180 linrothe
the huge head of Maheśvara from Pandrethan,56 push the upper ear forwards
as if seen from the side, and then swing the lobes out and down. Again, these
are minor Morellian details, which are scarcely required for identification but
reveal an artistic vocabulary that has been internalised, not a copyist’s mental-
ity of presenting conspicuous resemblances.
Third, my dating of the tenth- to early eleventh-century for the Mulbek
Maitreya is mainly based on the bodily proportions. We have seen in the
Dras sculpture the agile but compact forms which grow out of the earlier,
massive proportions of the Fattegarh Śiva (ca. 6th century) and the power-
ful, stiff Bijbihara Karttikeya (ca. 5th–6th century), as discussed above, both
from Kashmir. This can be used as a developmental trend, with the Dras sculp-
ture as an early benchmark and the Cleveland Museum standing Buddha as
the other (accepting von Schroeder’s dating of late tenth to early eleventh
century).57 The sequence then is towards elongation of both limbs and torso
and as Susan Huntington points out “the emphasis on musculature lessens”,58
though an understanding of its invisible structure still underlies the shaping of
body parts. The Mulbek sculpture definitely accords much more closely to the
later elegant slender torso of the Cleveland Museum’s standing Buddha than
to the muscled power of the Dras bodhisattva. The torso and legs are still well
formed, without the mannered geometry of bodily sections that becomes the
hallmark of the Kashmiri style as practiced in Western Tibet, as seen in metal-
work made by followers. This has the smoothness of parts visible, for instance
in the painting of the West Tibetan Dungkar Cave 2 of Ngari, which I would
similarly attribute to visiting Kashmiri artists or their very well-trained local
acolytes (fig. 5.20). Contrast then the standing bodhisattvas on stone above the
village of Manda in Zangskar, which we can attribute to local Zangskari artists
working with such images as the Mulbek Maitreya as inspiration (fig. 5.21).59
Precious as these sculptures are, and as close in many overt details (vanamāla,
rippling hem between legs, Kashmiri-style stūpa above the head of the one on
the right), they do not convey the naturalism and three-dimensionality which
Kashmiri artists inherited from Gandhāra and Gupta, and which even their
painters were able to convey in two dimensions. The Manda bodhisattvas are
Kashmiri-style sculptures. The Mulbek Maitreya is Kashmiri.
56 Siudmak, “Early Stone,” fig. 8; Siudmak, Hindu-Buddhist Sculpture of Ancient Kashmir, pl.
97.
57 von Schroeder, Ulrich, Buddhist Sculptures in Tibet, 2 vols. (Hong Kong: Visual Dharma
Publications, 2001), 86; also Luczanits, “From Kashmir to Western Tibet,” fig. 2.10.
58 Huntington, Art of Ancient India, 368.
59 A GPS reading for the site of sculptures above Manda is: N 33° 38.029’; E 076° 41.479’; alt.
12,765’.