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The Tirthankara Kuntunathafront

© Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

  • The Tirthankara Kuntunatha (back)
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The Tirthankara Kuntunatha

Location

    • First floor | Room 32 | India from 600

Objects are sometimes moved to a different location. Our object location data is usually updated on a monthly basis. Contact the Jameel Study Centre if you are planning to visit the museum to see a particular object on display, or would like to arrange an appointment to see an object in our reserve collections.

 

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  • Indian Art in the Ashmolean Museum by J. C. Harle and Andrew Topsfield

    Indian Art in the Ashmolean Museum

    Just as the historical Gautama Buddha came to be seen by later adherents of the faith he founded as only one of a long line of former Buddhas, so the historical Mahāvīra, founder of the Jaina faith, came to be counted as the twenty-fourth Tīrthaṅkara (literally “ford-maker”) or great teacher of that religion. The present image is a representation of Śrī Kunthunātha, the seventeenth in the line.

    A comprehensive inscription on the back of the image states that is was commissioned by a certain merchant Simghāka together with his wife and two brothers, and was installed by Śāstrī Lakṣmīsāgarasūri, a monk of the sixth gaccha (tapāgaccha) of the Śvetāṃbara or white-clad branch of the Jain faith. It was made in the town of Vasantapura, one of the major centres of Jainism at this time as attested in works such as Hemacandra’s Pariśiṣṭaparvan , which corresponds to the modern Vasantagaḍh in southern Rajasthan, where other bronze Jaina images dating from as early as the 7th century A.D. have been found.

    Amongst the small attendant figures in the prabhāvali are doubtless the yakṣa and yakṣī associated with Kunthunātha, the latter the only recognizable female figure, seated in a lalitāsana. There is the outline of a goat, Kunthunātha’s vāhana, lightly etched on a panel below the seated figure. Otherwise the little figures have no distinguishing marks or attributes, and are stylized to an extraordinary degree into the quasi-geometrical forms of the last Western Indian Jain style.

    The Ashmolean possesses another almost identical image [EAOS.110], also of Kunthunātha, consecrated in 1470 by the same Lakṣmīsāgara.

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