John Guy
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
A vast body of Indian religious texts was recorded and transmitted though the medium of the palm-leaf manuscript. This humble form of the book, at once both fragile and resilient, has provided the vehicle for Indian religious thought for over two thousand years, and served as a medium for preserving some of the earliest surviving paintings known from India.
From at least the 10th century these manuscripts were beautifully illuminated with miniature illustrations, typically with images of the deities to whom the text was dedicated and who were evoked through the recitation of sadhanas, invocations and visualizations embodied in the text.
The imagery chosen for these representations emanates at a conceptual level from the texts themselves, especially the teachings of the Prajnaparamita, which has at its core the Buddhist sentiment of compassion, and the role of tantrism, both given expression through the pantheon of Bodhisattvas and Taras, the ultimate goal being enlightenment through transcendental wisdom. These divine images were evoked through the recitation of magical sound syllables (bija-mantras). In this way the miniature manuscript paintings function in the same manner as larger cloth paintings (pata; Tibetan tangkhas), as meditational aids.
Narrative themes occur more rarely, and are located either on the interior surface of wooden manuscript covers, or on the first and last folios of the palm-leaf manuscript. They assume explicitly narrative functions only, it would seem, when they are illustrating scenes from the life of the Buddha. In these instances the textual source would appear to be the Astamahapratiharya (Eight Great Sacred Locations), the historical Buddha Sakyamuni’s life-passage events. Each of the Eight-Great-Sacred Locations mirrors a seminal event in the Buddhas’ life. The Jatakas are but rarely represented, one exception being the superb 10th century cover in the National Museum, New Delhi.
Early in their history the manuscripts themselves came to acquire a sacred character, becoming objects of veneration in their own right. Judging from narrative scenes in Pala sculpture, the worship of books of wisdom assumed an important part of Buddhist ritual. Of the small corpus of surviving illustrated palm-leaf manuscripts of the 10th to 12th centuries – many bear colophons recording their date and place of production, invariably one of the Pala mahaviharas of Magadha (Bihar) or Bengal – two texts dominate the output: the Ashtasahasrika Prajnaparamita Sutra (‘Perfection of Wisdom’) and the Pancharaksha, an esoteric collection of dharanis evoking the wisdom deities.
This paper will present illustrated editions of these manuscripts and explore the relationship of text to image and the role of narrative in both its story-telling function, and at a magico-symbolic level in which the placement and sequencing of images serves a different purpose, that of evoking a mandala constellation which empowers and protects these sacred texts and those who recite them.
(Presented in the International Conference – Buddhist Narrative in Asia and Beyond, 9-11 August 2010, Imperial Queen's Park Hotel, Bangkok, organized by Institute of Thai Studies, Chulalongkorn University with support from The Thailand Research Fund (TRF), in co-operation with Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts, Institute of Asian Studies, The Confucius Institute, Chulalongkorn University and l’École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO))