The emphasis on the religious merit in understanding the reason behind inserting images is not entirely misplaced. In a purely materialistic sense, the more resources put into the project, that is, expensive pigments and more skillful artisans and scribes, the greater the merit claimed in the donor’s mind and the community that encountered the end result, that is, the beautifully illustrated manuscript of the AsP.4 Merit making must have been one of the major motivations behind donating an illustrated manuscript. After all, the manuscripts were the “pious gifts” (deya dharma) made to accrue punya to benefit all sentient beings. However, merit making alone cannot explain why elaborate iconographic schemes were developed during the course of the two centuries when the production of illustrated manuscripts in eastern India saw its heyday. As we will see, the manuscript makers in medieval South Asia responded to the changing doctrinal and cultic environment of Esoteric Buddhism with innovative iconographic schemes. Seen in this context, the images do more than just decorate a book. They do not exist entirely superfluous to the text, nor do they defy the context of a book. On the contrary, the iconographic programs are designed to symbolize the teaching of the text, and the images define a book’s material context as a three-dimensional sacred object. To emphasize their function in the book as more than mere embellishment, I have chosen the term illustration to refer to the paintings. The term illustration does not exclude the meaning of decoration, and their decorative aspect is part of our discussion. Before examining the innovative strategies introduced in making Buddhist books, let us first investigate the historical circumstances that led to the introduction of illustrated Buddhist manuscripts in South Asia to understand the rationale behind illustration.
MAPPING THE HISTORICAL ORIGIN
The earliest surviving illustrated manuscript from South Asia dates to the late tenth century (ca. 983 CE).5 Painted book covers from the Gilgit region may date to the ninth or tenth century, but no surviving manuscript with images on folios dates to earlier than the tenth century. As seen in the previous chapter, this late introduction of the illustrating practice may relate to the flourishing of the Prajñāpāramitā cult in the ninth century in eastern India. Where did this practice originate? Why did the Buddhists in eastern India suddenly begin to illustrate their manuscripts at this time? While the historical origin of the practice of illustrating manuscripts in Buddhist tradition is beyond the scope of the current study, I would like to offer a few remarks regarding this issue to provide the historical context for the development of iconographic schemes identified below.
Sanskrit manuscripts of South Asian origin survive from much earlier dates. Some of the Gilgit manuscripts date to the fifth or sixth centuries,6 and the manuscripts from Bamiyan, Afghanistan, now in the Schøyen collection, have some palm-leaf fragments that are reported to date to the second century.7 A few painted wooden boards that served as book covers accompanied the manuscripts found at Naupur near Gilgit.8 Varying dates between the seventh and the ninth centuries have been proposed for these painted covers,9 and whichever date we accept, the painted covers certainly predate the earliest known surviving illustrated manuscript from the South Asian subcontinent, dated circa 983 CE (see web 2–1). It is intriguing to find vertical compositions on the book covers made for the Gilgit manuscripts, because the pothi format manuscripts were usually written horizontally from left to right and later book covers also follow this format (see fig. 2–5). As Pratapaditya Pal remarks, the vertical format found on two sets of these covers may suggest their connection to a preexisting tradition of banner paintings.10 I wonder if this may also reflect the influence from the north, that is, from China via Central Asia, where a manuscript would have been written vertically from right to left.11
Manuscripts from Dunhuang suggest that illustrating manuscripts was rigorously practiced by the ninth century in China and Central Asia.12 Inserting an illustrated frontispiece comparable to the painted book covers was in practice by the mid-eighth century in East Asia, as an illustrated frontispiece of the Avataṁsaka sūtra from Korea (Unified Silla) dated 754–755 CE suggests. Among the great number of early manuscripts in Indian language and script found in Central Asian sites and Dunhuang, a few manuscripts contain a forerunner to the idea of illustrating a text folio, with images of the Buddha appearing in roundels.13 All of these early examples point to the possibility that the idea traveled to South Asia from Central Asia, especially to eastern India in the case of illustrated palm-leaf manuscripts, suggesting multi-directionality and mutuality of cultural influence on the development of Buddhist practices in India and elsewhere. With many international pilgrims and foreign monks coming to the land of the historical Buddha, especially to the area of ancient Magadha and Gauḍa (Bihar and Bengal), where all the major Buddhist pilgrimage sites were located and where many Buddhist monastic institutions thrived under the royal support of the Pālas and the Candras during the early medieval period (especially the ninth through the tenth centuries), new ideas about how to make a Buddhist book could have traveled a great distance. This is not to argue that the exact manner of illustrating manuscripts traveled from Central Asia or China to eastern India. The mode of illustration developed in South Asia is unique and quite different from its counterparts in Central Asian and Dunhuang examples. But I emphasize the multidirectionality in the pattern of interaction and contacts to suggest the possibility that the idea of putting the images inside the text folios was shared in different culture zones through frequent travels and trades undertaken by many Buddhists during the early medieval period. Such travels by the devout in turn enabled the survival of the manuscripts from Bihar and Bengal as they faced unfavorable conditions with the demise of Buddhist monastic institutions there from the late twelfth century onwards.
INTRODUCTION OF THE ILLUSTRATING PRACTICE IN SOUTH ASIA
If the tradition of illustrating text folios was inspired by the practice established in Central Asia and China, it is easy to assume that it was transmitted through the northwestern region of the South Asian subcontinent, such as Gilgit and Kashmir, where a number of earlier manuscripts were found and where the archaeological evidence for Buddhist book cult in practice from earlier centuries is available.14 However, a relatively late date for the surviving material from India, the late tenth through the thirteenth centuries, makes us look for an alternate traveling route, for Buddhist activities in Gilgit had dwindled considerably by the tenth century.15 We may look to the neighboring Himalayan region, especially to the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal where the production of illustrated Buddhist manuscripts was equally on the rise in the early eleventh century and increased dramatically by the thirteenth century.16 The similarity in format and size and the use of palm leaf as the main material of choice put the Nepalese and eastern Indian illustrated manuscripts in the same tradition of bookmaking, despite their stylistic, iconographic, and sometimes paleographic differences.17
The Kathmandu Valley was not as politically stable during this time, with periods of joint rules and short-lived kings. Yet it is remembered as a Buddhist paradise in contemporary Tibetan literature, and Buddhist artistic productions indeed thrived during this time.18 Perhaps, the unstable political condition provided a perfect ground for cultural experimentations and heightened religious zeal that accommodated increased movements of people to and from India, not only Nepalese, but also Tibetans, such as Nagtso Lotsāwa, traveling to India in search of a teacher, and Indian Buddhist masters, such as Atīśa, traveling to Tibet. Among these travelers were the donors of the earliest known surviving illustrated manuscripts from the South Asian subcontinent. The second earliest surviving illustrated manuscript from Nālandā (ca. 1041 CE), now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, was a manuscript of the AsP commissioned by a Nepalese lay donor named Rāmajīva. The donor of the earliest surviving AsP manuscript, now in the Asiatic Society, Kolkata, (G.4713) is identified as a monastic elder (sthāvira) named Sādhugupta, whose unique title, śākyācarya, raises that tantalizing possibility that his monastery, Tāḍivāḍi Mahāvihāra, may have been in Nepal.19 Another AsP manuscript, made during Mahīpāla’s twenty-seventh regnal year, was transported to Nepal and was in the Kathmandu Valley by NS 355 (1235 CE).20