During annual festival days in Kathmandu, horizontal cloth banners are hung on courtyard walls in Buddhist monasteries, where monks and lay people gather to watch ceremonial performances. Exposed to the elements and crowds of people, such banners rarely survive intact. This piece is a fragment of probably half of a complete banner.
The paintings illustrate a story from a Nepalese text about the primordial Buddha named Svayambhu, meaning “self-created,” whose stupa, the white hemispherical monument seen three times in the lower register, is a sacred center in the Kathmandu Valley. In the upper register are pilgrimage places in and around Kathmandu, located along the Bagmati River and its tributaries. In the lower register is the story of a king, shown on ...