A History of the World in 100 Objects (47 page)

Because of the strong parallels with the Susanna story, it’s always been tempting to see the crystal as connected to this royal drama. Perhaps it was made as a present for Theutberga to show Lothair’s sincerity in accepting that she was blameless – if so, it’s a kind of private statement marking a temporary truce in their marital hostilities. But aspects of the way in which the final scene is treated hint that it is almost certainly something much more significant. In the last scene,
the artist deviates from the biblical text and shows Susanna being declared innocent by a king sitting in judgement, and the inscription specifically names Lothair. The message is clear: one of the key duties of the king is to ensure that justice is done – in short, the king must secure and respect the rule of law, even at great personal cost to himself. Justice is almost
the
defining royal virtue.

A treatise, probably written for Lothair himself, spells this out:

The just and peaceful king carefully thinks about each case, and not despising the sick and poor of his people, speaks just judgements, putting down the wicked and raising the good.

These ideals, articulated more than a thousand years ago, are still central to European political life today. Lord Bingham told me:

In the centre of the crystal, one sees the king who commissioned it in the role of judge. This is of considerable interest and importance because historically the crown and monarchy has always been regarded as the fount of justice. When Queen Elizabeth II took her Coronation Oath in 1953 she swore a very old oath, prescribed by an Act of 1688, that she would do justice and mercy in all her judgements. This is exactly the role in which one sees King Lothair – in the role of actually personally administering justice, which, of course, the Queen no longer does, but the judges who do it in her name are very proud to be called Her Majesty’s judges.

The Susanna Crystal was made for a king without an heir in a kingdom without a future. In 869, when Lothair died undivorced, his uncles did indeed partition his lands, and all that remains of Lotharingia today is the name of Lorraine. For more than a thousand years, indeed until 1945, Lothair’s Middle Kingdom was bitterly fought over by the successors of the wicked uncles, France and Germany. If Lothair had succeeded in divorcing his wife, and had had a legitimate heir, Lorraine might now rank with Spain, France and Germany as one of the great states of continental Europe. Lotharingia perished, but the principle that Lothair’s Crystal proclaims has survived: a central duty of the ruler of the state is to guarantee that justice is done, dispassionately and in open court. Innocence must be protected. The Lothair Crystal is one of the first European images of the notion of the rule of law.

Almost every religion has spirits or saints, gods or goddesses, that can be called upon to see us through troubled times. If you were a Sri Lankan around
AD
800 you would probably have invoked the name of Tara, the spirit of generous compassion. Over the centuries many artists have given Tara physical form, but it is hard to imagine many more beautiful than the golden, nearly life-size figure which now presides serenely over the long Asia gallery at the British Museum.

The statue of Tara is cast in a single piece of solid bronze, which has then been covered in gold. When new, and seen under the Sri Lankan sun, she must have been dazzling. Even now, when her gilding is rather worn and illuminated only by the cool light of Bloomsbury, she still has a compelling lustre. She is about three quarters life-size, and she stands, as she always would have, on a plinth, so that as you look up at her she benignly gazes down at you. Her face tells you at once that she comes from southern Asia. But that’s not the first thing that strikes visitors as they look at her: she has a quite impossible hour-glass figure and her upper body is completely naked. Her full and perfectly rounded breasts float above a tiny wasp waist. Below, a flimsy sarong is draped in gleaming folds that cling to and beguilingly reveal her shapely lower body.

When Tara arrived at the British Museum in the 1830s she was at once put into the store rooms and kept there for thirty years, viewed only by specialist scholars on request. Possibly she was seen as too dangerously erotic and voluptuous for public display. But this statue was not made to titillate. She is a religious being, one of the spiritual protectors to whom the Buddhist faithful can turn in distress, from a religious tradition that has no difficulty in happily combining divinity and sensuality
.
The statue of Tara takes us into a world where faith and bodily beauty converge to move us beyond ourselves. It also tells us a great deal about the world of Sri Lanka and southern Asia 1,200 years ago.

The island of Sri Lanka, separated from India by only twenty miles of shallow water, has always been an important hub in the seaborne trade that stitches the lands of the Indian Ocean together. In the years around
AD
800 Sri Lanka was in close, indeed constant, contact not only with the neighbouring kingdoms of southern India but also with the Islamic Abbasid Empire in the Middle East, with Indonesia and with Tang China. Sri Lankan gems were highly prized; 1,200 years ago rubies and garnets from the island were regularly being traded to east and west, reaching the Mediterranean and possibly even Britain. Some of the gems from the great Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo (see
Chapter 47
) may well have come from Sri Lanka.

But it was not only goods that travelled. The teachings of the Buddha, who lived and preached in northern India some time around 500
BC
(see
Chapter 41
), had gradually evolved into a complex philosophical and spiritual system of conduct designed to liberate the individual soul from the illusion and suffering of this world. The new faith spread rapidly along the trade routes of India. So when this sculpture of Tara was made, Sri Lanka had been predominantly Buddhist for more than a thousand years. The particular strand of Buddhism that flourished in Sri Lanka at that time gave a special place to divine beings called Bodhisattvas, who could help the faithful live better lives. Tara is one of them.

Professor Richard Gombrich, a leading expert on Buddhist history and thought, explains her background:

She is a personification. She represents in person, symbolically, the power of a Buddha to save you, to take you across the ocean that is this world into which, according to most Buddhists, you are continually reborn until you find your way out. There is a particular future Buddha, Bodhisattva, called Avalokiteshvara, first found in texts which probably date from the first century
AD
. Initially he operates by himself, but after a few centuries the idea came that his power to save could be personified as a goddess. She represents his compassion and his power. Tara is simply an aspect of Avalokiteshvara.

Tara probably stood inside a temple, and originally there must have been a matching sculpture of her male consort, Avalokiteshvara, nearby, but his image has not survived.

Strictly speaking, Tara was not made to be worshipped but to be a focus for meditation on the qualities she embodies – compassion and the power to save. She would have been seen essentially by priests or monks from a privileged elite; relatively few people would actually have been able to meditate on her image.

Standing in front of her and knowing something of what she meant to believers, we can better understand why her makers chose to represent her as they did. Her beauty and serenity speak of her endless compassion. Her right hand, held down by her side, is not at rest but in the position known as
varadamudra
, the gesture of granting a wish – a clear demonstration of her prime role as the generous helper of the faithful. Her gilded skin and the jewels that once adorned her make it clear that this statue of Tara can only have been commissioned by people in command of great wealth.

It’s very rare for a statue as big as this to survive and escape being melted down; indeed we know of no other example of this size from medieval Sri Lanka. At that date most large bronze statues would be cast by pouring the metal around a clay core to make a hollow figure. Tara, by contrast, is bronze through and through. Whoever made her must have had a great deal of bronze, rare skill and a lot of experience of this very challenging kind of work. Tara is not just a beautiful object; she is a remarkable technical achievement, and must have been very expensive.

We don’t know who paid for Tara to be made – it could have been the ruler of any one of several kingdoms which squabbled and fought over territory in Sri Lanka around
AD
800. Whoever it was clearly wanted her help on the path to salvation. In Sri Lanka, as anywhere else, gifts to religious institutions were also an important part of the political strategies of rulers, a means of asserting publicly their privileged links to the divine.

One of the fascinating things about this sculpture is that at the time it was made Tara was a relatively recent convert to Buddhism. She had originally been a Hindu mother goddess and was only later adopted by Buddhists – a typical but particularly beautiful example of the constant dialogue and exchange between Buddhism and Hinduism that went on for centuries and which can be seen today in statues and buildings all over south-east Asia. Tara shows that Buddhism and Hinduism are not tightly defined codes of belief, but ways of being and acting that can, in different contexts, absorb each other’s insights. Tara is, in modern parlance, a strikingly inclusive image: made for a Buddhist, Sinhala-speaking court in Sri Lanka but stylistically part of the wider world that embraced the Tamil-speaking, Hindu courts of southern India. Indeed Sri Lanka was shared, then as now, between Sinhala and Tamil, Hindu and Buddhist, and there were close links and many exchanges through diplomacy, marriage and, frequently, war.

Nira Wickramasinghe, Professor of History and International Relations at Leiden University, in the Netherlands, describes for us what this long-established pattern means for the region today.

In many ways you can speak of a south Indian/Sri Lankan region with many points in common, culturally and politically as well. There has also been a two-way flow of influences in art, religion and technology. Of course, it has not always been a peaceful relationship; there have also been invasions and wars between southern states of India and chiefdoms in Sri Lanka.

It’s really trade that brought people from India to Sri Lanka. You have certain communities which are fairly recent migrants from south India, in the ninth to the thirteenth centuries. They merged their south Indian identity with a more Sri Lankan identity, and what is curious now is that many of these are the most ardent Sinhala nationalists.

The complex working-out of the relationships that we see embodied in Tara, between Sinhalese and Tamil, between Sri Lanka and southern India, between Buddhists and Hindus, still goes on 1,200 years later – relationships that in Sri Lanka have tragically included the recent long and bloody civil war.

But Tara may actually have survived thanks to war. Marks on the surface of the sculpture suggest that she was buried at some point, perhaps to avoid her being looted by invaders and then melted down. Unfortunately, nothing is known about how or when the statue was found, nor how it came, around 1820, to be in the possession of the then Governor of Ceylon (as the island was known at the time), the soldier Sir Robert Brownrigg. Ceylon had been taken over by the British from its Dutch rulers during the Napoleonic Wars, and in 1815 Robert Brownrigg had conquered the last remaining independent Sri Lankan kingdom on the island; he brought Tara to Britain in 1822.

Many centuries before that the island had abandoned the particular strand of Buddhism in which Tara had played such a prominent part, and her statue may well have been removed from the temple and buried for safekeeping during that religious upheaval. But, although no longer revered in Sri Lanka as she was in the past, Tara is a living force in many places, especially in Nepal and Tibet. Millions of people all over the world still turn, as they did in Sri Lanka 1,200 years ago, to Tara to see them through.