Tradition · lost-wax bronze tradition
Pāla bronze casting
The eastern Indian school of small bronzes — Tara, Avalokiteshvara, Manjushri, crowned Buddhas — cast by lost wax in an eight-metal alloy, with inlaid silver eyes and a high polish, made for monastic and household use and portable enough to travel.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 24.830, 85.210
Worth knowing
Taranatha's Tibetan history names Dhiman and his son Bitpalo as the school's founders and distinguishes their eastern and Magadhan manners, which is a rare case of Indian sculptors remembered by name. The Kurkihar hoard of two hundred and twenty-six bronzes, found in a Bihar village in 1930, is the largest group; the style is the direct ancestor of Tibetan and Nepali metal image-making.
Connections (2)
- Craft tradition ofSwāmimalai bronze icon casting
The Pala bronzes of Bihar and Bengal and the Chola bronzes of the Kaveri delta are the two great Indian lost-wax traditions and they are contemporaries, running in parallel for three centuries at opposite ends of the subcontinent. Both cast in a multi-metal alloy to Shilpa Shastra proportion; the Pala work is small, portable and Buddhist, the Chola work is processional, large and Shaiva. Swamimalai still casts by the same method; the Pala workshops stopped when their patrons did.
- TransmissionTabo Monastery, Spiti
Pala bronzes travelled north with monks and were copied in Tibet and Nepal, and the metal images in the western Himalayan monasteries — Tabo, Alchi, the Guge temples — belong to a style that starts in eastern India. The Newar casters of the Kathmandu valley, who supplied Tibet with images for centuries afterwards, are the surviving end of the same tradition: the technique left India when the monasteries did and has been practised abroad ever since.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Pala Empire”. Taranatha, History of Buddhism in India (trans. Chattopadhyaya); Archaeological Survey of India excavation reports for Nalanda, Vikramashila, Paharpur and the Odisha sites.
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