A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [137]
When Tara arrived at the British Museum in the 1830s she was at once put into the store rooms and kept there for thirty years, viewed only by specialist scholars on request. Possibly she was seen as too dangerously erotic and voluptuous for public display. But this statue was not made to titillate. She is a religious being, one of the spiritual protectors to whom the Buddhist faithful can turn in distress, from a religious tradition that has no difficulty in happily combining divinity and sensuality. The statue of Tara takes us into a world where faith and bodily beauty converge to move us beyond ourselves. It also tells us a great deal about the world of Sri Lanka and southern Asia 1,200 years ago.
The island of Sri Lanka, separated from India by only twenty miles of shallow water, has always been an important hub in the seaborne trade that stitches the lands of the Indian Ocean together. In the years around AD 800 Sri Lanka was in close, indeed constant, contact not only with the neighbouring kingdoms of southern India but also with the Islamic Abbasid Empire in the Middle East, with Indonesia and with Tang China. Sri Lankan gems were highly prized; 1,200 years ago rubies and garnets from the island were regularly being traded to east and west, reaching the Mediterranean and possibly even Britain. Some of the gems from the great Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo (see Chapter 47) may well have come from Sri Lanka.
But it was not only goods that travelled. The teachings of the Buddha, who lived and preached in northern India some time around 500 BC (see Chapter 41), had gradually evolved into a complex philosophical and spiritual system of conduct designed to liberate the individual soul from the illusion and suffering of this world. The new faith spread rapidly along the trade routes of India. So when this sculpture of Tara was made, Sri Lanka had been predominantly Buddhist for more than a thousand years. The particular strand of Buddhism that flourished in Sri Lanka at that time gave a special place to divine beings called Bodhisattvas, who could help the faithful live better lives. Tara is one of them.
Professor Richard Gombrich, a leading expert on Buddhist history and thought, explains her background:
She is a personification. She represents in person, symbolically, the power of a Buddha to save you, to take you across the ocean that is this world into which, according to most Buddhists, you are continually reborn until you find your way out. There is a particular future Buddha, Bodhisattva, called Avalokiteshvara, first found in texts which probably date from the first century AD. Initially he operates by himself, but after a few centuries the idea came that his power to save could be personified as a goddess. She represents his compassion and his power. Tara is simply an aspect of Avalokiteshvara.
Tara probably stood inside a temple, and originally there must have been a matching sculpture of her male consort, Avalokiteshvara, nearby, but his image has not survived.
Strictly speaking, Tara was not made to be worshipped but to be a focus for meditation on the qualities she embodies – compassion and the power to save. She would have been seen essentially by priests or monks from a privileged elite; relatively few people would actually have been able to meditate on her image.
Standing in front of her and knowing something of what she meant to believers, we can better understand why her makers chose to represent her as they did. Her beauty and serenity speak of her endless compassion. Her right hand, held down by her side, is not at rest but in the position known as varadamudra, the gesture of granting a wish – a clear demonstration of her prime role as the generous helper of the faithful. Her gilded skin and the jewels that once adorned her make it clear that this