Last Existence: Buddha performing a miracle before the ascetics

Fragment of a relief probably belonging to a false-niche, and showing the Buddha performing a miracle before the ascetics. The Buddha visits an ascetic of the Kasyapa lineage and asks him to spend the night in the fire-house. The ascetic accepts but warns the Buddha that a poisonous snake dwells in it and might harm him. By a miraculous feat, the Buddha subjugates the snake who crawls in his alms bowl and emerges unharmed from the fire-house. Kasyapa and his disciples convert. The relief preserves scanty traces of an upper register separated by a listel, and of the proper-left inner jamb separated by a vertical row of square panels with axes, bisected into triangles each containing an indented triangle. A tenon seems to be carved on the bottom face. The back face shows vertical tool marks. The figured field shows the Buddha standing, his right hand being in abhayamudrā, the left holding the alms bowl where the snake originally was crawled. He has plain nimbus. The overrobe features a V-shaped neckline, and the drapery is rendered with lines of the same shape. In the foreground and on the left, an elderly ascetic is kneeling down in left profile, his left hand is raising up, the right is resting on the knee. The hair was probably fashioned into a coil with a vertical knot. He is dressed in paridhāna and an uttarīya. A male figure, possibly another elderly ascetic, is standing in left profile in the background. His right hand is raised up, and his hair was probably similar to that of the previous figure.