Last year, a team of adventurers were led by a shepherd to caves in a sheer cliff-face in Mustang, where they found and photographed murals dating back to the twelfth century CE. The site, whose location is being kept secret, is apparently affiliated with Tibetan Buddhism, while the murals are clearly the work of Newar artisans. (According to BBC News, with more details in Kantipur Online.)
Various details reported in connection with this find should be followed up urgently. Particularly, not only “inscriptions” but also “manuscripts” (in Tibetan?) were found this site or at a nearby location. The team announced that these will be translated following their return visit this year.
It does not inspire much confidence that the murals are reported as depicting the “Buddha’s life”, whereas the single image available (shown) actually shows the consort of a tantric siddha rendered in accordance with Newar iconographic conventions — an image which could not fit into any known account of the Buddha’s life.
What would be most beneficial for everyone would be to present full documentation and disclosure of whatever was photographed or taken away from these sites, and make it available to experts working on the history of Nepalese and Tibetan Buddhism. Let us hope that some capable specialist(s), somewhere, is being given access to the team’s findings.
Plea: Could some credentialled person please contact any one of the reported team members — Luigi Fieni (Italy), Broughton Coburn (Wyoming), Peter Athans (USA), Renan Ozturk, or Prakash Darnal (Nepal) — and find out what is going on with this extraordinarily important discovery.
Resolution: PDSz kindly and promptly elicited some useful information from Prof. Charles Ramble. Many thanks to both.
Just received this from Charles Ramble:
The website – indeed, I was just inside the
cave in question a couple of weeks ago. I gave a short talk about it in
Oxford a few months ago on the basis of some photos the climbers sent me,
but now everything is much clearer. I don’t know where the bit about the
Buddha’s life story came from, because the murals actually depict the last
45 of the 84 (or 85) mahasiddhas according to the Vajrasana system (Sa skya
pa, probably 12th century). The paintings themselves are probably 13th or
14th (as opposed to 12th) century, and probably by Bengali rather than Newar
painters. Also – in another cave – a huge amount of textual material, nearly
all Bonpo. We photographed the whole lot (around 7000 folios): Khams brgyad
(the 16-vol Bonpo Prajnaparamita), two copies of a the Klu ‘bum, a copy of
the gZer mig, a commentary on the Bonpo Zhi khro, and a bunch of other stuff
I haven’t identified yet. Just one colophon, which suggests that the whole
lot was commissioned by the second King of Mustang, and therefore written in
the late 14th or early 15th century. I’ll probably give a talk about it in
Oxford some time in November