Vietnam White Marble Vitarka Buddha Statue, 36 in

The vitarka mudra, and what the hand is doing

Vitarka is the gesture of discourse. The right hand comes up to chest height, thumb and index finger closed into a circle, the other three fingers left extended — a closed loop for an argument with no loose end, held up while the point is being made. The left hand stays open in the lap, palm upward, so the meditative half of the figure is never abandoned. The gesture runs through Gandharan sculpture and the Gupta-period workshops at Sarnath and Mathura before travelling east into Central Asian and Chinese Buddhist art. Choose it when you want the Buddha teaching rather than the Buddha withdrawn.

Vietnam white marble at 36 inches

The stone is Vietnam white marble from the Thanh Hoa quarries: a bright, cool, neutral white with a fine crystalline grain and hairline grey veining that stays under about 3% of the surface. It carries none of Makrana's cream warmth, so the piece sits cleanly against painted walls and green planting rather than against wood. Taken to a soft satin polish, light lands on the robe folds as a blurred sheen instead of a hard reflection, which keeps the carving readable from a foot away. At 36 inches tall, roughly 26 inches across the knees and about 255 kg, this is a floor piece — it needs its own patch of ground, not a console table.

How this Buddha is made

Every piece here is commissioned: carved for you, in your stone and at your size, by the master sculptors and artist families we work with in Jaipur. We design it with you, brief the sculptor, and follow the work through each stage — rough block, primary massing, the detail carving of the face, hands and drapery, then the progressive polish — before crating and delivery to your door. The face, the fingers of the raised hand and the folds of the robe are hand-finished throughout; a machined edge shows immediately on a gesture this small and this exposed.

Placing a 3 ft seated Buddha

A seated figure at this scale reads best on the floor, with the head a little below a standing viewer's eye: a sheltered verandah, the edge of a courtyard, a living-room corner, or the far end of a meditation room. Leave roughly two feet of clear wall or planting behind it so the silhouette has something to sit against, and face it east if you want the older placement convention. Marble takes rain but not road grit, so an open-air spot does better under a roof line. The same form can be commissioned in Makrana white marble, black stone or Dholpur pink sandstone, at other heights, or on a plain plinth in place of the double lotus — send us a photograph of the spot on WhatsApp and we will tell you what suits it.