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.
