Choying Dorje came to lead the Karma Kagyu school as the Tenth Karmapa in the early seventeenth century, and history remembers him as much for what he made with his hands as for what he taught. Among the most original artistic figures Tibet produced, he treated sculpture the way other lineage heads treated commentary, as a vehicle for transmitting a tradition's visual memory forward. This brass image of Green Tara, cast with pigments added afterward to pick out her features, stands under eight inches tall and carries his signature departures from standard Tibetan convention throughout: elliptical lotus petals rather than the rounder Tibetan norm, drapery rendered in tight striated folds, hair built up in stacked plates, ornate earrings, and a bulbous necklace, a vocabulary he drew from older Kashmiri and Swat Valley metalworking traditions that had largely dropped out of contemporary Tibetan practice by his own century.
A pair of birds perched above the deity's head completes the composition, a recurring motif across his work and one of the surer ways scholars now identify an unsigned piece as his. Tara herself is one of Tibetan Buddhism's most widely venerated bodhisattvas, an embodiment of compassion invoked for protection and swift help, and a seventeenth century sculpture of her by the head of an entire lineage sits at the intersection of two distinct kinds of authority, doctrinal and artistic, vested in the same person.