Page 134 - Himalayan Art Macrh 19 2018 Bonhams

3057
AN EMBROIDERED SILK THOUSAND-BUDDHA ROBE (KASHAYA)
TIBETO-CHINESE, CIRCA 18TH CENTURY
Constructed with eighteen double columns and comprised of one thousand embroidered
Buddhas and ten auspicious symbols; silk-floss satin stitch on a gold damask silk field.
Himalayan Art Resources item no.61584
53 1/2 x 107 in. (136.6 x 304.2 cm)

$15,000 - 20,000
漢藏 約十八世紀 錦緞緙絲千佛袈裟

This luxurious gold monastic silk is pieced together to echo the design of patchwork
robes worn by monks who have taken Buddha’s vow of poverty and only wear donated
scraps of cloth stitched together. However, the present example is obviously very
elaborate with due restrictions on its appropriate use, being reserved only for occasional
use by the highest and most spiritually adept monastic officials, as well as for throne
covers. For more information, see Valrae Reynolds, ‘Thousand Buddhas Capes and Their
Mysterious Role in Sino-Tibetan Trade and Liturgy,’ in In Heavens’ Embroidered Cloths,
Hong Kong, 1995, pp.32-7.

The ‘thousand Buddhas’ express the core Mahayana belief of the Buddha’s infinite
availability to all. The actual count reproduced on the garment is inconsequential.
Reynolds also discusses a fragment held in the Newark Museum that shows Buddha
images seated on similar pointed lotus leaf platforms worked in a combination of counted
stitch and silk-floss satin stitch (‘Myriad Buddhas: A Group of Mysterious Textiles from
Tibet’, in Orientations, vol.21, no.4, April 1990, p.91, fig.4).

The corpus of related examples varies dramatically in look and attribution. Compare with
kashaya in the Cleveland Museum of Art dated to the 14th century, in Watt & Wardell,
When Silk Was Gold, New York, 1997, pl.64. Compare a kesi Buddhist priest’s robe
illustrated in Hong Kong Museum of Art, In Heavens’ Embroidered Cloths, Hong Kong,
1995, pl.45, as well as two embroidered examples, ibid., pls.43-4.

Provenance
Collection of a Private American Family, acquired in Kathmandu, 1967-70

132 | BONHAMS