Kashmiri “Loving-Kindness” in Ladakh: A Tall Order?

This sculpture at the western edge of the greater Tibetan cultural horizon illustrates a stage in Buddhism’s transmission to Tibet in which Kashmir played a large role. The kingdoms of Ladakh and Zangskar (Zanskar, now in northernmost India) were within the circuit of traveling Kashmiri painters and sculptors, a number of whose spectacular works survive on their western edges and interiors. Before gradually making their way to Tibet proper, the highly developed Kashmiri Buddhist teachings and art first made themselves deeply felt in the western Himalayas, extending also to the regions of Spiti and Ngari, on either side of the present border between India and Chinese-controlled Tibet, respectively. 

Kashmir’s visual inheritance was dominant in the western Himalayas between the eighth and twelfth centuries, and it remained important there in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, after Kashmir itself had turned away from Buddhism.1 The monumental sculpture at Mulbekh, about twenty-five feet (seven and a half meters) in height, was carved into an isolated rock along a major route between the capitals of Ladakh (Shey and Leh) and Kashmir. The most well-known, handsome, and accessible of several life-size or larger rock carvings of Maitreya, the bodhisattva who will appear as the next Buddha, on the border region between Kashmir and the western Himalayas, it constitutes an impressive landmark of the Kashmir style’s diffusion into the western Himalayas.2

Unlike most other stone carvings of Maitreya in the western Himalayas, the Mulbekh sculpture is four-armed. He holds a string of prayer beads and the nagapuspa flower in his ringed upper hands. The nagapuspa flower is a reference to the tree under which Maitreya will eventually sit when, like Buddha Shakyamuni under the bodhi tree, he attains enlightened Buddhahood. In his lower left hand he holds a kundika, a pure-water vase, signifying that in Maitreya’s final life, he will be born into the Brahman caste, not, like Shakyamuni, into the warrior aristocracy. Maitreya’s lower right arm extends in a gesture of giving, reminder of the meaning of his Sanskrit name, which is based on maitri (Tibetan: jampa), meaning “loving kindness.” The stupa nestled against the high chignon on his head unmistakably signals that the carving at Mulbekh is the Future Buddha Maitreya, its shape in a distinctively Kashmiri form.

The stupa has a trapezoidal stepped base, a small dome, and a superstructure with a stack of  umbrella-like disks above a platform with slanting struts on top of the dome. This characteristic form goes back at least to Kanishka, the famous Kushana dynasty king and promoter of Buddhism from about the second century CE. Another feature of the Maitreya at Mulbekh in line with earlier Buddhist art is the elaborate arrangement of his hair. Curling “butterfly” loops tied to the ends of his chignon recall double-bow topknots featured in western Kushana dynasty Maitreya images.3

Further unmistakable Kashmiri visual features are the tripartite structure of the torso, diamond-shaped scoring around the navel, large beaded jewelry with rosette medallions on his belt and necklace, the relaxed hip-slung pose, as well as the thick garland hanging from Maitreya’s shoulders, wrapping around his arms, and ending above his ankles. All these features are found on stone and metal sculptures known to be Kashmiri. Dates from the seventh through the twelfth century have been proposed for the Mulbekh sculpture. Close comparison with other sculptures and with studies of the development of Kashmiri art provides some guidance in the absence of inscriptive or textual documentation.4 The rendering of the slender and elongated limbs without sacrificing the articulation of a nuanced body structure suggests a working date of the late tenth or early eleventh century.5

Also revealing of the sculpture’s Kashmiri origins is the triangular pediment-like framing device enclosing the tight trefoil niche in which the bodhisattva stands. This was the preferred architectural form for Buddhist and Hindu shrines in Kashmir at the time (fig. 3). Square and rectangular sockets chiseled into the rock apparently stabilized one end of wooden beams for a slightly projecting porch or facade. Shrines built in front now control and accommodate roadside reverence. They block unobstructed views of the entire sculpture and hide seven archaic-looking figures standing at the level of Maitreya’s feet. Among them might be the four directional guardians (lokapalas), hoisting swords and other objects, but damage sustained by the figures over the years precludes full identification (fig. 4). The group probably also includes donor figures, dressed in belted robes.

The fact that so many monumental sculptures—not just in Ladakh—depict Maitreya has occasioned speculation based on traits described in early Buddhist texts: 

In the future age of Maitreya, beings will not only have extremely long lifespans, but will also be physically enormous; Maitreya’s own body is described in such terms. . . . The enormous size of Maitreya’s body has been connected by some scholars with the many monumental sculptures of him either extant or referred to in textual sources.6

Importance conveyed through size also organically lends itself to expressions of rulership. “The monument imposes order on the landscape or the city . . . the monument signals the authority of the state over resources and skills as well as over time itself.”7 These concepts may help explain why some Asian political dynasties tried to associate themselves with Maitreya and produced such sculptures. Christian Luczanits has noticed that Maitreya veneration was popular in elite circles around the time of Kanishka within the ruling family of the Kushana dynasty (ca. first–third century CE).8 André Alexander and Sam van Schaik emphasize “Maitreya worship during the imperial period in central Tibet.” The latter wish to deduce from an impressive number of large images found in Leh, Shey, and the borderlands of Kashmir, including the Mulbekh sculpture, the “revival” of the central Tibetan pattern using forms from “regions to the west” within “the early domains of the western Tibetan kings.”9 

Intriguing as that suggestion might be, it runs the danger of accepting central Tibetan narratives of the invasion and dominion of the western Himalayas and the imposition of a reconstituted rulership as historically accurate. To be sure, later western Himalayan accounts also claim for themselves a measure of legitimacy through continuity with imperial Tibet. One wonders, however, what is meant when various places in the eighth or early ninth century in the western Himalayas are said to be “in the hands of the Tibetans.”10 Existing evidence mainly concerns their control of passes, bridges, or fords with garrisoning troops to rebuff enemies from invading and disenfranchising local rulers. However, those actions should not obscure the local and regional ties and enduring relationships between Ladakh and Zanskar with Greater Kashmir before the twelfth century. The timing and process of the reorientation of the western Himalayas toward Tibetan culture is called into question by the presence of Kashmiri sculptures such as the Mulbekh standing bodhisattva, particularly when, as is acknowledged for the inscribed Maitreya in Leh, the Tibetan inscription was added to a preexisting sculpture at an unknown date.11

Challenging both of those interpretations—that sculptures of Maitreya express textual claims of monumentality and reflect dynastic cults—is an inconvenient fact: in Tibet and the western Himalayan kingdoms, there are plenty of large early sculptures of other Buddhist deities, including Shakyamuni and Vairochana Buddhas and various forms of Avalokiteshvara. Another puzzle is the fascinating tendency of recent and contemporary observers to misconstrue the gender of early Tibetan and Himalayan deities. The Maitreya carving at Mulbekh is one such example. A contemporary archaeologist describes it as having a “feminish” face and pelvic region, triggering the desire to “take the figure to be that of a female.”12 In the early nineteenth century, William Moorcroft described a Maitreya in Leh thus:  “[A]lthough the person is male, the countenance is female, and the whole appears to be an androgynous type of the powers of nature.”13 Janice Leoshko noticed a similar tendency in nineteenth-century British observers of art in India: “Male figures were often mistaken for females in early accounts of eastern Indian sculptures.”14 I notice many of my undergraduate students, intelligent and interested as they are, often misread different secondary sexual characteristics in Tibetan art. It is a tendency that one should expect to encounter in the study of Tibetan art, which, among its rewards, offers to bring home the pertinence of the oft-repeated axiom that gender is socially constructed and thus culturally relative, not biologically given. Though the Bodhisattva Maitreya sculpture at Mulbekh has long hair, elaborate jewelry, soft fleshy features, and a line demarcating the upper chest with nipples, interpreting  the sculpture as female is a misreading.