The Buddha's Stories

Continued

Another painting from a much later time, Life Story of Buddha Shakyamuni (FIG. 4), presents the life of the Buddha in a different aesthetic, iconographic, and compositional convention from Figure 2.

This painting communicates the story of the twelve deeds of the Buddha and closely corresponds to the traditional recounting of the Buddha's great achievements recorded in Praises to the Twelve Deeds of the Buddha as found in the eleventh-century translations from Sanskrit within the Tibetan canon. (The enumeration of the twelve deeds found in scholastic commentaries varies from those listed in Praises and depicted in Figure 4.) Several scenes in this painting demonstrate that the artist had some awareness of the established visual conventions for representing the eight great events but incorporated additional events into its structure.

Some scholars recently suggested that "seeing Buddhist art involved quite a bit of listening." Recitation of the lines from Praises that reiterated the Buddha's deeds may have been part of this "listening" aspect. It is notable that neither painting (FIGS. 2 and 4) contains identifying captions, suggesting that to an informed viewer their pictorial content reflected well-known cultural conventions.