by Ed Douglas
It was a final flourish from Indian Buddhism. The Pala Empire in Bengal, already in decline in western India during the mid ninth century, found itself under increasing pressure from a resurgent Hinduism and the kingdoms that supported it. Islam had displaced Buddhism from Afghanistan and Pakistan by the early eleventh century, although Buddhism hung on in Kashmir until the fourteenth. Its large monastic institutions grew distant from the lay population, weakening their connection to ordinary people. To their eyes, tantric Buddhism looked pretty much the same as the Hindu version. Then, in around 1193, the Persian warlord Ikhtiyar al-Din Muhammad Khalji swept across Bihar and this gradual decline became annihilation. Monks and nuns were put to the sword, gold icons looted and religious books burned. Buddhism was essentially scraped off northern India, its followers scattered, many of them taking refuge at Kathmandu. (Ikhtiyar al-Din soon overreached himself attempting to invade Tibet and lost his army; he was assassinated not long after.)
This culture, swept away on the tide of history from the very places where Buddha had preached, now found refuge in the mountains, where it not only survived but enjoyed a period of artistic and architectural achievement. Kathmandu’s valley in the mountains was strategic enough to get rich but obscure enough to escape fatal predation as successive waves of invaders swept across the plains of India. In this way, Nepal, meaning the valley of Kathmandu, held a peculiarly important position in Asian history, a crossroads where South, Central and East Asian religious and artistic influences met, coalesced and survived, a living reminder of a half-forgotten world, the key to a secret history that would remain hidden from Europeans even after they discovered the city.
The cultural brilliance of medieval Kathmandu was not lost on the rest of Asia, however. Soon after its emergence, it would find new expression in the court of a new force that had torn through all of Asia and into Europe: the Mongols.
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Just as Buddhism, fading from India, flourished in Kathmandu, so it also gained new impetus in Tibet. In the west, we have seen, the Guge kingdom had sponsored a Buddhist cultural revival, drawing from Kashmiri influences and teachers like Atisa. Central Tibet, meanwhile, became a spiritual laboratory for tantric practices from northern India and the Pala Empire, via trade routes that passed through the Kathmandu valley. A famous example of a tantric ‘wild one’ prompting an entire lineage is Marpa Lotsawa, Marpa the translator, born into a landowning Tibetan family but too restless to settle to life as a farmer. He travelled to Nalanda in India to study with the great teacher Naropa (who in turn had studied with Tilopa) and brought home new tantric mantras that he would practise on behalf of the laity in return for gold, which in turn funded return trips to India for more study. Gold mining was intense in eleventh century Tibet and gold fuelled the dissemination of Buddhism, trickling south through Kathmandu to India as spiritual energy flowed the other way. Marpa’s student was the charismatic Milarepa, and their lineage became the Kagyu sect of Tibetan Buddhism, Kagyu meaning ‘whispered transmission’.
Some feared that the huge popular success of tantric teachings and their wilder interpretations threatened to corrupt their meaning into little more than magical spells used for personal gain. Konchok Gyalpo was one such, born into the aristocratic Khon family. A contemporary of Milarepa, he founded a new Buddhist centre at Sakya, thirteen kilometres south-west of Shigatse in southern Tibet, beginning another Tibetan Buddhist lineage that survives today, the third of the four great schools of Tibetan Buddhism and the only one whose spiritual leader is drawn from within the same family. The Sakya would prosper in the fragmented world of Tibet in the early part of the second millennium, but largely through the intervention of foreign powers.
It was another version of Tibetan Buddhism, however, that would intially influence the Mongols, one that sprang from the Tangut people. Known to themselves and Tibetans as the Minyak, they had been pushed out of the rolling grasslands of north-eastern Tibet during the time of the Tibetan Empire to the Ordos region near the Yellow river. Now, in the eleventh century, they were building their own centre of power and moved back into Tibet, taking the Tibetan plateau city of Xining. As the Tibetan emperors had done, they translated Buddhist scriptures into their own language. In doing so they developed a new kind of relationship with Tibetan teachers, particularly from the Kagyu lineage, who travelled to the powerful Tangut court. In 1227, the Mongols’ devastating forces swept down and utterly destroyed the Tangut capital Xingqing. Despite this, they saw value in continuing the ruler-priest relationship the Tangut had pioneered between themselves and Tibetan monks, as it offered an effective way to control the high and exposed Tibetan plateau at arm’s length, without committing resources that might be used more profitably elsewhere.
By the mid thirteenth century, Tibet had largely been absorbed into the Mongol Empire under Mongke Khan, the fourth khagan, or ‘emperor’, beginning a period of Mongol influence in Tibet that would last until the eighteenth century. Mongke gave his patronage to the Kagyu lineage, although the leader of the empire’s Buddhists came from Kashmir. But the Sakya lineage also had influence among some of the Mongol elite and in 1258, Kublai Khan, under the influence of his wife Chabi, acknowledged Drogon Chogyal Phagpa, leader of the Sakya-pa, as his tantric guru, essentially converting to Tibetan Buddhism. Mongke died in 1259 and, after a civil war with their younger brother Ariq Boke, Kublai was elected the fifth khagan in May 1260. At the end of that year Phagpa became Kublai’s kuoshi, a kind of state religious instructor, cementing the idea of a ruler–priest relationship between Mongols and Tibetans, a conscious attempt by Kublai to move away from the Mongol reputation as nomadic raiders. A Tibetan would now lead the empire’s Buddhists, or at least that portion that Kublai retained in the new Yuan dynasty he formally proclaimed in 1271, and which ruled China and its wider region for the next century. Phagpa and the Sakya also became the controlling power in Tibet, to the disadvantage of the Kagyu, although they continued to have support from the Mongol Il-Khanate in the west, ruled by Hulagu, another of Kublai’s brothers.
To cement this new synthesis of religious and political power, Kublai commissioned a stupa dedicated to Phagpa’s predecessor and uncle, the great Buddhist scholar Sakya Pandita. A previous Mongol lord, Godan, had tried to use Sakya Pandita as a proxy to control all the Tibetans, an effort that was largely ignored. Now, thanks to Kublai, the Sakya really were in charge. To build the stupa, Phagpa needed artisans capable of something exceptional to symbolise this new relationship with the Mongols. Such skills were absent from Tibet and so he looked across the Himalaya. India had been the wellspring of Buddhism in Tibet from the time of the emperors almost five hundred years earlier, but the rise of Islam had largely extinguished that source. The great university at Nalanda, where Marpa had studied tantric Buddhism, had been razed to the ground. So Phagpa looked to the Kathmandu valley, where Buddhism and its art continued to flourish, and its famous Newari craftsmen, who had made such an influential cultural impact during the era of the tsenpo emperors, when craftsmen from the Kathmandu valley had helped adorn the Jokhang temple in Lhasa.
A well-known legend tells how Phagpa sent a request to Jayabhima Deva Malla, among the first of the Malla dynasty that ruled the valley from the early thirteenth century. (‘Malla’ means wrestler. A dynasty of that name in north-eastern India features in the Mahabharata. The Mallas of the Kathmandu valley weren’t the only ones to borrow that mythical prestige, which can be confusing.) Phagpa wanted a hundred artisans to build the Khagan’s stupa. He clearly didn’t need that many men for just one stupa; this was a wholesale acquisition of the Himalayan artistic tradition that gave Tibetan Buddhism its distinctive visual imagery. Chinese artists didn’t have the knowledge to produce the Tibetan Buddhist iconography Phagpa required, the myriad tantric deities in all their manifestations. In hiring artisans from Kathmandu, Phagpa was bringing a kind of iconographic legitimacy to the new relationship between the Sakya lineage and Kublai Khan.
As it happened,
the king in Kathmandu could only muster eighty artisans. The earthquake of 1255, estimated to have killed thirty thousand people, a third of the valley’s population, must have had a devastating impact on the city, limiting the skilled labour Jayabhima Deva had to spare, even for a Mongol emperor. Meeting the workers personally before they left for Tibet, the king asked them to choose one of their number as leader. The only one prepared to take on the responsibility was a young man still in his mid teens, an artist of genius called Arniko. He admitted his youth but claimed he was ‘old in mind’. It was the start of a journey that would lift him to the highest levels of Kublai’s court and earn him a fortune. It was Arniko who would be responsible for the spiritual iconography that gave the Yuan court its religious authority.
Tradition holds that Arniko was born in the city of Patan, perhaps because it enjoyed the greatest artistic reputation, but the little we know about him comes from the chronicles of the Yuan dynasty where he made his name, rather than from his birthplace. Even his name is debated: in China it was written as Anige. The best source we have is his epigraph, written by a Chinese court official called Cheng Jufu. Yuan chroniclers claimed he came from royal stock, but since he married a Mongol princess, that was more likely a piece of expeditious social retrofitting. Rather like the hagiographies of Buddhist saints, the stories around Arniko are of a preternaturally gifted and serious-minded child. The epigraph tells us that even as a three-year-old, Arniko would be looking around the temple during religious ceremonies and passing judgment on the architecture. At school, he memorised complex sutras on the arts at one sitting, like Mozart absorbing every aspect of music he’d never heard before. By the time he left for Tibet he was an expert in painting, carving and casting images. Starting in 1261, he led a group of Newari artisans in building a golden stupa that Kublai commissioned for the Sakya monastery in central Tibet, a complex that was then rapidly evolving as Sakya power within Tibet grew. The stupa was built in the monastery’s main hall, and although it no longer exists, the legacy of Arniko’s Newari artisans can be traced in stunning murals at Shalu monastery neaer Shigatse, the languid, elliptical shapes an echo of the last Pala Empire on the roof of the world.
Arniko did such a good job that Phagpa insisted he visit Kublai Khan’s capital Dadu (modern Beijing) at the end of 1262. His introduction to Kublai was recorded. The Khagan looked at him for a while before asking if he was afraid ‘to come to the big country?’ Arniko’s reply was politically shrewd for a teenager.
The sage regards people in all directions as his sons. When a son comes to his father, what is there to fear?
—Why do you come?
—My family has been living in the west for generations. I took the imperial edict to build the stupa in Tibet for two years. I saw constant wars, and wish your majesty could pacify there. I come for sentient beings.
The emperor tested the young Newari with a challenge: to restore a damaged bronze statue the court’s artists had judged beyond repair, a task he eventually accomplished although it took three years. Kublai was delighted and over the next decade Arniko worked his way up to become supervisor for all classes of artisans, thousands of them, responsible for a huge expansion of state-sponsored art that Kublai eventually curtailed because it was so expensive. Arniko was responsible for the religious imagery, imperial portraits and other court projects, seals and insignia, a kind of branding that defined the regime’s character, its strong links between the Sakya preceptor and the khagan’s sovereignty. The Mongol lords liked the golden images of Buddha, but they left the complex philosophy to their Tibetan priests. When Kublai went to war, Phagpa gave his blessing and Arniko created a mural featuring the fierce tantric protector deity Mahakala to make the enterprise auspicious.
Arniko’s most famous achievement was the White Stupa in Beijing, which still stands, having been singled out for protection by Communist China’s first premier, Zhou Enlai, some years before the Cultural Revolution. It is a curious combination of Pala, Newari and Chinese styles, a consequence perhaps of its architect’s cosmopolitan life. Around it he designed a temple so vast it took fifty-eight thousand trees to complete, the most expensive building project of Kublai’s reign but destroyed in a fire in 1368. Arniko is also associated with the Sarira Pagoda, another white stupa fifty-two metres high, at the Buddhist centre of Wutaishan in Shanxi province, sacred home of the bodhisattva Manjushri, completed in 1301 some years after Kublai’s death. By then Arniko had already built another commission at Wutaishan for Kublai’s successor Temur: the Wangsheng Youguosi, or Temple of Myriad Saints Safeguarding the State, which proved to be one of the most expensive and complicated buildings the Yuan dynasy built and is sadly no longer extant. Controversial at court, the project nevertheless brought its Newari architect huge riches. Kublai had rewarded him with jade and gold belts, dozens of expensive robes, fur coats and hats, chariots and horses; for this latest triumph Temur’s mother rewarded him with almost half a ton of silver. Kublai made sure Arniko’s Newari wife was brought from Kathmandu and he married several times more, including his Mongolian princess. He took on a Chinese soubriquet, Xixuan, meaning ‘western studio’, a reference to his house in western Dadu as well as his distant origins and artistic school. He died in 1306 a wealthy man with huge landholdings and thousands of serfs, not the first and certainly not the last migrant from Nepal hoping to exploit his talents in a foreign land.
When Kublai died, Arniko produced portraits of his old patron and his favourite wife Chabi, who had died a few years earlier. She had been a great supporter of the Mongol court’s Tibetan influence but later, as some believe, converted to Christianity like her mother-in-law. Always cosmopolitan, she was a restraining influence on Kublai, mindful of maintaining respectful relations with the khagan’s mostly Chinese subjects. The art historian Anning Jing has argued that these portraits are those now hanging in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, showing Kublai Khan in his more corpulent middle years and Chabi in her remarkably tall Mongolian headdress, known in Chinese as a gugu. The technique expressed in these paintings suggests an artist trained in the Himalaya, not China.
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Echoes of Arniko’s creative world resonated in Europe, most famously in The Travels of Marco Polo, which included a description of Shangdu, the summer palace of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan; Arniko was not its chief architect, but he had made his contribution. ‘There is at this place a very fine marble palace, the rooms of which are all gilt and painted with figures of men and beasts and birds, and with a variety of trees and flowers, all executed with such exquisite art that you regard them with delight and astonishment.’ Polo’s book was for centuries one of the few available sources on Central Asia. The Elizabethan travel writer Samuel Purchas drew on it for his Purchas, his Pilgrimage: a geo-religious encyclopaedia he collated and published in 1613. Purchas himself never travelled more than three hundred or so kilometres from his native Essex, taking inspiration instead from the seafarers he met there. He also inherited the papers of Richard Hakluyt, chaplain to Robert Cecil, secretary of state to Elizabeth I and James I. Hakluyt wrote widely on exploration and voyages of discovery, and was an adviser to the East India Company, founded in 1600.
It was Purchas’ book that Samuel Taylor Coleridge had open on his chest when he fell into a vision-filled sleep at his rented cottage in the Somerset village of Nether Stowey, having taken grains of opium to alleviate a bout of dysentery. Coleridge understood very well the impact opium had on his imagination. ‘I should much wish,’ he wrote in a letter to Robert Southey during that period, ‘like the Indian Vishna, to float about along an infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotos, & wake once in a million years for a few minutes – just to know I was going to sleep a million years more.’
Purchas’ version of Polo’s story opens with the phrase: ‘In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Palace, encompassing sixteene miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs . . . ’ The Khan, Purchas wrot
e, spent his summers in a ‘sumptuous house of pleasure’ that could be dismantled and moved around: deluxe nomadism. Coleridge borrowed the first sentence, added an extra syllable to give ‘Xanadu’, turned the ‘house of pleasure’ into a ‘stately pleasure dome’ and swapped the prosaic ‘build’ for ‘decree’: much more the style of a Mongol Khan. The poem ‘Kubla Khan’ is not of course about the Mongols: it’s about the human imagination in the act of creation, Coleridge sculpting a dream and offering it to the reader. He did have ideas about the real Kublai Khan, describing him in a letter as ‘the greatest Prince in Peoples, Cities & Kingdoms that ever was in the World’. But for Coleridge Kublai was simply the most powerful and exotic leader he could imagine, an Oriental barbarian beyond even the remotest outcasts of the Bible. European Romanticism fed on such stories of exotic fantasy and lost utopias, and colonial conquest made ‘the Orient’ a rich vein of material. Such imaginings had a pervasive influence on European perspectives of the East. Coleridge does at least allow Kublai Khan a sensuous creativity at odds with his barbarian reputation, reflecting the Mongol’s patronage of the arts and his intellectual curiosity. And somewhere in that world view, unknown to Purchas or Coleridge, were cultural flavours brought across the Himalaya from Kathmandu.
The first Europeans to visit the city were seventeenth century Jesuit missionaries, among them Johann Grueber, born in the Austrian city of Linz in 1623. Having served for several years as a mathematics assistant at the Qing imperial court, he was summoned back to Rome in 1661. The sea route was closed, thanks to a hostile Dutch navy, so with his Belgian companion Albert d’Orville, Grueber made a daring journey from Beijing to Goa in south-western India through Tibet and Nepal. Setting out he travelled first west to Xining, where he joined a merchant’s caravan to Lhasa, passing along the northern shore of the vast lake of Kokonor before turning south-west, indulging his passion for drawing as he went. Grueber was the first European to reach Lhasa, where he spent a month or so waiting for another merchant’s caravan to cross the Himalaya. While he waited, he sketched the locals and tried to meet the fifth Dalai Lama, Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso, the Great Fifth. As a Jesuit unwilling to kneel before an idolater, the audience was denied. Grueber sketched him anyway, from a portrait hung at the gate of the Dalai Lama’s new palace, which he called the ‘Burg Beitala’: known to us as the Potala.