Avadāna, the Traditions about the Bodhisattva

Avadāna, the Traditions about the Bodhisattva, Level 1, Inner Wall at Borobudur

a large collection of high-definition creative commons photographs from Borobudur, Java, illustrating the Previous Lives of the Buddha as told in the Divyāvadāna and elsewhere, together with a text by A. Foucher explaining the stories.

4: The Birth Story of Bhallatiya

Text by A. Foucher, Buddhist Art in Java

1: The Traditions about Sudhana

2: The Traditions about Mandhata

3: The Traditions about Rudrayana

4: The Birth Story of Bhallatiya

5: The Traditions about Maitrakanyaka

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089: Bhallatiyajataka

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We may say, furthermore, that the two last panels of this portion of the gallery Panels 89 & 90 are likewise duplicates. The only appreciable difference is that the same prince is standing on the first to overhear and seated on the second to listen to the discourse of the same pair of Kinnaras. Such is, in fact, the name that we do not hesitate to give to the human phenomena, who are related to the Gandharvas by their musical talents and who are represented here with birds' wings and feet. The Buddhist art of India and the Far East seems to have taken no account whatever of the concurrent tradition which claims that the Kinnaras are human monsters with horses' heads. When it has not been considered more suitable to give them, as above in the illustration of the Sudhanakumara legend, a purely anthropomorphic aspect, it is usually a kind of harpy that is represented under this name. This strange combination of the bust of a man or a woman, with or without arms, grafted on to the body of a bird, is found almost everywhere. It fits as well into the corners of the pediments of the temple of Martand in Kashmir as into those of the metopes of the Prambanan temple in Java. It has continued to be especially frequent in the decorative and religious art of Siam. In India proper it appears in the paintings of Ajanta; and we have remarked elsewhere, in a sculpture inscribed on the “Tower of Victory” at Chitor (XVth Century), “a double pair of Kinnaras”, perfectly analogous to those of Borobudur. Perhaps, under the Kinnarajataka rubric, they were not otherwise treated even on the old railing of Barhut : unfortunately we can only judge of this by a wretched sketch from a half-broken stone, and there is at present nothing to prove that, as Cunningham suggests, the leaves, or the feathers, which terminate the busts of the two monsters, must have separated their human trunks from their bird legs.

090: Bhallatiyajataka