Uncovering ritual traces: Buddhist mandala depictions in bronze from Java, Indonesia

Throughout the Buddhist world, mandala depictions take on many forms.

They are often sculpted in stone and wood, printed on clay, painted on silk and as murals, drawn in ink on paper – but few of them are cast in bronze.

This lecture will focus on the only extant examples in 10th-century Buddhist visual culture of large ensembles of small, individual bronze sculptures forming three-dimensional mandala assemblies of deities. These were all found in Java, Indonesia, buried in jars at three locations – in Nganjuk (1913) and in Kunti (1992), both in East Java, as well as in Surocolo (1976), in the Special Region of Yogyakarta.

Previous studies have focused mainly on identifying individual figures to correlate their iconographies with written descriptions of mandala assemblies in extant Tibetan and Japanese texts. While valuable in identifying Buddhist texts which may have circulated in ancient Java, this text-centric approach neglects ritualistic knowledge and mandala-making practices which may have circulated through non-textual means.

We will explore how the Javanese mandala assemblies of deities in bronze, when studied in relation to other mandala depictions from the rest of the Buddhist world, allow us to uncover traces of ritual practices. The common modern understanding of the mandala as a colourful, geometrically complex diagram, in which deities are arranged in a system of squares and circles, tends to obscure how mandala depictions translate in material and visual forms what was originally the performance of an ephemeral ritual act. However, the Javanese bronzes, being three-dimensional, durable, and portable, are more than fixed mandala depictions; they reflect a unique modality of representing Buddhist mandalas, suggesting the direct role of permanent images in otherwise ephemeral rituals.

Image: Bronze sculptures found in desa Candirejo, Nganjuk, East Java, in 1913. Photo: OD-2248 (dated 1915), courtesy of the Kern Institute, Leiden University Library Special Collections.