from palm-leaf to paper manuscript painting 1100–1500 John Guy
I
ndian painting around the year 1100 CE, as far as we can judge from the few dated works that can be assigned securely to the period, was devoted almost exclusively to the illustration of Buddhist and Jain manuscripts. We know from pilgrim descriptions that the great Buddhist monasteries of eastern India were richly painted with murals devoted to sacred images, although none have survived. The murals in the Sumtsek chapel at Alchi monastery, Ladakh, dated to around 1200, are among the most extensive mural paintings of this period extant, providing insight into the richness of the medieval mural painting tradition (Fig. 8).1 The great monasteries (mahaviharas) of northern India, from Kashmir to Bengal, undoubtedly had equally magnificent painted interiors, radiant with Mahayana Buddhist imagery. The multistoried libraries of these centers were renowned as treasure houses of learning and Buddhist knowledge, housing vast stores of both manuscripts and the finest paintings of the age (Fig. 9). The Jain temple also had its knowledge repository, the jnana bhandars, which over time assumed a critical role as the custodial preserver of Jain knowledge and religious art. The overwhelming majority of Buddhist illustrated texts are devoted to the Ashasahasrika Prajnaparamita (Perfection of Wisdom in 8,000 Verses) and the Pancaraksa (Five Protective Goddesses). The mystic spells and charms (vidya) that comprise both collections came to be personified as female deities, their iconographic forms already codified by the twelfth century in the Sadhanamala (rosary/garland of invocations) and Nispannayogavali.2 These profoundly influential texts gave voice to the Mahayanist preoccupation with compassion embodied in the cult of bodhisattvas and taras. Buddhist artists — mostly monks, we can assume — produced a great corpus of illustrated palm-leaf texts in eastern India during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. They draw imagery from two prototypes — temple sculptures that embody the elaborate
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Figure 8. Prajnaparamita, Sumtsek chapel, Alchi monastery, Ladakh. Mural painting on plaster, ca. 1200. Photograph by J. Poncar
iconographic schema developed in the parent texts (Fig. 10) and mural paintings of which almost nothing survives from this period. In both instances, the manuscript artists had to miniaturize radically, which they achieved with consummate skill. The sophisticated linear and chromatic complexity of the Pala painting style is evident by the date of the oldest survivors, two editions of the Ashasahasrika Prajnaparamita manuscript produced in the
