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Folio 1 (recto), from a Manuscript of the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines (Ashtasahasrika Prajnaparamita-sutra)
Sunday, September 14, 1119 (year 239 of the Newar Samvat in the month of Ashvina)
- Medium
- Palm leaf backed with yellow paper
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Leaf: 5.4 x 54.3 cm (2 1/8 x 21 3/8 in.)
- Culture
- Eastern India, Bihar, Vikramashila Monastery. Paper: Nepal, Kathmandu
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Indian and Southeast Asian Art
- Credit line
- Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Sometime between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, Nepalese paper known as lokta, made from the bark of high-elevation evergreen shrubs, was pasted to the first folio of this manuscript in order to prevent the delicate palm-leaf page from further deteriorating. Mantra syllables of invocation are written hastily in black ink. Like the Nepalese numbers found throughout the rest of the manuscript, the yellow paper is another indication that the Manuscript of the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines was held in a Nepalese monastery after being copied in eastern India.
