Before the kneeling monster we see standing a bearded man, with smiling face, who holds tablet and brush in his hands in the act of writing. The back of his figure has been cut off when adapting the picture as a mount for the two woodcuts under which it was discovered. He is clad in a white-sleeved under-robe, long pink mantle, and a stiff black head-dress with a square ornament stuck in front. A branching column of flame rises from the tablet. Others stream from the dragon’s head and body.
The dragon is a composite monster. The head is of a conventional lion-like type, with voluminous upstanding mane, out of which rise three sharp-pointed objects resembling mountain peaks. The body suggests that of a scaly snake, with wings of curling feathers attached and with the forelegs of a bull (?). In the foreground lies a string of square-holed Chinese coins, an emblem the meaning of which at present escapes us. The whole is drawn with much vigour and, in spite of the fearsome appearance of the monster, with a distinct touch of humour.
PLATES XXXIV, XXXV
EMBROIDERY PICTURE OF ŚĀKYAMUNI ON THE VULTURE PEAK
XXXIV
XXXV
The large hanging in silk embroidery (Ch. 00260), to which the small scale, one-tenth, and certain photographic difficulties do not allow full justice to be done in this reproduction, is by its size—the perfectly preserved central figure is close upon life-size—by its remarkably skilful execution, and by its fine colours one of the most impressive of the pictorial remains recovered. That it represents Śākyamuni on Gṛdhrakūṭa, the ‘Vulture Peak’, famous in Buddhist legend and situated near Rājagṛha, the present Rājgir, is conclusively proved by the rocks behind the Buddha’s figure in the centre.
This fine, if hieratically stiff, figure, as I have already had occasion to point out,[70] when discussing the statues shown by the pictures in Plates [xiii] and [xiv], in every detail of its pose and dress reproduces a specific type, fixed originally by some Indian sculptural representation.[71] But if its iconographic characteristics are determined by long hieratic tradition, it is different with the setting it has found here. In the whole composition of our picture is revealed the individual touch of a master, and the skill and taste of the craftsmen who reproduced his work make it easy for us to recognize the merits of the lost original.
The design in our hanging has been worked solid throughout in satin-stitch. The embroidery has been executed with admirable care and the silks used have remained clean and glossy.[72] The ground is a coarse natural-coloured linen faced with light buff silk. This has mostly worn off in the interspaces of figures. Two of the figures, too, representing monkish disciples, having fallen along the line of folding, while the hanging was stored away and crushed for long centuries, have perished except for remains of the heads. Otherwise the picture is practically complete, and neither the effect of the whole nor that of characteristic features of treatment is impaired.