November 13, 2009
New York Times | Art Reviews | ‘Victorious Ones,’ ‘Peaceful Conquerors’

Compassionate Masters of the Universe

By HOLLAND COTTER

First, do no harm. That’s the bottom-line rule of Jainism, one of the three major homegrown religions in India. To believers, all living things, from whales to humans to flu bugs, have souls and, karmically speaking, all souls are equal. If you go thrashing and stomping your way through the average day, as most of us do, you’re bound to be injuring something. And if you injure something, you injure everything, including yourself. This is how karma works. So it pays to move with care.

Mohandas Gandhi, who used nonviolence as a political tool, learned a lot from the Jains. But in the West we still know little about them and even less about their art — brilliant little narrative paintings, sculptures of sleek nude saviors — which we tend to misidentify as Buddhist. Not that there’s much around to see. The last major American survey was at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1994, and it never came to the East Coast. Scant Jain material is on regular view in New York museums.

This fall, however, brings two Jain shows to New York: “Victorious Ones: Jain Images of Perfection” at the Rubin Museum of Art and “Peaceful Conquerors: Jain Manuscript Painting” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Neither show is as spectacular as the Los Angeles exhibition, although the Rubin Museum one approaches it. Together they provide an in-depth survey of a great art tradition and a complex faith that has nearly five million followers in India.

And I do mean complex. For all its clear-cut ethical thinking, Jainism has a highly contradictory view of the world. On the one hand, it envisions the cosmos as a precision machine, with balanced realms of heaven and hell sandwiching a thin slice of earth, and time measured out in regular and recurrent epochs of bloom and decay.

Yet creatures living in those epochs experience tremendous uncertainty. This is particularly true in periods of disintegration, one of which, by Jain reckoning, we are in now, with no end yet in sight. Violence will continue to grow. Beast will turn on beast. Hell will outweigh heaven. Is there any sound reality to rely on?

There is, in the form of the transcendent beings known as jinas, or victors, for whom Jainism is named. They appear, 24 in all, in every epoch. The enemy they’ve conquered, through eons of self-discipline, is themselves, or rather human passions: fear, aggression, love, what have you. As a result they’ve reached the end of the karmic line, where bloom and decay end, and truth — unvarying, imponderable, and probably as plain as the nose on your face — waits.

The Jina nearest to our own time was named Mahavira. An older contemporary of the Buddha, he lived in northern India in the sixth century B.C. His life is the subject of several exquisite manuscript paintings at the Met, selected from the museum’s permanent collection by John Guy, the curator of South and Southeast Asian art.

The story these works tell begins with a prenatal mix-up: the future Jina, though expected to be of royal birth, has been conceived by a nonroyal Brahman couple. The error is soon finessed by the miraculous transfer of the foetus to the womb of a Jain queen, an event depicted with wide-eyed, almost comical verve in a tiny 15th-century manuscript painting from western India, long a Jain stronghold.

In other illustrations we see the infant Mahavira born, bathed and coddled. Then, in a flash forward, he’s a bejewelled young sovereign being carried in procession to the edge of a forest. There he strips off his princely gear, plucks out his hair by the roots and, naked or near naked, sets out on a final earthly journey. In a culminating image he stands on the moon, a kind of superman, preaching truth to the cosmos.

By this point he exists outside our sphere, as all jinas do. He’s superhuman, beyond access, deaf to our appeals. Still, the paintings of his life, even this one of him on the moon, look almost warm to the touch, with their jazzy color combos of crimson, gold and ultramarine ground and their naturalistic details: transparent fabrics, pretty flowers and wasp-waisted bodies striking Ruth St. Denis poses.

There are more such paintings in the Rubin Museum show, and other kinds too: half-abstract geometric designs; elaborately plotted cosmograms; and pilgrimage road maps teeming with minute human and animal figures that move, like ants through the earth, toward gilded jinas glowing in shrines.

These images depicted are, presumably sculptures, and sculpture is, for me, the high point of Jain art. You’ll find a handful of superb examples at the Met, including the big marble jina, snow white and ultra serene, that has become a kind of mascot for the South Asian galleries. But the Rubin show has many more: nearly three dozen carved and cast figures, from hand size to life size. Dating from the 5th to the 17th century, they add up to a primer of sculptural types.

The types seem, at a glance, fairly limited. Most sculptures made for temples or home altars were of single male figures seated in yogic meditation or standing attentively upright, legs straight, sapling-smooth arms hanging down at their sides, hands shaped like big, bizarre flowers and empty. Some of the jinas wear sheer robes; others are nude, in which case they are associated with the Jain sect called Digambara, or sky-clad, meaning dressed in nothing but air.

Digambara ascetics and teachers — though not ordinary worshipers — completely renounce possessions, including clothing. They are, you might say, career nudists, living out an extreme version of the injunction to exist as no-impact presences in the material world. As if in a defiant gesture of total disarmament, they render themselves as unprotected as the most vulnerable of organisms.

Nudity has an ethical downside: women are barred from practicing it and are spiritually considered second-class citizens. But visually it is the feature that most clearly distinguishes Jain from much other South Asian art, including Buddhist, with which it is often confused. The misidentification is understandable. Over the centuries the two faiths coexisted as more or less friendly rivals. The same artists made images for both; and those images shared period and regional styles.

The main differences are doctrinal. While the religions share the primary goal of helping individuals escape the trauma of repeated births and deaths, they take varying approaches to it: measured and moderate in the case of Buddhism, severe and self-punishing in the case of certain Jain practice. Also, Buddhists didn’t believe in the existence of eternal souls, but Jains do, which gives their commitment to nonviolence — called ahimsa — a particularly ardent edge.

This is not to suggest that Jains were, or are, a population of renunciates. Historically adept at integrating into society, successful as merchants and traders, they often aligned themselves with the highest sources of political power and led luxurious lives. The jinas represented ideals of moral perfection, admirable, but basically inimitable. Thanks to art, you could see them — adamant in their simplicity, at once present and absent, almost innocent of charm — but you knew you could not be them.

What you can be is fully human and, in the karmic scheme of things, with so many souls in so many forms streaming through eternity, that’s an achievement in itself, or possibly just the luck of the draw. In any case, it comes with pleasures — spicy, sprightly paintings among them — and with obligations: first, to make peace with both absolutism and uncertainty; next to see all your fellow creatures for the companion souls they are; and last, which is also first in that circling Jain plan, to do no harm, no harm.

“Victorious Ones: Jain Images of Perfection” runs through Feb. 15 at the Rubin Museum of Art, 150 West 17th Street, Manhattan; (212) 620-5000; rmanyc.org. “Peaceful Conquerors: Jain Manuscript Painting” runs through March 28 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.

 Courtesy: New York Tmes

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