Receptacle of the Sacred. Jinah Kim
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actions, which could be easily translated into a visual narrative. An eastern Indian Kv manuscript now in the British Library (Or. 13940) is indeed richly illustrated and includes a few panels representing the narratives from the text.32 But this text, too, was not as frequently commissioned with paintings in medieval eastern India.33 The PC was the second most popular text for illustration in medieval eastern India, and the demand for illustrated manuscripts of the PC actually superseded the demand for the Prajñāpāramitā sūtra in Nepal by the sixteenth century. The relationship between the text and the images in an illustrated manuscript of the PC is perhaps most straightforward, since it is an apotropaic text proclaiming the efficacy and the power of the five protectresses. From the twelfth century onwards, the iconographic program of the PC manuscripts is more or less standardized, and a manuscript of the PC contains the images of the five goddesses accompanying their respective texts.34 The PC’s standardized one-on-one iconographic scheme, however, did not arise without various attempts to imbue the manuscript with the sacred presence in India.35
In comparison to the visually translatable contents of these Mahāyāna sūtras, the AsP provides little visual material to illustrate, for it is a philosophical treaty on emptiness. But perhaps the lack of visionary accounts in the text contributed to its malleability as a cultic object. When the text’s main goal is to expound a philosophical concept, how to represent it visually has many possibilities. The various iconographic schemes developed during this period suggest that the makers of these manuscripts were aware of the challenge of representing an unrepresentable text and sought ways to incorporate the message of the text in constructing their manuscripts as sacred objects. The fact that this metaphysical text was chosen for commissioning illustrated manuscripts, over other more visually oriented texts, attests to its status as the book of the Buddhist book cult. The cultic importance of the AsP, a more traditional Mahāyāna text, in the face of the fully developed forms of Esoteric Buddhism also reflects the conservatism that we see in the choice of a more archaic and formalized script. This conservatism and a desire to be more securely connected to the root of the tradition may also explain the popularity of the Buddhist book cult among the lay Buddhist practitioners in the late twelfth century when the monastic establishments were falling apart, as we will see in chapter 6. My analysis of the iconographic programs focuses on the illustrated manuscripts of the AsP with occasional examples of the Pañcarakṣā manuscripts.
Some iconographic choices, such as the choice of the Buddha’s life scenes, do suggest the conservative tendency to remain true to the core value of the Buddhist traditions. But the makers of medieval Buddhist books quickly adapted to the ever-changing cultic and demographic environments of eleventh- and twelfth-century eastern India. Many bookmakers developed strategies that made their books valuable cultic objects that could be animated and enlivened through the divine presence. Some manuscripts were designed to embody famous tīrthas (sacred sites, Group B manuscripts) and some to manifest maṇḍalas (lit. “circles,” plans or diagrams representing the hierarchical ordering of the divine presence, Group D manuscripts) in their respective three-dimensional spaces. If we consider how each manuscript was constructed as a sacred object, we can categorize the surviving illustrated Buddhist manuscripts from South Asia into four groups based on their iconographic structure: Group A, embodying the enlightenment experience of the Buddha; Group B, embodying the Buddhist sacred geography; Group C, representing and symbolizing the text; and Group D, manifesting a maṇḍala. The manuscripts (Ms) in Group A usually have three illustrated panels per folio. Four of them (Ms A1–Ms A4) have two pairs of two illustrated folios placed at the beginning and the end of the text, and three (Ms A5–Ms A7) have three pairs of illustrated folios placed at the beginning, the middle, and the end of the text. Both Group B and Group C manuscripts have a single panel per illustrated folio, except for occasional irregularities in Group B manuscripts (Ms B1 and Ms B2), and these two groups have the illustrated folios placed at the beginning and the end of each chapter or each section of the text, except for two Group C manuscripts (Ms C3 and Ms C4). Most manuscripts categorized under Group D have three illustrated panels per folio and three pairs of two facing illustrated folios placed at the beginning, the middle, and the end of the text, just as in Group A manuscripts. My categorization covers both Indian and Nepalese productions, but the main focus of the analysis is on eastern Indian manuscripts. The list of manuscripts in each group is by no means comprehensive. By dividing relatively well-known manuscripts into these four groups, we can understand better their cultic significance in historical context. It can also provide a useful analytical framework to understand the complex iconographic programs of illustrated Buddhist manuscripts.
FOUR ICONOGRAPHIC TRENDS
Makers of Group A rendered a book comparable to a reliquary or a stūpa. The iconographic program of Group A systematically represents the Buddha’s life scenes and the Prajñāpāramitā deities along with the cultic deities. This trend was the earliest iconographic scheme to develop in eastern India, possibly at the famous monastery of Nālandā, and all the subsequent trends more or less developed in reference to this one. The following manuscripts are examined as part of Group A:
Ms A1: AsP, Mahīpāla’s 6th year (ca. 983 CE), Asiatic Society, Kolkata G.4713 (fig. 3–1, web 2–1)
Ms A2: AsP, Mahīpāla’s 27th year (ca. 1007 CE), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, M86.185a-d
Ms A3: AsP, Nayapāla’s 14th year (ca. 1041 CE), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, M72.I.20a-b36 (fig. 2–3)
Ms A4: AsP, Vigrahapāla III’s 15th year (ca. 1058 CE) and Gopāla’s 8th year (ca. 1140 CE), Asia Society, New York (fig. 2–1, W-diagram 3–1)
Ms A5: AsP, Mahīpāla’s 5th year (ca. 1074 CE), Cambridge University Library, Add. 1464 (W-diagram 3–2)
Ms A6: AsP, Vigrahapāla III’s reign (ca. 1043-1069 CE), Wellcome Library, London, Sansk ε 1 (fig. 3–3, 3–4)
Ms A7: AsP, Madanapāla’s 17th year (ca. 1160 CE), Detroit Institute of Arts, Acc. No. 27.586
Of these seven manuscripts, Ms A5 and Ms A6 stand out from the group because their iconographic programs most clearly allude to the idea of a three-dimensional maṇḍala, articulated in Group D. Ms A7 dated to the second half of the twelfth century (ca. 1160 CE), and many manuscripts in Group D suggest that the Buddha’s life scenes remained the most popular theme in illustrated manuscript production until the beginning of the thirteenth century in eastern India.
Group B manuscripts consider a book as an embodiment of holy sites, and their iconographic programs characteristically represent famous images and sacred sites. This tradition initially developed in Nepal in the early eleventh century in parallel with Group A, which developed in Magadha (Bihar), and was adopted in Bengal by the beginning of the twelfth century. Group A and Group B are rooted in the same idea of embodying sacred sites in a book, if we understand the eight life scenes of the Buddha in Group A’s iconographic program as the eight major Buddhist pilgrimage sites.37 The major difference between the two groups lies in the structure of iconographic programming. If the makers of Group A manuscripts considered a book as a stūpa and placed the eight scenes systematically to encase the text, the Group B makers had a more ambitious vision of holding and replicating all the famous Buddhist holy sites, or tīrthas, in a book. The sites identified in these manuscripts are located not only in the South Asian subcontinent but also in faraway Buddhist lands of Sri Lanka, Java, Sumatra, Central Asia, and China. This group is comparable to a pata (or paubhā in Nepal) painting that commemorates one’s pilgrimage to the holy sites, which could serve as a pictorial guide for imagined pilgrimage.38 Many sites are located in Bihar and Bengal, but some are in western India (Gujarat, Maharashtra, Sindh), the northwestern region (Peshawar, Swat valley), China, Java, Sri Lanka, and other faraway places. This vision also reflects what sites the Buddhists in the Kathmandu Valley considered more important and powerful. The following manuscripts are considered in Group B:
Ms B1: AsP, NS 135 (1015 CE) during the joint rule of Bhojadeva, Rudradeva, and Lakṣmīkāmadeva, restored in NS 259 (1139 CE) during the reign of Mānadeva, Cambridge University Library, Add. 1643 (W-diagram 3–3)
Ms B2: AsP, NS 191 (1071 CE), Asiatic Society, Kolkata, A.15