A very rare silk brocade fragment of a banner of a Thousand Buddhas China, Jin Dynasty, 12th / 13th century

lampas weave of gold-foil wrapped threads against a deep blue silk ground, finely woven with seven repeated registers of the Five Transcendental Buddhas, each in various identifying mudras seated in dhyanasana on a lotus against an oval mandorla, divided by rising columns of curling vegetal scrolls, the left and right edges with a running border of undulating lotus buds and large lotus pads (framed)

Formerly in a Japanese private collection

The present fragment is one of several extant fragments of the original banner; rare examples of Jin Dynasty textiles surviving only by virtue of being preserved in the treasuries of Tibetan monasteries. One fragment is in the AEDTA Collection, illustrated by Amy Heller, Tibetan Art, Milan, 1999, pl.75, p.118, bearing four full registers of Buddhas, and sliced segments of two other registers; another is in a Japanese private collection, illustrated by Sae Ogasawara, 'Chinese Fabrics of the Song and Yuan Dynasties Preserved in Japan', Orientations, August 1989, p.44, fig.14, bearing seven full registers and a section of another register.

The five Trancendental Buddhas are identified by their various mudras, reading from left to right, Akshobya in bhumisparsa mudra, Ratnasambhava in varada mudra, Vairocana in dhamacakramudra, Amitabha in dhyana mudra, and Amoghasiddhi in abhayamudra. As Heller discusses, op.cit., p.88, one fragment was discovered together with a closely related banner of large deities, with identical lotus-leaf borders, all with consistent iconographic conventions but for the error in the hand of Ratnasambhava. Nevertheless these rare surviving textiles illuminate both the degree of prevalence of Tibetan Buddhism within the Xixia kingdom as well as the technical achievement in textiles in the thirteenth century.