Krishna lifts the roof in Cambodia

Source: National Museum of Cambodia, Phnom Penh 

This 7th century Cambodian sculpture of the Hindu god Krishna, from the National Museum in Phnom Penh, caught my attention in John Guy’s excellent catalogue* of ancient South-East Asian sculpture. I was particularly taken by the statue’s graceful stance and the wonderful expression on his face. How does something from 7th century Cambodia come to possess all the energy and elegance of Indian and Greco-Roman art?

You may remember Krishna as the god who swooped down to rescue the Elephant King in the previous post. This time, he is lifting a mountain called Mount Govardhan with one hand and holding it over an entire village, in order to protect it from a rain-storm sent by the god Indra. This scene (known as Krishna Govardhana) is a favourite in Indian art, especially in the field of miniature painting. In the 17th century version below, from Bikaner in Rajasthan, Krishna lifts the mountain nonchalantly, like a waiter holding a tray, while he basks in the attentions of adoring women. Cowherds tend to their flocks in the foreground, while in the upper right corner Indra watches from atop his white elephant, no doubt cursing Krishna for foiling his plan.

Source: British Museum

I like the fact that, while depicting Krishna as the hero, the artist has also emphasised the life-giving qualities of rain. The foliage is lush and green (which you would appreciate if you lived in dusty Rajasthan) and the cows are obviously healthy and productive. The one in the bottom left is even giving birth to a new calf under the anxious gaze of a rain-soaked cowherd!

In the Hindu pantheon, Krishna is one of the forms taken by Vishnu, though he may actually have been a regional deity in his own right before being absorbed into the Vaishnavite fold. He is always portrayed as youthful and energetic, often associated with cowherds (hence the bovine imagery), notorious for his dalliances with pretty girls, and beloved of mothers and grannies who coo over his childish antics such as stealing butter from the pantry.

All of which makes me wonder how this laddish deity was received in 7th century Cambodia, nearly three centuries before the Angkor civilisation. There are so few surviving records that it’s impossible to be sure. Hinduism and Buddhism both made a strong impact on the region, spreading along trade routes from Eastern and Southern India early in the first millenium (precise dates are sketchy). Cambodian sculpture from this period shows clear signs of influence from Indian models; there are even some examples of Hari-hara, the half-Vishnu half-Shiva composite figure that is a classic of Indian sculpture. The novelist W Somerset Maugham was enchanted by a Hari-hara that he saw in the Phnom Penh museum while he was travelling through Cambodia in the 1920s.*

The predominance of Buddhism in Cambodia today disguises the fact that for long periods, Hinduism was the dominant religion there. And local devotees seem to have taken to Krishna enthusiastically, judging from the several images of Krishna Govardhana that have been found. The finest, like our sculpture, come from a site called Phnom Da, about 60km south of Phnom Penh. Not much is known about it, except that it was a Hindu cave temple complex, probably active around the 6th-8th centuries. When excavated by French archaeologists in the early 20th century, it yielded some beautiful and sophisticated sculptures, with long elegant limbs, smooth powerful bodies and expressive faces. These have become a reference point for the study of South-East Asian sculpture, with scholars often referring to a “Phnom Da style”.

The example below (now in the Cleveland Museum in the US) is a fine example, described by John Guy as “perhaps the greatest pre-Angkorian sculpture outside Cambodia”. A Cleveland curator has noted that it’s the perfect image for a cave temple, as Krishna seems to be holding up the roof!

Source: Cleveland Museum of Art

The Cleveland piece is certainly more imposing than our Krishna, being twice as high (2.4m versus 1.2m) and in possession of his lower limbs which were re-discovered in the 1950s.  But I have a sneaking fondness for the Phnom Penh piece because of its cheery and slightly smug expression – exactly how a boy-god would look while lifting a mountain with one hand.

* Reference material:
Lost Kingdoms: Hindu-Buddhist Sculpture of Early South-East Asia (2014), ed. John Guy, Metropolitan Museum, New York
The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930), W Somerset Maugham

"The Cleveland Museum's Kṛṣṇa Govardhana and the Early Phnom Da Style of Cambodian Sculpture", (2000), Stanislaw Czuma, Ars Orientalis Vol 30

So hungry you could eat an elephant

 

Source: British Museum

This Indian musical instrument (a sarinda - like a small violin) caught my eye in the British Museum. Made of ivory in the early 18th century, the main body is carved with images of flowers and angels, while the scroll-end depicts a monster devouring an elephant and clutching another in its claws (above right). The artist had a macabre sense of humour, because the sarinda is played in an upright position, so the musician would have the monster staring straight at him! On the other hand, I wonder if this was a decorative piece only, as ivory surely wouldn't produce good resonance for a stringed instrument.

By showing the poor elephant sliding into the monster’s maw, the artist persuades us that the monster must be enormous. It’s a neat trick that is also seen for example at Gangaikonda Cholapuram, the magnificent South Indian temple built in the 11th century by Rajendra Chola I. In this case, the image is carved beside a doorway to act as a threat to trespassers.

The elephant’s size makes it a good snack for monstrous appetites. This occurs in another popular image in Indian art: the god Vishnu rescuing an elephant from the makara, a crocodile-like monster. As told in the Bhagavata Purana, the king of the elephants was having a quiet drink from the river when it was seized by the makara and held in a death struggle. The elephant prayed to Vishnu, who swooped down and killed the monster with his deadly sudarshana chakra (a sharp-edged spinning disc). In artistic renderings, Vishnu is often portrayed as the handsome dark-skinned young avatar Krishna, accompanied by his flying companion Garuda who seems to be a kind of parakeet in the example below. You can also see the chakra embedded in the makara's neck. The scene is known collectively as Gajendra Moksha, the Liberation of the Elephant King.

Source: Victoria & Albert Museum

It’s not hard to see where the idea of the makara came from: India is home to three large species of crocodile, two of which (the saltwater and the mugger) regularly attack humans, while the gharial is harmless but grows to over 5 metres. Their presence was noted by the armies of Alexander the Great when he reached the Indus River in the 4^th century BC. He thought he’d reached a section of the Nile because it was the only other place where they had seen crocodiles.

And crocodiles do actually attack elephants, as shown in this photograph taken in Zambia in 2010 (see also this article). A Google search turns up at least three recorded incidents in the past 10 years. In all these cases the elephant survived, so clearly Vishnu is still standing by when needed. But if you ask me, it’s never really safe to go back in the water. 

Source: Scientific American

The emperor's war-horses keep up the fight

 On a recent visit to the V&A, I was taken aback by this strange clay sculpture of a horse from 3rd or 4th century China. Is that an asparagus growing out of its head?

Source: Victoria & Albert Museum

Anyway, it set me thinking about horses in Chinese art, and in particular those depicted on carved stone panels at the tomb of the emperor Taizong. Looking further into this, I learned something about the panels’ troubled history.

Taizong (r. 626 to 649 AD), the second emperor of the Tang dynasty, is revered in Chinese history as a great ruler: a fearless warrior, highly literate, concerned for the welfare of his people, and open to foreign trade and culture. In many ways, he laid the foundations for the brilliance of the Tang dynasty. The Tang ruling elite were passionate about horses and equestrian sports, including polo which was especially popular among women. They imported top-quality horses from expert breeders in Central Asia whose livestock was superior to the rather weedy local ponies. The Tang love of horses was reflected in their art, notably in the horse figurines which are a must-have for any wealthy Chinese antique collector (see below).

Source: Metropolitan Museum, New York

More importantly, good horses were vital to the army and therefore a symbol of dynastic power and prestige. Taizong led his troops into battle on a series of mighty war-horses which he loved so much that he chose the six greatest ones and had their images engraved on stone panels, each accompanied by a poetic epitaph which he wrote himself. In accordance with his wishes, the huge panels (each measuring 1.6m x 2m) were installed as part of his tomb complex at Zhaoling, 60km north-west of Xian in Shaanxi Province.

Source: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

The most famous of the six panels (shown above) depicts the horse named Saluzi, or Autumn Dew. The story goes that while carrying Taizong into battle, Saluzi was hit by an arrow. Taizong’s army chief, General Qiu, pulled the arrow out of Saluzi’s chest then and there, the brave horse showing no sign of pain or suffering. The sculptor (whose identity is unknown) has portrayed Saluzi standing calmly with his legs angled slightly forward, bracing himself, while the general’s knees are bent to show the force needed to extract the arrow.

Each of the six horses was chosen because it carried Taizong to victory at a particularly important battle. All of them sustained serious injuries in the process: for example, the horse named Quan Mao Gua (Curly-haired) was hit by nine arrows but continued to surge forward bravely, as shown in the carving below – the picture isn’t very good but you might just make out two arrows sticking out behind the saddle. 

Source: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

A black horse with white socks named Bai Di Wu (White-footed Crow) reportedly carried Taizong on an epic 100km ride through the night. His panel shows him in a “flying gallop”, all four feet off the ground, and his poetic epitaph reads:

With a sword long enough to touch the sky

And this swift steed that could run with the wind

On a gallop I recovered Long

With one look I brought peace to Shu.

倚天長劒, 追風駿足, 聳轡平隴, 囘鞍定蜀.

It turns out, however, that the panels are the subject of a long-running dispute between the University of Pennsylvania Museum, which currently owns the two shown above, and the museum authorities in Xian where the other four remain. According to the UPM’s records, it first received the two panels in 1918 on loan from the Paris-based Chinese art dealer Loo Ching Tsai (known as CT Loo). The museum eventually purchased them from Loo in early 1921 for $125,000. 

It emerged that the panels’ provenance was shady, to say the least. The UPM received a letter in June 1921 from a French collector named Paul Mallon, who thought they might like to know that he had paid a fellow Frenchman named Grosjean to “obtain” the panels from Taizong’s tomb in 1912. Unfortunately, the grave-robbers hired by Grosjean were “attacked by peasants” while carting the loot away. The panels were confiscated by local officials and sent to the district museum. And so poor Monsieur Mallon was left out of pocket, quelle domage. 

The next problem is that no-one knows how the panels ended up in the US. After their sojourn at the district museum, they turned up in Beijing in the possession of the new ruler of post-imperial China, the warlord Yuan Shi-Kai. CT Loo claimed that the shipment to the US was arranged by a local middleman who was authorised by “the supreme authority of the country”, implying that either Yuan, his family or someone in his government had approved the deal, which is perfectly plausible but impossible to verify.

CT Loo himself had a controversial reputation. An orphan who moved to France in 1902 as servant to a Chinese businessman, he became the pre-eminent dealer in ancient Chinese, Indian and South-East Asian art, catering to wealthy collectors and major museums in the US and Europe. Anyone studying the provenance of Asian antiquities in the West will encounter his name repeatedly: an online search of the Smithsonian’s Freer-Sackler collection turns up over 300 hits. As a result, he came to be viewed with suspicion for his links with objects of questionable origin, the Taizong horses being a well-known example. He always denied any wrongdoing, and was in fact known for his philanthropy towards Chinese causes up until his death in 1957.

   

So where does that leave our heroic horses? Demands for their return have been made by authorities in Xian every few years but the UPM is not giving in. Perhaps tellingly, the issue has not come up at the highest diplomatic levels, suggesting that the Chinese central government is not (yet) interested in turning this into an Elgin Marbles situation. Will this change in the new climate of Sino-US relations? The horses probably don’t mind: they’ve seen a lot worse.

Reference material: "Emperor Taizong and his six horses", Zhou Xiuqin, Orientations 32, No 2 (2001); "CT Loo: highs and lows of a great art dealer", presentation by Geraldine Lenain to the Asia Society, Hong Kong (link here)

Doors of Perception at Luang Prabang

These ornate double doors caught my attention when I visited Haw Pha Bang, the golden temple which lies in the grounds of the Royal Palace at Luang Prabang, Laos. Many temples in Luang Prabang have similarly dazzling doorways, usually depicting famous scenes from Buddhist literature. But you have to be quite familiar with the literature to make sense of the images, and unless you have been a keen reader of the Jatakas (the vast collection of stories about the Buddha’s path to enlightenment), some of the images can be a bit baffling.

So I was quite pleased to be able to decipher the images here. They depict one of the most famous scenes from Buddhist scripture, where Gautama Buddha, having at last achieved the state of enlightenment, is attacked by the demon Mara and his wickedly tempting daughters. They try to undermine the Buddha’s new-found equanimity by offering him all manner of worldly pleasures. But the Buddha touches the ground with his right hand and calls on the Earth to witness that he is enlightened and beyond all temptation. The Earth (sometimes portrayed as a goddess) responds accordingly: Mara is vanquished and his daughters are revealed as evil hags. This is the point when the Buddha is proven beyond doubt to have reached the transcendent state of Nirvana.

The sculptors at Haw Pha Bang have made it fairly easy to follow the story. On the upper left is the Buddha being attacked by the hideous many-armed Mara and his retinue of strange beasts.

On the lower left are the temptress daughters, wearing plenty of bling and striking their finest poses.

On the upper right, the Buddha sits newly resplendent on his lotus throne, his right hand calling the Earth to witness.

And below him sit a trio of women whose appearance at first I found puzzling. Because if these were meant to be Mara’s daughters revealed as evil hags, why did they look like normal women? 

Fortunately, just minutes earlier, I had seen a useful clue to this question: the royal family’s collection of illustrations to the Vessantara Jataka.

The Vessantara is the last of the Jataka stories and a great favourite among Laotian Buddhists. It tells the tale of Prince Vessantara (an incarnation of the Buddha) who willingly suffers all kinds of losses and even gives away his wife and children – a bit like Patient Griselda in Bocaccio’s Decameron. At its heart is the Buddhist precept of non-attachment to all things temporal. For our purposes however, the key element is the preamble, where the prince’s mother (on learning that she is pregnant) asks the gods for ten special favours. According to the description in the Royal Palace, she wishes not only that her child will be a great leader, but also (and this really caught my attention) that she will retain her youthful figure after childbirth, and specifically that her breasts will remain firm and not sag like those of other women. The Royal Palace’s English translation is actually more graphic than this.

Having gotten over my unexpected coughing fit, I found that this anecdote helped to explain the final images on the temple doors. A key indicator seems to be that the three women’s breasts have succumbed to gravity, instead of remaining supernaturally perky like those of the temptress daughters on the left. Other clues are their walking sticks, their practical hair-styles and their lack of jewellery. 

My first response was a feminist snort of disdain, bearing in mind that Haw Pha Bang was actually built in the late 20th century when (as I harrumphed to myself) the sculptors should really have known better. But thinking further, one could argue that the sculptors were seeking to distinguish between fantasy and reality. The left door is about the perils of self-doubt and illusion, while the right door is about remaining grounded in reality. Perhaps I’m trying too hard here?

The image of the Buddha touching the Earth with his right hand is one of the key mudras or hand gestures in Buddhist art. The position, known as bhumisparsha mudra, is a particular favourite in Thailand, for example in this 15th-16th century bronze from Ayutthaya, in the collection of the Musée Guimet, Paris.

While researching this piece, I was delighted to learn that the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, will be holding an exhibition of Burmese and Sri Lankan artifacts relating to the Vessantara Jataka. This coincides with the start of my third and final module at SOAS, which by happy coincidence is on Buddhist Art. Check out the Ashmolean exhibition here.