BEFORE THE ADVENT OF PAPER, an early book form in the Indian subcontinent was the palm-leaf manuscript, known as pothi. It had a long and narrow horizontal format and was seldom more than 60 cm long and 6 cm high. Despite its diminutive size, it was a durable instrument for communicating Indian religious thought for over 2,000 years. The manuscript was intended to preserve and disseminate Indian sacred texts in the service of religion, as well as the great literary epics. It is not known when the pothi began to be illustrated as none have survived before the 10th century. However, from at least that time, manuscripts were illuminated with miniature images of deities to whom the text was dedicated. The palm-leaf manuscript thus became a repository of the Indian pictorial convention, whose preservation was hindered by the subcontinent’s humidity. Apart from monumental wall murals, such as those at Ajanta, little evidence of classical Indian painting has survived the passage of time. A custodian of possibly the earliest surviving Indian painting traditions, the humble manuscript became an important medium documenting what might otherwise have been lost.
Some of the world’s rare holdings of Indian illustrated palm-leaf manuscripts are currently being displayed in a special exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Early Buddhist Manuscript Painting: The Palm-leaf Tradition draws from the museum’s own holdings of illustrated palm-leaf manuscripts, book covers, initiation cards, thangkas and sculptures, in an installation featuring many rarely seen works including some that have never been exhibited. According to John Guy, curator of South and Southeast Asian Art at the museum’s department of Asian art: ‘Indian illustrated palm-leaf manuscripts of the 10th to 13th centuries are extremely rare, and the few that survived did so outside India, principally in the monasteries of Tibet. The painting style we witness in these earliest surviving manuscripts reflects stylistic conventions developed in Indian temple and monastic mural painting, now almost completely lost to us. Thus these manuscript paintings provide a unique insight into Indian painting styles at the close of the first millennium AD.’
The exhibition of some 30 manuscript folios and book covers focuses on one remarkable Mahayanist Buddhist text, the Ashtasahasrika Prajnaparamita Sutra, ‘Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Verses’. In the Hindu-Buddhist pantheon, it was highly revered as one of the oldest Mahayana sutras and a fundamental text for understanding emptiness. The essence of the text was also personified in a deity of the same name, Prajnaparamita, ‘Goddess of Transcendent Wisdom’. The Ashtasahasrika Prajnaparamita Sutra was widely illustrated in manuscript form and, as an iconic representation of the goddess through whom devotion might be directed, became an object of worship itself. ‘Early in their history the manuscripts themselves came to acquire a sacred character, becoming objects of veneration in their own right. The worship of books of wisdom (jnanapuja) assumed an important role in temple ritual. The public recitation and worship of texts, as well as the display of the manuscript itself, still forms an important of Buddhist and Jain worship,’ Mr Guy explained.
When the palm-leaf manuscript made its appearance is open to conjecture. Speculation suggests it might be as old as the art of writing in India itself. The earliest surviving manuscript samples were made of birch bark, called bhurjapatra, traceable to the 2nd and 3rd centuries. It is possible that the palm leaf was used for manuscripts at the time, but none are extant. As its name suggests, the palm-leaf manuscript was made of treated palm-leaf folios, usually from the talipot (Corypha umbraculifera) palm whose leaves were first trimmed to a narrow, horizontal shape and then ‘processed’. They might be boiled in lime-water, or dried in the shade and oiled on the surface. In north, west and east India, a calligrapher using a reed pen or brush wrote the text in ink directly onto the folio surface. The unbound folios were given to the painter to make the illustrations, using obviously, vegetable pigments and dyes, and filled with paint of opaque quality. Occasionally red cinnabar was applied to add lustre to the illustrations. The folios were threaded, bound and secured by cords through holes and protected by flat wooden covers. When completed, the manuscript was wrapped in cloth and stored in the monastic library.
Only a few hundred palm-leaf manuscripts providing evidence of east Indian medieval painting are extant. On view in the exhibition are those of the Bengal school of West Bengal or Bangladesh where the Pala rulers were great patrons of Buddhist art between the 8th to the 12th centuries. They presided over a network of monastic workshops of scribes and artists copying and illustrating sacred texts in the monasteries of Nalanda, Vikramasila, Vikramapura and Somarupa. The manuscript’s execution was considered an act of merit for both patron and scribe. ‘It is not uncommon for a colophon to record the name of the donor and the scribe, sometimes with the place and reign-year of execution,’ said Mr Guy. But the manuscript was not dated and neither were its texts’ origins recorded. Inscriptions bearing the name of the painter do not appear, suggesting he was perhaps of a lower caste. Yet the Manasollasa, a 12th century manual of technical information on painting placed much emphasis on the painter’s formal accomplishments. He was to be a ‘master of fine draughtsmanship, proficient in painting according to the prescribed methods and adept in the use of colours and modelling’ because he was ‘not only a fresco painter, but was (also) well-versed in the technique of miniature painting on palm-leaf (patra-lekhana)’.
The Manasollasa’s statements support the contention that miniature manuscript painting was part of a larger mural tradition. The illustrations were limited by the folio’s size and conformed to a standard format of around 5 cm by 8 cm. Their style was uniform, usually of a dominant deity in a centralised frame, surrounded by text on either side. The figure, outlined in black, was vividly painted in red, blue, yellow, green and white. Flora and fauna from nature and motifs from the celestial realm intrinsic to Indian religion appeared alongside temple or monastic architecture. When magnified, the complexity of these elements reveals the epic proportions and scale of wall painting long since vanished. However, the individual figures depicted often do not provide the text’s focus of worship. ‘Rarely do they actually illustrate the subject of the text. Typically they provide an iconographic representation of a deity, or a scene from a jataka story not described in the text. Their function therefore would appear to be limited to assisting the devotee in concentrating his worship, giving focus to his meditation,’ said Mr Guy.
If the figurative images had a meaning, it was to allude to the power of the Shakyamuni Buddha, which in itself gave the text great authority. The believers, who read, recited, wrote down, taught or propagated such texts to others, accrued a lot of merit. Narratives of the jatakas, stories of the Buddha’s previous existence and significant events in his life however, are rarely found. Two folios from a unique edition of the Pancavimsatisahasrika Prajnaparamita manuscript (circa 1090) are featured. One portrays the Buddha standing submerged in water, giving safety (abhayandada) to mariners, a role more usually assumed by the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara. Two smaller celestial deities appear on either side. Submitting to the Buddha’s calming powers in the sea is the deity Rahu, who causes eclipses and is associated with storms. Bodhisattvas served as the embodiment of compassion to all living creatures and delayed their own enlightenment in the process. A Bodhisattva plays the vina, a stringed musical instrument, in a mountain grotto whose depth is conveyed by a deep blue, encased by colourful angular rock fragments. A seated and bejewelled Future Bodhisattva Maitreya with a stupa represented in his headdress appears in a 12th-century Pala-period folio from an Ashtasahasrika Prajnaparamita manuscript. Flanked by two white lotuses, he is inside a terraced shrine or bhadra, preaching to a female devotee prostrated at his feet. Another Bodhisattva is bestowing boons to a gathering of the devoted against a background of lush foliage. Other deities represented include the four-armed Kurakulla, an emanation of the Amitabha Buddha. An aspect of the Red Tara, he is completely in red, and wears a flame-emitting aureole while dancing on a corpse in a mountain grotto.
These Indian visual conventions were widely disseminated – both within the subcontinent and without – by the manuscript’s portability. Following the collapse of Pala rule and the destruction of monasteries in the mid-12th century, an exodus of Buddhist monks brought them to the Himalayan region. The manuscript’s conventions were transmitted to shape the artistic achievements of Nepal and Tibet, perpetuating the legacy of Indian art, which was disappearing further south. Buddhism was known in Nepal early in the first millennium, and reached its ascendancy between the 12th and 13th centuries when Nepalese artists took the classical manuscript tradition further. Nowhere was it more elaborate than on the wooden covers able to accommodate continuous illustrated narratives. A rare 10th- to 11th-century cover from the Karnata-Malla period is devoted to Prajnaparamita who became one of Nepal’s principal female deities. Seated at the centre, the goddess is holding in her raised left hand, the sutra text of which she is the personification, as her principal attribute. Supported by a cast of Buddhist deities, she is attended by two bodhisattvas, Padmapani and Vajrasattva. On the left are two scenes from the Shakyamuni Buddha’s life; his miraculous birth at Lumpini and the subduing of the angry elephant Nalagiri at Rajgir. On the right, the Buddha is giving his first sermon at Sarnath to an assembly of monks and bodhisattvas. Depicted too is the great miracle at Shravasti where multiple Buddhas appeared. The composition of much drama and movement, dominated by red, measures all of 56.8 cm by 5.7 cm.
Even today, the Ashtasahasrika Prajnaparamita Sutra is read and recited as a ritual for blessings by the niwars, a linguistic group in Nepal. The faithful in neighbouring Tibet do likewise as it had been adapted to Lamaism, a complex form of Buddhism, by the 11th century. Devotional images of deities evoked through recitation of the Ashtasahasrika Prajnaparamita text later circulated, and appeared in Tibetan initiation cards, called tsakalis. These small 13th to 14th century paintings used during Buddhist initiation ceremonies, had letters on their backs indicating the correct sequence. One set made for the Nyingma (Elder) school of Tibetan Buddhism has a central group forming a meditation mandala dedicated to Vajrasattva, the sixth and ultimate Buddha, accompanied by five tathagatas, celestial Buddhas and four lokapalas, gate-keeper guardians. Tibetan thangkas in distemper on cloth made for monasteries also carried portraits of Lamas as well as Buddhist deities heavily influenced by the Pala tradition, often in a riot of colour.
Outside the subcontinent, regular maritime contact with east Indian monastic Buddhism influenced the ‘Indianisation’ of southeast Asia, and was accompanied by related three-dimensional art forms. Sculpture in particular later emerged an indispensable aid to dating manuscripts. This is because ‘the study of parallel developments in sculpture,’ Mr Guy adds, ‘attests the close stylistic interdependence of the plastic and visual arts in ancient India.’ Buddhist images of Indian provenance found in mainland and insular southeast Asia demonstrate the legacy of monastic contact. In Burma, a 10th-century bronze Bihari sculpture of a crowned and jewelled Pala Buddha was identified as of the Kurkihar style. Important religious exchanges between India and the Malay archipelago inspired the creation of Borobudur, one of the world’s greatest Buddhist monuments in east Java, by the powerful Sailendra rulers from the mid-8th to the 9th centuries. During the reign of the third Pala king Devapala (815-854), the Sailendras also constructed one of Nalanda’s main monasteries in India itself. Thereafter manuscript editions of the Ashtasahasrika Prajnaparamita Sutra circulating in Sumatra and Java instigated the cult of the ‘Goddess of Transcendent Wisdom’. A 9th-century Sailendra style bronze sculpture with traces of lacquer, was made in Prajnaparamita’s honour in the Palembang area of Sumatra.
The introduction of paper in 12th century India accelerated the palm-leaf manuscript’s demise some two centuries later. Although its replacement by the art of the book was almost complete by the 16th century, its miniature illustrations were given a new lease of life. They were increasingly enlarged to reach 10 cm by 20 cm and soon dominated an entire page. Growing to a large rectangular format, they subsequently featured in Buddhist books as far as China, where they were valued as an independent art form.
Early Buddhist Manuscript Painting: The Palm-leaf Tradition is at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028, until 22 March 2009. www.metmuseum.org
