The image with delicately featured face, his eyes at once smiling and half-closed, his lips also smiling; is seated on a lotus throne - one hand in the gesture of granting wishes. He wears a small flower behind each ear. The Buddha is seated within a 13 tiered chorten (stupa) beneath an umbrella canopy, surrounded by an extravagantly lush foliate landscape with a playful monkey and a peacock among the flowering branches. To his right, held aloft a vase from which a lotus-topped pillar springs forth is a second chorten. That it is empty tells a tragic tale...

For chortens of this type see Rhie and Thurman " Wisdom and Compassion, Sacred Art of Tibet" (updated version) p.462 (supplement) fig. 217 in the 14th Century thangka of the Cosmic Bodhisattva Usnisvijaya.