RUBBING FROM THE QIFOTA (SEVEN BUDDHA PAGODA)

The present work is part of a set of rubbings commissioned by the Emperor Qianlong himself. In 1777, the Panchen Lama of Tibet presented the emperor with a set of seven paintings of the ‘Seven Buddhas of the Past’. Although largely formulaic, the paintings were unusual in that each painting also included the parents of each Buddha in the lower right corners, seemingly contradicting the Buddhist principle of detachment from family in the fulfillment of enlightenment. Patricia Berger, in Empire of Emptiness: Buddhist Art and Political Authority in Qing China, United Kingdom, 2003, pp. 186-87, posits that this might have been an intentional act of compassion from the Panchen Lama to Qianlong, who had just lost his mother. The emperor was so taken by the paintings that he ordered the construction of the Qifota (Seven Buddha Pagoda), an eight-sided column with carved reproductions of the seven paintings. He also ordered that rubbings be made from the stone column and distributed to the Dalai Lama and to various palace collections. For another rubbing from the same group, but depicting Kanakamuni Buddha, in the collection of the Palace Museum in Beijing, see ibid., p. 188, fig. 64.

Baron Alexander von Staël-Holstein (1877-1937) was an early Western scholar of Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese languages, who contributed to the translation of several important Buddhist texts. In the 1920s and 30s, he was a professor of Sanskrit, Tibetan and History of Indian Religions at Peking University in Beijing, and in 1928 was a visiting professor at Harvard, helping the Harvard-Yenching Institute to collect important books. A selection of the illustrated literature von Staël-Holstein brought with him from Beijing to Harvard was compiled by Walter Eugene Clark to form the seminal 1937 Two Lamaistic Pantheons, one of the earliest Western references of Qing-dynasty Buddhist iconography.