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Prajnaparamita flanked by two female figures, folio 1 (verso), 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
- Gum tempera and ink on palm leaf
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Leaf: 5.4 x 54.3 cm (2 1/8 x 21 3/8 in.)
- Culture
- Eastern India, Bihar, Vikramashila Monastery. Painting: 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
In the center of the first folio, the personification of the texts found within the manuscript is shown as a crowned four-armed goddess holding a rosary, palm leaf, and giving a mudra, or symbolic hand gesture, indicating that she is in the process of teaching. The haloed Prajnaparamita’s golden skin tone and accoutrements showcase the image’s self-reflexive relationship to the light-colored palm leaf that was used to make this book. The text on this leaf is not the Perfection of Wisdom itself, but rather a preamble of praises to the goddess known as the Prajnaparamita-stotra of Rahula. These hymns would have continued onto folio 2 of the manuscript, which was unfortunately lost before the volume was acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art.
