Three Luohans (羅漢) carving

Here is a stone carving of three luohans hugging together. The carving is well executed with minute facial details of the Luohans shown. This shows the skills and talent of the master who produced this piece of art. As Luohans usually come in group of 18, I believe there are other carvings of luohans in groups of three that will finally made up the total of 18 Luohans.

A luohan 羅漢 is the Chinese term for an arhat, one of the historical disciples of the Buddha. As Buddhist tradition developed, and especially in the East Asian Buddhist countries, the number of arhats or luohans tended to increase, and at least the most important were regarded as, or as almost, bodhisattvas or fully enlightened beings, with a wide range of supernatural powers. According to Buddhist tradition, groups of 16, 18 or 500 luohans awaited the arrival of Maitreya, the Future Buddha, and groups were often used in East Asian Buddhist art. The full set is thought by most scholars to have had figures for the typical Chinese main grouping of Sixteen or Eighteen Arhats. although. These and earlier smaller groupings of six or eight were each given names and personalities in Buddhist tradition.

A set of life-size glazed pottery sculptures of luohans usually assigned to the period of the Liao dynasty (907–1125) was discovered in caves at I Chou (I-chou, Yizhou) in Yi xian or Yi County, Hebei south of Beijing, before World War I. They have been described as "one of the most important groups of ceramic sculpture in the world." They reached the international art market, and were bought for Western collections. At least eight statues were originally found, including one large fragment which was long thought to have been destroyed in Berlin during World War II, but has been sighted in Russia recently.

Others are now in the following collections: the British Museum in London, two in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Penn Museum, Philadelphia, Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas City, the Musée Guimet in Paris, and a Japanese collection. With the example lost in Berlin, this makes a total of ten figures (Source: Wiki).

A life-size luohan sculpture

Another luohan sculpture