Buddhist Painting in Greater Kashmir: An Early Inspiration for Tibet?

This painting of bodhisattvas Maitreya and Avalokiteshvara with patrons is on one of a pair of wooden boards clinching and protecting a stack of birch-bark pages constituting a handwritten Buddhist text. When found in 1938, it was on the underside of the top cover. (The bottom cover depicts three buddhas) (fig. 2).

It is one of three sets of painted manuscript covers excavated in 1938 in the area north of Kashmir known as Gilgit. The other two sets, with vertical painted compositions, appear to be earlier, one from the seventh and the other from the early eighth century. Collectively, the three pairs offer not only the earliest but also, for all intents and purposes, the only excavated Buddhist paintings from the Greater Kashmir area. But what do they have to do with Tibet? Actually, quite a bit. The taller rectangular shape of the pages of the texts enclosed by the covers resembles those used later by Tibetans, strikingly different from the long narrow format used in eastern India and Nepal. Along with similarities in the way that the exteriors of book covers were painted a little later in Tibet, this has led some to suggest a substantial role in the transmission of the “cult of the book” in its physical form from Greater Kashmir to Tibet.1 Additionally, the aggressive, expansionist rulers of the Tibetan Empire (ca. 600–850) invaded and occupied Gilgit in the early eighth century and were instrumental in the destruction of the Patola Shahi rulers who had been fervent patrons of Gilgit’s Buddhist art.

The Gilgit painted covers were found as part of a cache of manuscripts in the 1930s near the village of Naupur, north and slightly west of Kashmir, which culturally if not politically dominated the Gilgit rulers. The Patola Shahi dynasty oversaw this area between the late sixth century through at least the eighth. The Gilgit rulers, who identified themselves by name and with sponsor portraits, commissioned a number of spectacular silver-inlaid brass Buddhist images, probably from Kashmiri ateliers, as all display a distinctively Kashmiri style.2 At times, the local rulers were at odds with the dynasties of Kashmir, but in the eighth century both were allies with the Tang Chinese against the invading and occupying Tibetan armies.3

The Tibetans temporarily occupied Gilgit in the early eighth century after the Shahi kings neither submitted to the Tibetan invaders nor allowed their troops to transit their state freely. The local ruler, Surendraditya (720–737), sent missions to the Tang court, which dispatched troops to help drive out the Tibetans. However, there seem to have been setbacks for both the Tibetans and the alliance of the Tang court, the Kashmiris (both the Karokota [ca. 625–855] and Utpala dynasties [ca. ninth–tenth centuries]), and the local Gilgit rulers, until the latter were finally defeated in the mid-eighth century. Some kind of Tibetan military presence was maintained until the early or mid-ninth century, when the Tibetan dynasty collapsed. Nonetheless, a late tenth-century itinerary between Central Asia and Kashmir mentions the city of Gilgit and eight Buddhist monasteries, evidence that Gilgit Buddhism survived or even thrived at least into the tenth century.4

Of the three excavated sets of wooden book covers—now in the Shri Pratap Singh Museum in Srinagar, Kashmir—two of them protected copies of the Samghata Sutra, of which multiple copies were identified among the Gilgit manuscripts. They were written in Sanskrit in the script in common use in Greater Kashmir at the time, called Proto-Sharada. The sutra was translated into Chinese in the sixth century5 and into Tibetan in the ninth century. It is a text that among other things describes the process of bodily death, advises the ways to avoid the hells and other karmic consequences for actions that harm others, and consoles family members of the deceased. In recent times, it has been recited in memorials for the victims of the 9/11 attacks and of the tsunami of 2004.6

The sutra features two bodhisattvas: Sarvashura (Universal Hero), and Bhaishajyasena (Medicine Son). A third, Maitreya, is briefly mentioned. Although it is tempting to see the two bodhisattvas painted on the inside top cover as Sarvashura and Bhaishajyasena, the bodhisattvas actually can be identified as the two-armed bodhisattvas Maitreya and Avalokiteshvara. This reminds us that the manuscripts, written on paper and birch bark, and the wooden covers were not necessarily made for each other or even at the same time. The covers in particular could have been shifted to other manuscripts or made to protect older manuscripts that may not originally have had such a cover. In the present instance, the manuscript found inside the covers is dated to the early seventh century, while the painted covers were created more than a century later.7

The inside of the top cover was painted with the two bodhisattvas and the sponsor couple in an undifferentiated space with flowers of different sizes and colors floating in the background. Maitreya is the pinkish bodhisattva in the middle holding a golden vase. The white Padmapani, a form of Avalokiteshvara, is on the right. At his left shoulder is an image of Buddha Amitabha on a lotus. Most intriguing is the kneeling sponsor couple on the far left. The woman dressed in orange holds a white scarf reminiscent of the offering scarf (khatak) ubiquitous in Tibet even today. The slightly larger male, in a belted robe with a sword buckled on his left, offers a lamp and a garland or wreath to the two bodhisattvas. Portraits of sponsors are quite common at the very bottom of compositions in later Nepalese and Tibetan art, but what is unprecedented in this composition is that here they are depicted the same size as the deities. The bodhisattvas each have a head and body nimbus, which the lay couple making offerings do not, but they look as if they are either in front of large sculptures of the bodhisattvas or sharing the same space with the deities themselves. Perhaps the latter is the intention. According to one of the Gilgit manuscripts recovered, the Splendid Vision Sutra (the Sanskrit title is Sarvatathāgatādhisthāna-satvāvalokana-buddhakṣetrasandarśana-vyūha), Avalokiteshvara says that those who hear, honor, and copy one of the prayers included in the sutra “will receive visions of buddhas and visions of bodhisattvas.” As he spoke the prayer, “Heavenly flowers showered down,” and he promised that through the right conduct and ritual actions, practitioners would be “seeing me face-to-face.”8

There remains some controversy about the function of the mounds in which the manuscripts and the covers were discovered. In 1931 local shepherds found a few texts in a wooden box. In 1938 the site was hastily excavated by an official attached to the government of the maharaja of Kashmir. If the main mound was a stupa, as many believe, the manuscripts placed in it were consecration deposits—powerful relics of the dharma taught by the Buddha—or else the manuscripts were ritually “retired” there. Others, however, believe that the dilapidated mound was the library of Buddhist ritualists, full of “inherited books, books they used in their daily vocation, gifts of books from grateful clients.”9 That it was a copying workshop or scriptorium is not out of the question, though the fact that the site contained multiple, incomplete, and worn texts found together is more indicative of ritual discarding.

Only a quarter of a mile (four hundred meters) from the excavation site is a cliff-carved standing buddha, almost ten feet (three meters) in height, within a pediment-like frame in the Kashmiri style.10 Not far to the east, in Skardu, another complex rock carving can be seen (fig. 3); comparing it with the similarly dated but much smaller book cover set demonstrates the different skills or origins of the painters versus the sculptors that the Gilgit sponsors could call on. The seated buddha in the carving has a stiff upright posture, swelling shoulders, square face, and artificially splayed toes on his crossed feet. The central buddha on the bottom manuscript cover is much more relaxed and natural looking, with an egg-shaped face common to Kashmiri sculptures. The standing bodhisattvas on the carving, including Maitreya on the buddha’s right, somewhat awkwardly dwarf the buddha and have similarly plastic faces. Kashmir was a few days walk south of the main Gilgit capital. Small metal sculptures and paintings were probably commissioned in the more cosmopolitan centers of the contemporary Kashmiri dynasties.11 Available stone sculptors willing to work on site for days or weeks were probably local.