Skirting the Bodhisattva: Fabricating Visionary Art

This essay explores the image-text relationship between the ca. 12-century monumental Maitreya bodhisattva sculpture within a narrow tower in the village of Mangyu and passages from the Gaṇḍavyūha Sūtra. Paintings on the dhotī of the sculpture resemble themes described within a kūtāgāra-tower in the text related to Maitreya, and also depict one of the prominent jātaka associated with the Buddha, the Starving Tigress, or Vyāghrī jātaka. The essay suggests the jātaka was deployed to demonstrate Maitreya’s recapitulation of the course of Śākyamuni’s path of self-sacrifice, and that the resemblance between text and image was intentional on the part of the 12th-century builders in Ladakh, on the far western reaches of cultural Tibet.