.

Section 3 shifts from mural space to painted representations of personal adornment, demonstrating that by the eleventh century, kalavinka imagery had entered the visual vocabulary of jewelry within Silk Road Buddhist settings. Case studies from Western Thousand Buddha Cave 16 and the Khara Khoto3 scroll illustrate how the motif functioned as bodily ornament in both human and divine contexts.

Section 4 turns to excavated material evidence, analyzing gold ornaments from the Liao and Western Xia periods in which kalavinka forms appear in fully realized metalwork. These objects are considered alongside the painted examples discussed earlier as parallel manifestations of the motif’s transmedial and material transformation.

Section 5, the conclusion, synthesizes the findings, emphasizing the mechanisms that enabled a sacred figure to migrate across media while retaining its religious identity, and outlines directions for future interdisciplinary research.

2. Iconographical Evolution of Kalavinka as Motif

2.1. Kinnara/Kinnari Prototype

Scholarship on the origin of the kalavinka has long been divided between two main explanatory frameworks: a “Greek Siren hypothesis4,” advanced by scholars such as Stein (1921), Chen (2002), Y. Zhang (2018), and Ge (2018) and grounded largely in morphological comparison, and an “Indian Kinnara hypothesis,” supported by Sun and Zhang (2018), Liang and Xia (2023), and G. Zhang (2016). The Siren-centered approach often treats human-bird hybridity as a sufficient indicator of genealogical connection. However, this line of reasoning is methodologically unstable, as it often overlooks continuities in function, textual framing, and ritual or visual context. Even when hybrid winged figures in South or Central Asia are discussed through a Hellenistic lens, as in early comparative models associated with Stein’s broader Hellenocentric interpretations of hybrid deities, such arguments do not adequately explain the kalavinka’s consistent placement within Buddhist cosmology as a sonic agent of praise.

By contrast, the kinnara/kinnari provides a more coherent functional prototype. Across Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu traditions (Kramrisch 1928), these semi-divine beings are consistently characterized as celestial musicians whose presence is signaled through music, offering, and auspicious attendance (Duan 1987). This identity both predates any single sectarian affiliation and persists across diverse textual and visual corpora. The foundational work of Panchamukhi (1951) on Gandharvas and Kinnaras established the stability of this category as a class of celestial musicians rather than as an ad hoc hybrid form. Although early kinnara imagery in stūpa contexts cannot be reduced to narrowly defined Buddhist Dharma preaching, it nevertheless participates in a ritualized economy of sound and veneration that would later be inherited by the kalavinka in China.

Early Indian representations of kinnara/kinnarī are most prominently associated with Śuṅga (158 BCE–75 BCE) and early Andhra (1 BCE–2 CE) contexts, as well as with the mural and architectural programs of Ajanta during the Vākāṭaka period (late 3rd century CE to mid-6th century CE) (Ji 2002). Across these phases, despite changes in medium, site, and compositional logic, the kinnara’s core visual identity and its musical and offering functions remain strikingly consistent. This continuity suggests the presence of a durable iconographic template capable of later migration and reconfiguration.

In the earlier stūpa phase, kinnara figures frequently appear in flight within sacred narrative settings, hovering above bodhi trees or stūpas while bearing garlands and other offering attributes (Figure 1). Although they also occur in architectural ornament (Barua and Sinha 1926), their presence remains tied to sacralizing acts. Bharhut is particularly significant because it preserves an unusually explicit convergence of image and text. Railing pillar reliefs depict kinnara figures accompanied by inscriptions that enable narrative identification, including a fragment commonly interpreted as referring to a “Kinnara Jātaka5” and showing a Moon Kinnara–kinnari couple (Cunningham 1879), providing early visual evidence for the paired, gendered premise (Figure 2) (Rouse 1901).

The later Ajanta phase offers the most structurally relevant precedents for the eventual mobility of the Dunhuang kalavinka. At Ajanta, kinnara and kinnarī increasingly appear as individual figures embedded within ornamental framing systems. Cave 17 is especially dense in such imagery (Figure 3). Kinnara motifs occur on major architectural supports, including examples in which a single figure is enclosed within a circular ornamental border, at times shown flying with garlands and at other times standing while playing instruments such as vertical flutes. These configurations are significant because they demonstrate how, within a clearly sacral environment, the celestial musician can function as a modular emblem that is both devotional and decorative, compressed, framed, and formally integrated into geometric architectural surfaces. This condition forms an important precedent for the motif’s later legibility as a transferable visual unit across pictorial fields and, eventually, into portable formats.

The transition from the South Asian kinnara to the Chinese kalavinka is best understood not as a simple internal evolution of an Indian prototype, but as a historically layered process of renaming and recontextualization shaped by scriptural transmission and visual practice. As Buddhist texts became systematized and circulated across regions, the kinnara’s musical identity was rearticulated within a Pure Land sensory framework. Pure Land discourse, grounded in the Amitābha Sūtra6 tradition and its exegetical developments, defines the kalavinka as the “bird of wondrous sound,” whose exquisite voice adorns the Buddha realm and proclaims the Dharma. In this way, earlier celestial musicianship is recoded within a specifically Buddhist soteriological soundscape. This functional continuity, in which music operates as a sacral offering, supports the identification of kinnara/kinnari as the most compelling prototype for the Dunhuang kalavinka prior to the significant formal transformations traced in later sections.

While this genealogy clarifies functional inheritance, it does not by itself explain the marked morphological changes that occur after the motif’s transmission into China. In particular, the pronounced elongation and ornamental stylization of the tail, which became prominent by the mid-Tang period, have no direct precedent in early South Asian examples. The following section therefore turns from prototype to transformation, examining how the kalavinka’s body was visually reconfigured in Chinese Buddhist art and how these changes prepared the motif for its later mobility across media.

2.2. Evolution of Kalavinkas in Dunhuang

2.2.1. Transregional Transmission and Cultural Reception of Kalavinka

Before examining the morphological transformations of the kalavinka in Dunhuang, a more fundamental question must be addressed: how could an ancient Indian motif of a celestial musician travel across vast geographical and cultural distances and yet become legible within a Chinese religious and visual framework?

Zürcher’s (2012) influential model of the early transmission of Buddhism to China provides an important starting point. He characterizes this initial spread as a form of “long-distance transmission,” marked by sporadic contact, fragmentary doctrinal reception, and limited feedback with Indian centers. Under such conditions, early Chinese Buddhism often absorbed discrete elements, such as texts, images, and ritual concepts, detached from their original institutional contexts (Mair 2012). This mode of transmission facilitated selective reinterpretation and visual recontextualization, enabling imported motifs, including the kinnara-derived kalavinka, to be integrated into emerging Chinese Buddhist systems without strict reliance on their original narrative frameworks.

Equally significant is Buddhism’s stance toward language and transmission. Unlike Brahmanical traditions that privileged specific sacred languages, Buddhism did not insist on a single canonical linguistic form. Instead, it accommodated translation and vernacularization as legitimate vehicles of the Dharma. This emphasis on vocal transmission and semantic translatability resonates with the kalavinka’s defining attribute as a bearer of wondrous sound, a figure whose religious efficacy operates through voice rather than fixed textual form. Its identity as a sonic mediator of the Dharma therefore aligned with a religious culture that prioritized auditory dissemination and doctrinal adaptability.

Finally, the kalavinka’s reception in China should also be understood in relation to preexisting local traditions of avian symbolism. As Riboud (2007) has observed, Chinese visual and ritual culture long associated birds with auspiciousness, cosmological order, and celestial communication, as exemplified by motifs such as the Vermilion Bird. Within such a symbolic environment, a foreign bird-being defined by beautiful sound and heavenly presence would not have appeared alien (Fang 2023). It could instead be accommodated within established frameworks of sacred and courtly imagery. The convergence of transregional Buddhist transmission, linguistic flexibility, and indigenous avian symbolism thus created the cultural conditions under which the kalavinka could be both adopted and visually reimagined in the Chinese context.

2.2.2. Evolution of Kalavinkas in Dunhuang Murals

The Dunhuang material demonstrates that the kalavinka persists as a transplanted, Indian-derived celestial musician while undergoing a systematic formal reorganization within Tang Buddhist pictorial practice. The focus on the Tang dynasty in this section is deliberate, as it was during this period that the kalavinka’s morphology was progressively reshaped in ways that later facilitated its translation into small-scale, wearable formats. The Song–Liao archaeological discoveries of kalavinka jewelry can therefore be understood not as an abrupt “decorative turn,” but as a material continuation of transformations already visible in Tang mural practice.

Across the Tang dynasty, this reconfiguration can be described through three interrelated morphological tendencies: (1) the consolidation of earlier paired types and the progressive de-gendering of the figure; (2) the elongation and ornamental stylization of the tail as a primary carrier of visual rhythm; and (3) the reorientation of bodily structure toward bounded, symmetrical, and frame-compatible formats. These processes developed cumulatively from the Early Tang through the Late Tang, gradually transforming the kalavinka from a narrative-bound sacred attendant into a repeatable, modular motif capable of operating beyond mural space and adapting to the constraints of portable, metal-based media.

Importantly, these tendencies are not inferred from isolated examples. Murals from multiple Tang phases preserve primary visual instances that demonstrate each of these developments. The representative cases discussed below, including Mogao Cave 220 (Early Tang), the caisson of Cave 360 (Middle Tang), and the head-centered arrangement in Cave 14 (Late Tang), should therefore be understood not as singular anomalies but as especially clear manifestations of broader and well-attested visual patterns. Rather than claiming a simple quantitative “peak” in isolation,

Table 1. Kalavinka’s Appearances in Middle Tang Period Caves at Dunhuang Murals (763–835 CE).

Subject Type	Cave Number
Visualization Sutra Illustration	159, 112, 7, 126, 199, 201, 258
Medicine Buddha Sutra Illustration	7, 159, 200, 238, 237, 360, 369
Amitabha Sutra Illustration	369, 386
Sutra of Repaying Kindness Illustration	54,200
Golden Light Sutra Illustration	158
Preaching Scene	166
Assembly of the Buddhas of the Ten Directions	258
Diamond Sutra Illustration	69

and

Table 2. Kalavinka’s Appearances in Late Period Caves at Dunhuang Murals (836–907 CE).

Subject Type	Cave Number
Visualization Sutra Illustration	12, 141, 144, 232
Medicine Buddha Sutra Illustration	177
Amitabha Sutra Illustration	156, 107, 192, 196
Sutra of Repaying Kindness Illustration	141
Niche and Caisson Decoration	14, 85, 9

map the distribution of kalavinka appearances across subject types in the Middle and Late Tang corpora, providing a concrete basis for the following formal analysis (Table 1 and Table 2). Together, these tables situate the selected case studies within a wider evidentiary field rather than treating them as exceptional.

(1) Fusion and De-gendering (Early Tang Foundations, 618–712 CE)

One of the earliest and most structurally significant departures from Indian kinnara imagery is the gradual dissolution of the male–female paired type in favor of a single, increasingly androgynous figure. Representative and well-preserved examples from the Early Tang period appear in the murals of Mogao Caves 220, 329, 372, and 386, among which Cave 220 is the most complete and therefore of exceptional scholarly value.

In Mogao Cave 220, the kalavinka appears as a solitary being situated within Pure Land settings (Figure 4). Although faint traces of gendered facial modeling remain, overt gender markers are significantly reduced. This visual consolidation produces a figure that is not merely “neutral,” but is also structurally easier to repeat, mirror, and redeploy across bounded decorative fields, an early precondition for later modularity. The shift also aligns the kalavinka with broader tendencies in Chinese Buddhist figuration, in which sacred beauty is often rendered in idealized, beyond-gendered terms.

(2) Elongation and Stylization of the Tail (High Tang Expansion and Localization: 713–756 CE)

During the High Tang period, the kalaviṅka’s tail undergoes its most conspicuous morphological transformation, shifting from an avian appendage toward an autonomous ornamental device. In Visualization Sūtra7 contexts, such as Mogao Caves 45 (Figure 5) and 172 (Figure 6), the tail extends dramatically, often approaching or exceeding the length of the torso. Its terminal forms become increasingly scroll-like and vegetal rather than feathered, integrating visually with surrounding cloud bands, linked-pearl borders, and ornamental pattern systems. The tail thus ceases to function as a naturalistic avian appendage and instead becomes the primary carrier of visual rhythm and decorative flow.

This development can be further understood in relation to processes of visual localization. Tang historical records describe the tribute of an exotic bird explicitly identified as the “vinka bird,” noted for its long, curled tail and appealing vocal qualities. Schafer (1963) proposed a philological identification and associated the “vinka bird” with Dicrurus paradiseus formosu8, a species distinguished by elongated tail streamers and vocal mimicry. Akin to kalavinkas, Dicrurus paradiseus formosus is also known for its beautiful singing voice. The convergence between textual description and the emerging visual emphasis on an elongated, curling tail suggests that painters could have drawn upon living avian models newly present in Tang court environments (Schafer 1963). This claim is offered as a plausible visual catalyst rather than a one-to-one identification.

Such a localization hypothesis is consistent with Bagley’s (2006) observation that Chinese artists often reimagined imported mythical or hybrid creatures through reference to locally observed fauna. Rather than pure imaginative invention, artists often integrated features of real fauna into the morphology of legendary beings, a practice traceable to early Chinese decorative systems. The kalavinka’s increasingly stylized tail can therefore be understood as the product of two converging forces: the internal decorative logic of mural design and the external availability of visually striking long-tailed birds that provided concrete referents for reimagining the creature’s anatomy. This synthesis of imported mythic identity and local zoological reference exemplifies the mechanism by which foreign Buddhist imagery was naturalized within Chinese visual culture.

(3) Reorientation Toward Decorative and Framed Formats (Middle–Late Tang, 763–835 CE; 836–907 CE)

By the Middle Tang period, the kalavinka’s body was increasingly reorganized to accommodate framed, symmetrical, and compositional systems. The most direct, mechanically observable preparation for transmedial transfer occurs when the kalavinka is made to fit circular formats. Middle Tang ceiling programs introduce kalavinka-centered caisson medallions, as in Mogao Cave 360 (Figure 7), where wings, tail, torso, movement, and even surrounding clouds are compressed and subordinated to circularity. In this bounded field, the figure loosens its dependence on sutra-narrative sequencing and begins to operate as a self-contained decorative module, functioning more like an “object-emblem” than a narrative participant. The torso bends, the wings fold inward, and the elongated tail coils to complete the contour, while clouds and surrounding motifs submit to the same centripetal order. This circular compression represents a decisive step toward ornamental modularity.

This caisson painting displays a notable compositional convergence with the framed kinnara figure in Ajanta Cave 17 (Figure 3). In both cases, the celestial musician is compressed within a bounded, circular, geometric field. The wings, tail, and surrounding elements are reorganized to conform to the spatial logic of the frame. The point of this comparison is structural rather than genealogical certainty: it underscores how a “framed emblem” format can coexist with sacral meaning while preparing the motif for later portability.

Late Tang examples further extend this logic. In Mogao Cave 14 (Figure 8), two kalavinkas flank the head of the Vajra-Holding Avalokiteśvara. Their bodies are reorganized into a symmetrical reversed-V-shaped configuration that serves architectural framing rather than pictorial narration. Their tails converge toward a central vegetal motif, functioning as decorative connectors. Yet the figures continue to hold musical instruments, preserving their sonic identity even as their forms become increasingly subordinate to ornamental design. The kalavinka thus operates simultaneously as a divine musician and a decorative module, a dual status that anticipates its later translation into jewelry worn near the head and ears.

A complementary, cross-regional echo of the kalavinka’s ornamental transformation can be observed in Japan. The Hōsōge (“auspicious floral-scroll”) Kalavinka makie Sanjūjō Sasshi-bako9 (Figure 9), generally dated to the late tenth century and preserved in the Kyoto National Museum, was produced as a container for a set of esoteric Buddhist fascicles associated with the transmission lineage of Kūkai10. The lacquer surface features repeated kalavinka motifs integrated into a decorative floral-scroll program, demonstrating that by this period the figure functioned as a portable ornamental emblem beyond mural settings. Although the box does not present a narrative Buddhist scene, its inscription—納真言根本阿闍梨空海 入唐求得法文冊子之筥11—identifies it as a container for esoteric scriptures brought from Tang China by Kūkai, situating the object firmly within a Buddhist ritual and textual economy.

The kalavinka figures on the box display an expanded range of performative gestures, including drumming and ribbon dance, extending the repertoire of celestial musician imagery already visible in late Tang visual traditions. In this context, the Japanese example does not serve as primary evidence for the motif’s formal evolution, but as corroboration that the ornamentalized kalavinka, shaped by late Tang visual mechanisms, circulated across East Asia while remaining legible within Buddhist cultural frameworks.

Taken together, the Dunhuang evidence from the Early through Late Tang documents a sustained process in which the kalavinka’s form was progressively degendered, elongated, and bodily reconfigured. These changes did not diminish its sacred association with wondrous sound. Rather, they reorganized the figure into a structurally transferable motif. By the end of the Tang period, the kalavinka was already functioning as a decorative unit capable of operating within modular visual systems. The later emergence of kalavinka imagery in Song and Liao jewelry from regions geographically connected to Dunhuang should therefore be understood as the material continuation of visual transformations already well underway in Tang mural practice.

3. Translating the Sacred into Ornament: Painted Kalavinka Jewelry on the Silk Road

The preceding section has demonstrated that, by the end of the Tang dynasty, the kalavinka’s form had been fundamentally reconfigured within the visual culture of Buddhist mural painting. Dunhuang has served as a particularly concentrated and well-preserved body of evidence for tracing these developments, although such transformations formed part of broader visual processes unfolding across Buddhist artistic networks of the Silk Road.

The following section therefore turns to painted representations in which celestial musician birds appear as elements of personal adornment attached to the human body. Methodologically, these images mark an intermediate stage between mural iconography and excavated objects: they do not “prove” the existence of specific surviving ornaments, but they do show that kalavinka imagery had become intelligible as a wearable form within elite devotional self-representation. These images provide an essential bridge between the mural-based transformations outlined above and the excavated metal ornaments discussed in the subsequent section. They show that the kalavinka’s translation into jewelry was already conceptually and visually underway in painted form.

3.1. Western Thousand Buddha Cave 16: Uyghur Female Donor’s Kalavinka Earring

Among painted materials from Silk Road Buddhist sites, the kalavinka motif in the Dunhuang region shifts further from liturgical and narrative murals to explicit depiction of wearing, where sacred avian musicians are rendered as personal adornment. A key example is found in the passageway of Cave 16 in the Western Thousand Buddha Caves, where a female Uyghur donor figure is depicted wearing kalavinka-shaped earrings (Figure 10).

The presence of kalavinka ornaments in Dunhuang donor imagery must be understood within the political and cultural context of tenth-century patronage. During this period, Dunhuang was governed by the Cao family under the Guiyijun regime, which maintained close diplomatic and marital ties with the Uyghurs. These interactions facilitated the incorporation of Uyghur elites into the patronage networks of Buddhist cave production, where donor images functioned as visual assertions of status, legitimacy, and piety (Russell-Smith 2005).

Within these painted donor portraits, large-scale jewelry, often rendered in gold tones and featuring elaborate forms, plays a central role in articulating rank and identity. Uyghur female donors in particular are frequently depicted wearing prominent earrings, headdresses, and bead ornaments, whose size, material suggestion, and visual prominence signal both wealth and ceremonial display. These ornaments operate as markers of elite Buddhist patronage, situating the wearer within a transregional network of political power, religious affiliation, and luxury consumption.

Cave 16 was originally excavated in the Late Tang period and repainted multiple times during the Five Dynasties (907–960 CE), the Song (960–1279 CE), and later in the Republican era (1912–1949 CE). The donor figure discussed here belongs to the repainting phase associated with the Uyghur presence in Dunhuang during the Song dynasty. This chronological context is significant because it places the image within the same broad eleventh-century horizon as other Silk Road materials examined in this study, including the Khara Khoto painting discussed below. The kalavinka earring should therefore be understood as part of a broader Song-period visual culture in which sacred avian motifs had already entered the domain of elite bodily ornament.

The kalavinka earrings worn by the Uyghur female donor in Cave 16 epitomize this decorative repertoire. The donor is richly dressed and adorned with elaborate jewelry befitting her status as an elite Buddhist patron. Her hairstyle rises high above the forehead in a structured coiffure secured by decorative headwear, while patterned garments and jeweled accessories emphasize both wealth and piety. Her earrings take the form of kalavinkas, each depicted with a string of six bead-like gemstones. The kalavinkas’ wings curve upward and inward to form a compacted, near-circular silhouette, and a stylized tail descends in a controlled arc beneath the body. Although miniaturized to suit ornamental scale, the figure preserves the key morphological features traced earlier in mural contexts, including an androgynous body, an elongated decorative tail, and a posture adapted to the functional requirements of an earring format. In other words, the same formal mechanisms identified in Tang murals, namely consolidation, tail stylization, and frame-friendly bodily reorientation, here appear in explicitly wearable guise.

These earrings demonstrate that, by the Song period, the kalavinka had become legible as a wearable emblem. Its placement beside the ears is especially meaningful. In Pure Land discourse, the kalavinka is the bird of wondrous sound whose voice proclaims the Dharma. When reconfigured as an earring, the motif’s sonic identity is effectively reactivated through proximity to the organ of hearing. Rather than abandoning its sacred function, the figure’s association with celestial music and praise is re-situated in relation to the devotee’s body. The transformation is therefore one of medium and scale, rather than of religious identity. Even in painted form, the motif is already “translated” into a wearable logic of placement, visibility, and sensory implication.

A meaningful comparison can be drawn with the depictions of the Uyghur princess (Figure 11) and female donor (Figure 12) in Mogao Cave 61. Although their headdresses feature phoenixes rather than kalavinka birds, the overall configurations are strikingly similar at the level of ornamental grammar. In both cases, the bodily structure is inflected to form near-circular structures with long, curling tails. This comparison does not conflate phoenix and kalavinka iconography; rather, it suggests that elite female adornment favored a shared repertoire of avian forms shaped by circularity, symmetry, and tail-based decorative flow. Whether kalavinka or phoenix, such modified divine bird motifs appear to have been favored by high-status female adornment.

The broader ornamental program of the donor’s attire reinforces this interpretation. Her headwear is decorated with auspicious bird motifs in addition to the kalavinka earrings, indicating that hybrid and sacred avian imagery formed part of a fashionable repertoire of elite female adornment within Silk Road Buddhist visual culture. Such motifs were not merely decorative. They also functioned as signifiers of status, cosmological blessing, and religious affiliation. Donor portraits in Dunhuang murals consistently represent members of affluent and influential families, and their jewelry reflects both social rank and participation in a shared Buddhist visual language. Within this context, the kalavinka’s migration into jewelry should be understood as an extension of its sacred visual vocabulary into the sphere of socially visible adornment, where religious symbolism, prestige, and aesthetic refinement converged. At the same time, because donor jewelry is represented rather than excavated, its strongest evidentiary value lies in demonstrating visual intelligibility and cultural desirability: the kalavinka is shown as something that can be worn, displayed, and socially recognized as both auspicious and devotional.

The Cave 16 painting thus provides crucial visual evidence that celestial musician birds could function as jewelry within a Buddhist setting without erasing their religious significance. It stands alongside later excavated metal ornaments as a parallel manifestation of the kalavinka’s transmedial life across Silk Road regions.

3.2. Kinnara/Kalavinka Motifs as Head Ornaments of Deity at Khara Khoto

A highly relevant, yet iconographically more fluid, example of celestial musician bird imagery in wearable form appears in an eleventh-century painting scroll discovered at Khara Khoto (Figure 13), a fortified Tangut city on the Silk Road and a major center of Western Xia (1038–1227 CE) culture, trade, and Buddhist art. Khara Khoto reflects a cultural milieu in which Tangut and Uyghur populations coexisted and interacted across the northwestern Silk Road. During the Song–Xia periods, relations between the Tanguts and the Uyghurs were marked by shifting dynamics of conflict, alliance, intermarriage, and gradual cultural integration. As both groups participated in overlapping networks of trade, diplomacy, and Buddhist practice, elements of visual and religious culture circulated between them with relative fluidity. This prolonged contact fostered a shared artistic and iconographic vocabulary, within which motifs such as the kalavinka could be transmitted, adapted, and reinterpreted across different contexts (R. Yang 2011). The scroll is now preserved in the State Hermitage Museum. Translated by Nevsky (1960) as The Buddha of the Luxuriant Fiery Glow, the painting centers on a seated Buddha surrounded by attendant deities and planetary figures. Among them is the deity identified as Mercury, whose elaborate head ornament includes a small hybrid avian figure positioned prominently above the forehead. As with the donor portrait discussed in Section 3.1, this painted image does not provide direct archaeological proof of a surviving object; rather, it demonstrates that hybrid avian musician imagery could be conceived and represented as head-mounted ornament within a Buddhist pictorial field.

This avian motif has been described using different terminology in major scholarship. Piotrovsky (1993) identifies the figure as a “kinnara bird,” while other scholars, including Li (2018), refer to it as a kalavinka. Rather than attempting to resolve this taxonomic distinction, the present discussion approaches the image as part of a broader kinnara–kalavinka continuum within the visual culture of Silk Road Buddhism. The slippage between these labels is itself indicative of the shared morphological and functional territory occupied by celestial musician birds across regions and media, especially when images are miniaturized, stylized, and embedded within ornamental systems that reduce diagnostic iconographic attributes.

Formally, the ornament consists of a small winged being with a human-like upper body and an avian lower body, integrated into the deity’s coiffure. The figure raises its hands in a gesture of reverence directed toward the central Buddha. Although the tail does not display the extreme elongation seen in some Dunhuang mural examples, it is still noticeably extended in comparison with many early Indian kinnara prototypes (see Figure 3). The creature’s hybrid anatomy and devotional gesture situate it within the same family of celestial avian–human musician imagery examined throughout this study. Its reduced scale and structural integration into the headdress further underscore its adaptation to an ornamental, wearable format rather than to an autonomous narrative role. In this respect, the Khara Khoto image is especially valuable for showing “modularization” in practice: the motif functions as a compact emblem that can be attached to the body, is visually legible at small scale, and is compositionally integrated as part of a larger costume system.

Its placement is particularly significant. Like the kalavinka earrings in Western Thousand Buddha Cave 16, this hybrid figure is attached to the head, the bodily zone also strongly associated with hearing and voice. While the painting does not depict sound production directly, such proximity to the sensory and symbolic locus of sound resonates with the long-standing association of kinnara and kalavinka figures with wondrous music, praise, and aural offering. Even when miniaturized and embedded within the decorative system of a headdress, the motif’s sonic and devotional connotations remain contextually legible within the Buddhist visual environment of the scroll, in which the central Buddha anchors the entire scene within a religious frame.

The broader decorative program of the deity’s headgear further parallels the Dunhuang donor portrait. The kinnara/kalavinka-like figure appears alongside other auspicious bird motifs incorporated into the headdress. This clustering of sacred and auspicious avian forms suggests that such imagery belonged to a shared ornamental vocabulary associated with elevated status and cosmological significance. In Dunhuang murals, similar bird motifs adorn the headwear of elite female donors, while in the Khara Khoto painting, similar imagery crowns a celestial deity. In both cases, bird-formed ornaments participate in a visual language that binds adornment, hierarchy, and Buddhist symbolism. Crucially, the motif’s “wearability” is not an incidental detail but part of its devotional visibility: the head becomes a privileged site where sacred imagery is displayed, framed, and integrated into the body’s presentation within a Buddhist order of beings.

Geographically and chronologically aligned, the Khara Khoto scroll broadens the scope of the phenomenon observed at Dunhuang. It demonstrates that by the eleventh century, across different regions of the Silk Road, celestial musician bird imagery—whether designated kinnara or kalavinka—could function as a head ornament within explicitly Buddhist pictorial contexts. The significance of this example lies less in fixing an iconographic label or reconstructing a linear trajectory of tail stylization than in showing that the conceptual association between sacred avian musicians and bodily adornment was intelligible and transferable across media and regions. In other words, this is evidence for cultural intelligibility and pictorial plausibility: the motif could be “worn” by a deity in representation, preparing the ground for its material translation into elite metalwork.

Together with the painted kalavinka earrings from Cave 16, the Khara Khoto image indicates that the incorporation of celestial musician birds into personal and divine adornment was not an isolated local development. Rather, it formed part of a broader Silk Road visual culture in which sacred hybrid beings migrated into the domain of wearable ornament while retaining their religious resonance.

4. Sacred Bird as Ornament: The Kalavinka as Golden Jewelry Along the Silk Road

The painted evidence discussed above demonstrates that by the eleventh century, kalavinka imagery had already entered the visual vocabulary of both divine and personal adornment across Silk Road Buddhist contexts. The following section shifts from representation to material evidence by examining excavated gold ornaments as instances of material relocation, in which the motif moves from painted image into precious metal and becomes a wearable form. The use of gold as the primary material, together with the sophisticated metalworking techniques involved, such as openwork piercing, repoussé, chasing, and gemstone inlay, indicates that these objects belonged to spheres of elite consumption. Their high material value and technical complexity situate them within contexts of status display, ritual visibility, and socially elevated forms of Buddhist patronage. At the same time, their small scale and bodily placement required a re-engineering of pictorial form into wearable mechanics: attachment, suspension, durability, and (in some cases) movement and sound.

4.1. Liao-Period Gold Kalavinka Earring

A Liao-period (916–1125 CE) gold earring in the form of a kalavinka (Figure 14), now preserved in the Barin Right Banner Museum, provides one of the clearest excavated examples of the motif’s realization in precious metal. Unearthed at Bayanerdeng Sumu in Barin Right Banner, this ornament measures 8.8 cm in total length. Although the broader region participated in long-distance exchange networks, the present argument does not depend on assigning a single “Silk Road route” status to the findspot; rather, it treats the object as evidence for the circulation of Buddhist ornamental forms within the Liao cultural sphere and its connected frontiers.

In the Liao context, Buddhism had become closely integrated with court culture and imperial patronage by the tenth and eleventh centuries. As the Khitan state expanded, incorporating populations and religious traditions from the Central Plains and neighboring regions, Buddhism was progressively embedded within elite political and ritual life (Mou and Zhang 2015). The Liao earring may also be situated within the broader institutional and economic conditions that facilitated the transmission of Buddhist imagery across regions. The adoption of many Tang-style administrative structures, together with regular diplomatic and commercial contact with Song courts in the Liao southern administration suggests a sustained openness to cultural forms associated with the Central Plains. Although such political and economic connections do not by themselves establish a direct route for the transmission of any single motif, they provide a credible historical framework for understanding how Buddhist imagery moved across regions. In the case of the kalavinka, the motif had already been adapted within the Central Plains and the Dunhuang region by the Early Tang, where it was incorporated into Pure Land visual programs and gradually reshaped within Chinese Buddhist pictorial conventions. Within this background, the kalavinka on the Liao earring may be understood as part of a longer process of visual adaptation, through which a Buddhist image with transregional resonance was reformulated into a form suited to elite Khitan ornament (Kradin and Alexander 2014).

The convergence of kalaviṅka imagery in both Uyghur donor portraiture and Khitan-period excavated ornaments may be understood as part of a broader pattern of Buddhist transmission and adaptation across the Silk Road. Both Uyghur and Khitan polities participated in transregional networks through which Buddhist ideas and objects circulated alongside political and commercial exchange. After the collapse of the Uyghur Khaganate, the Uyghurs adopted Buddhism and played an important role as intermediaries in the movement of religious culture across Inner Asia. The Khitan incorporated Buddhism more gradually through processes of state formation and drew heavily on Han Chinese and Uyghur influences. Within this shared religious environment, kalaviṅka imagery could circulate across different ethnic and political contexts while retaining recognizable symbolic functions. Its appearance in both Uyghur female donor adornment and Khitan elite gold jewelry therefore reflects not isolated developments, but a common visual and religious vocabulary shaped by interconnected Buddhist cultures along the Silk Road (Ju 2021).

The earring’s exquisite metalwork, evident in the feather filaments, hair strands, and the veining of lotus petals, together with the intrinsic value of gold, suggests that it was produced for a wearer with access to elite resources (Zhu 1998). This inference, drawn from both material value and craftsmanship, places the object firmly within the sphere of luxury production. In this sense, the object shows how a sacred motif could participate in elite display while remaining legible within Buddhist visuality: the precious material itself further amplifies devotional visibility.

This kalavinka earring also demonstrates the three structural tendencies identified earlier (gender-neutral figuration, tail stylization, and pose compression), now reconfigured to meet the constraints of wearable metalwork. Its wings curve inward to form a compact ornamental silhouette, while the tail descends in elongated, scrolling strands that translate late Tang and post-Tang decorative idioms into linear, pendant-like extensions. The figure raises its arms before the chest in an offering gesture, with the head inclined toward a lotus. This posture is consistent with the kalavinka’s long-standing role in Buddhist visual hierarchies as a celestial attendant who performs homage through devotion and musical praise. The lotus further reinforces the Buddhist symbolic framework in which the image operates. In Buddhist iconography, the lotus functions above all as an emblem of purity, since its flower emerges unstained from the mire below, and thus serves as a particularly appropriate attribute within a visual language of sacred offering and transcendence (Terentyev 2004).

The kalavinka stands upon a band of auspicious clouds, from which hammered gold sheets are suspended. These sheets appear to have been assembled through openwork piercing, chasing, and looped suspension, forming a composite structure in which the central figure functions as the load-bearing body and the lower elements function as animated appendages.

The earring’s suspension logic also resonates with contemporaneous painted jewelry conventions. In Dunhuang donor portraits (Figure 11 and Figure 12), dangling elements are frequently attached to bird-formed head ornaments, suggesting a shared visual preference for kinetic, tiered ornament. This comparison does not imply direct derivation from mural to metalwork; rather, it clarifies a cross-media ornamental grammar in which avian motifs are paired with pendants to intensify movement, glitter, and sensory presence at the head.

These thin gold-leaf elements are freely movable and can produce light metallic sounds when the wearer moves. No acoustic testing has been conducted here, and sound cannot be assumed in every moment of wear; the claim is limited to sonic potential inferred from structure and material affordance. This limited inference matters because the kalavinka is consistently associated in Buddhist discourse with wondrous voice and praise, and a design that can produce sound offers one plausible way that “sonic identity” could be materially re-coded on the body. The suspended elements are cut from thin gold sheets and attached by small loops that allow independent movement. When worn on the body, normal head and neck motion would cause these lightweight pendants to oscillate and occasionally contact one another or the central gold body. The object’s design therefore incorporates the mechanical conditions necessary for intermittent, high-pitched metallic sound during movement. The crucial point is not that sound is guaranteed at every moment of wear, but that the earring is engineered to make sound possible as a by-product of bodily motion. This sonic potential can be discussed in relation to architectural sound-producing practices noted in earlier scholarship. Yang observes that in traditional Chinese timber architecture, small metal bells were often hung from structural points in palace or temple buildings, where wind movement activated them to produce auspicious sounds. When kalavinka ridge ornaments appear in proximity to such bells, the sounding element can be understood as materially consonant with the kalavinka’s identity as a being of wondrous sound. Although an earring should not be conflated with architectural devices, the comparison clarifies a shared cultural logic in which sacred avian figures associated with music and praise are paired with activated audible effects. In this context, the mobile gold-leaf pendants of the earring may be interpreted as an embodied, wearable analogue that re-codes the kalavinka’s sonic identity through motion.

Chronologically, this Liao ornament corresponds broadly to the same cultural horizon as the eleventh-century paintings discussed earlier. It suggests that the kalavinka’s migration into wearable metal forms did not occur only after its establishment in painted adornment but unfolded in parallel across media. The object therefore supports the argument that the motif’s sacred association with wondrous sound could be maintained within elite personal adornment, even as its form was reconfigured by the material constraints and sensory affordances of gold jewelry.

4.2. Western Xia-Period Gold Linked-Pearl Patterned Headdress

A gold headdress decorated with linked-pearl motifs and a kalaviṅka figure further illustrates the motif’s integration into high-status wearable ornament (Figure 15). The piece is now housed at the Yinchuan Municipal Cultural Heritage Administration and was discovered during municipal construction near Haibao Pagoda in Yinchuan. Because it was recovered from redeposited soil rather than through controlled excavation, its original stratigraphic context cannot be reconstructed, and the original inlaid gemstones are no longer preserved. Its stylistic and technical features, however, support its attribution to the Western Xia period (He and Ning 2024). Given the disturbed find context, the discussion below treats chronology and function as inferential claims grounded in form, technique, and comparanda, rather than as excavated certainties.

The headdress takes the form of an arched band designed to be worn across the forehead or attached to an elaborate coiffure (Figure 16). With an inner circumference of approximately 43 cm and a weight of 234.5 g, it is a substantial ornament consistent with elite attire. Its surface is organized by a continuous beaded border and a repeating sequence of gem settings and repoussé lotus motifs. The linked-pearl pattern, a decorative element widely transmitted through Silk Road artistic exchange and frequently encountered in Dunhuang mural ornament, establishes a clear visual connection to the pictorial traditions examined in earlier chapters (Li 2018). Here, the significance of the linked-pearl motif lies not merely in its “foreign origin” but in its role as a framing technology: a modular border that converts figural imagery into repeatable ornament and stabilizes it within a wearable layout. Its use here demonstrates the continuity of ornamental vocabulary across media, moving from mural framing systems into gold metalwork.

At one end of the frontal band stands a small kalavinka figure executed in relief. The being displays a human-like upper body and avian lower body, with wings extended along the contour of the band. Unlike the dangling mechanics of the Liao earring, this object translates the motif through structural integration: the bird’s body is engineered to “lock into” the band’s curvature rather than to hang freely from it.

This gold head ornament presents the kalavinka in a compact, highly ornamental configuration that emphasizes rhythmic curvature. The figure is rendered in a gender-neutral manner, with smooth facial features and elongated, curling tails that unfold in scrolling vegetal patterns closely comparable to Dunhuang examples. The tail rises in a curling, multi-lobed form that continues the ornamental stylization of avian tails traced in late Tang and post-Tang visual traditions. Crucially, these tail extensions do not trail into open space; they are disciplined into the headdress’s geometry. Their curves echo the arcs of the surrounding gold units decorated by micro-linked-pearl beads. By attaching the tail extensions directly to the encircling gold band, the figure’s body is subtly modified to meet the structural demands of jewelry design, transforming the kalavinka into a self-contained ornamental module.

The bird raises its arms in a gesture of offering, maintaining its devotional identity within a Buddhist visual framework. Flowing ribbons further animate the composition, a motif strongly associated with Dunhuang pictorial style, where celestial beings are often accompanied by fluttering textiles that evoke movement, performative presence, and sacred vitality. The ribbon also echoes the tail’s multi-directional curls, intensifying the sense of motion even within a rigid, wearable support.

Once again, the kalavinka is positioned at the frontal edge of the headdress, placing the motif in close proximity to the head and to sensory organs associated with voice and hearing, a location materially compatible with the kalavinka’s long-standing association with wondrous sound and devotional praise. Unlike the Liao earring, however, the object does not preserve sonic association through audible mechanics; instead, it re-codes “sound” iconographically and positionally, through gesture, lotus vocabulary, and head placement.

Like the Liao earring, this headdress is broadly aligned with the eleventh-century painted examples discussed earlier. Together, these objects suggest that kalavinka imagery circulated simultaneously in painted and metal forms across Silk Road regions. In this corpus, the motif’s sacred associations are not displaced by ornamentation but rearticulated within elite bodily adornment, where religious symbolism, aesthetic refinement, and sensory presence converged.

5. Conclusions

This study has examined how the kalavinka, a sacred hybrid musician associated with wondrous sound and Buddhist praise, came to function as wearable ornament within the corpus examined across Silk Road contexts. Rather than treating the appearance of kalavinka imagery in jewelry as a simple matter of decorative borrowing or secularization, the discussion has framed this shift as a process of material translation and transmedial transformation. By tracing the motif from its early South Asian kinnara/kinnarī prototypes through its formal reconfiguration in Tang-period mural painting and into eleventh-century painted and excavated ornaments, the article has asked how a figure embedded in pictorial programs and ritual soundscapes could be re-sited on the body while remaining recognizably Buddhist. The evidence suggests that this transformation did not entail an erasure of religious meaning but involved a re-coding of sacred identity through changes in scale, medium, and modes of bodily address (ear, head, and frontal display).

Three principal contributions emerge from this investigation. First, the study reframes the genealogy of the kalavinka by situating its East Asian development within a kinnara-derived lineage while acknowledging the fluidity of terminology across Silk Road regions. Rather than resolving the kinnara and kalavinka distinction through rigid classification, the analysis shows how shared functional and visual features enabled celestial musician imagery to circulate across media and cultural contexts. Second, it identifies three formal mechanisms that enabled the kalavinka to detach from narrative mural space and operate as a portable ornamental unit: (1) the consolidation of paired gendered types into an increasingly androgynous single figure; (2) the transformation of the tail into an autonomous decorative carrier; and (3) postural reorientation to fit bounded formats that anticipate suspension, repetition, and modular design. These changes are most clearly supported by painted evidence from Dunhuang, with further corroboration in the formal features of excavated jewelry. Third, by placing painted donor adornment and excavated gold ornaments in parallel rather than treating them as a strictly linear sequence, the article demonstrates that the kalavinka’s migration into wearable form unfolded across pictorial and metal media during broadly overlapping historical horizons. Within the materials examined, the motif’s association with wondrous sound, offering, and devotional praise remained legible, suggesting that ornament and religious identity were not mutually exclusive but could be mutually reinforcing within elite Buddhist regimes of display.

At the same time, several limitations indicate directions for future research. The present study has focused primarily on Buddhist visual and material contexts in the eastern and central sectors of the Silk Road. A broader comparative framework that includes additional religious traditions circulating in Central Asia, including Zoroastrian communities, may further illuminate the cross-cultural environment in which hybrid human–avian imagery developed. Such an approach raises the question of whether parallel or intersecting conceptions of sacred avian intermediaries contributed, directly or indirectly, to the visual shaping of kalavinka imagery. Exploring these possibilities would require closer integration of Buddhist art history with the study of Iranian and Central Asian religious iconographies, as well as more explicit attention to contact zones where artisans, patrons, and portable luxury goods moved between religious communities.

In addition, while this study has identified the presence of mobile metal components in kalavinka ornaments and noted their potential acoustic dimension, the sonic aspect of these objects remains insufficiently understood. Future interdisciplinary research that combines art historical analysis with materials science, metallurgical study, and experimental reconstruction may clarify how goldworking techniques, suspension systems, and bodily movement generated audible effects in practice. Such work would help distinguish iconographic “sound” (as a doctrinal attribute) from engineered sound (as a material affordance), thereby strengthening the article’s broader claim that sensory function is a key hinge in material translation. These avenues point toward a more integrated study of image, materiality, and sensory practice in the religious arts of the Silk Road.