Tiger, Hand carved Buffalo Horn sculpture.

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Tiger, Hand carved Buffalo Horn sculpture.:
$31.23

Buffalo Horn carving of a Tiger-Tora. Either Chinese or Japanese from the 19th century. I mounted this on a wood base which sets this off very nicely. The depth of colour in the horn is beautiful. The detail of the face is wonderful.
The Tiger in South East Asia is depicted as a guardian god of the primitive beliefs of ancient times and in later Taoist and Buddhist art; they symbolize protection against evil spirits, auspiciousness, the man of virtue and of benevolent rule; and they became the subject of tradition and transformation in works of modern and contemporary art.
A few tigers had visited Japan before its cultural isolation ended in the late nineteenth century, full-grown cats and mewling kittens given as gifts to warlords and shoguns. But most artists seem to have depicted tigers using imported pelts as reference. Many artists also liked to depict leopards in the mistaken belief they were female tigers, a family of spots and stripes.
On a closer look, it appears some artists used house cats as models.
Without tigers to draw upon from life, Japanese artists depicted the fearsome kitties for cosmic reasons unknown to artists such as Durer. They drew upon Taoism, a mystical Chinese philosophy that grew from studying nature. In free-flowing Taoism, Chinese philosophers saw the universe in terms of a symbiotic yin and yang: yang, active and masculine, takes the form of a mythological dragon; yin, passive and feminine, the tiger common to some Chinese forests.Japanese Zen Buddhism shares some beliefs with Chinese Taoism. In Japan, artists depicted twinned dragons and tigers on the sliding doors of Zen Buddhist temples. And like the Christian story of Saint Jerome and his lion, Buddhists believed that tigers accompanied long-ago holy men. In the Zen Buddhist imagination, a tiger grooms itself with monkish discipline, its sunlit nap a lasting metaphor for enlightenment.