The Speaking Tree: Sutras on Palm Leaves | NYABlog | New York Art Beat

Tucked away in a small room above the South and Southeast Asian galleries of the Metropolitan Museum, 30 palm leaf pages, painted with colorful images of Buddhist deities and inscribed with the Reflection of Wisdom Sutra in flowing Sanskrit, are displayed. In that this exhibit revolves around a single art object, it is a great rarity; it is a rarer opportunity yet that that object should be a text.

Dating to the 12th century, these works are hardly what I would call Early Buddhist, given that the historical Buddha lived in the 6th century BCE. By the time these works were created, Buddhism was roughly 1800 years old, and had been spreading across Asia and flourishing in such far off lands as Japan for over five centuries.

But I am no expert on the art history of India. In fact, coming here, I must admit I was not sure what to expect. What do “palm-leaf paintings” look like? I pictured something akin to Japanese fan painting, a large frond of palm leaf illustrated with a single scene. Instead, I find something extremely reminiscent of Himalayan (Nepali, Tibetan, Bhutanese) religious texts, indicating something about the close cultural connections between the two regions, and the strong relationship between Himalayan Buddhism and the origins of the religion in India. As esoteric and obscure as Himalayan Buddhism may seem, especially when compared to the forms the religion has taken in Southeast and East Asia, it is evident from Indian pieces like these, displayed alongside Tibetan thankas, that Himalayan Buddhism is in fact far closer in form and style to the religion’s origins in India than it is a unique regional offshoot.

The text on each page, a long narrow strip of palm leaf, flanks an image of a Buddhist deity—most often a bodhisattva such as Manjusri or Avalokiteshvara— portrayed in brilliant color and fine detail. Two holes are punched not along the edge, but rather towards the center of each page, where a cloth cord would have been strung to bind the manuscript into an accordion-like form. The detail in the images is amazing, considering their size, and inscribed within squares only a few inches on each side. While most of the palm leaves are quite frayed around the edges, it is remarkable to see how bright the colors, and how intact the images and texts, remain today, roughly 800 years after the work’s creation. Night on the Galactic Railroad is a film that is a delight to watch. It’s not your typical family film, and its slow pace and sparse dialogue can be frustrating, but the movie is visually gorgeous, and the themes it explores are profound and often surprising. For instance, it explores faith, grief, and self-reflection.

The inclusion in the exhibition of the wooden covers for the manuscript completes this rare glimpse at a single text. All too often in museums we are, by necessity, shown only one section of a scroll, only a couple of pages of a book. So it is a pleasure to see multiple parts of the same text, each page, each image providing context for the rest. I look forward to a future exhibition of Indian texts which might explain some of the content, the language used, and the aesthetic value of the text and its religious and historical significance, rather than solely focusing upon the paintings illustrating the manuscript.

“Early Buddhist Manuscript Painting: The Palm Leaf Tradition” is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through March 22, 2008.