Description

The picture has nine red panels depicting lively animals or human figures. All of them are facing left except the first pair, who gaze towards the others.

In the top-left panel a woman is waiting on a man with four arms sitting on a lotus flower. The man’s blue skin, four arms and crown indicate that he is a king of the gods. Looking towards some of his subjects, he is also identified as an asura king in the caption above – asurendra.

Looking from the top left, the contents of the panels are as follows:

  • second panel – two female dancers
  • third panel – two male musicians, identifiable from their mṛdanga drum and cymbals
  • fourth panel – a richly caparisoned horse
  • fifth panel – a blue elephant with a similarly costly harness
  • sixth panel – two horses pulling a chariot with a charioteer and a passenger
  • seventh panel – two men carrying weapons
  • eighth panel – a bull with a collar round its neck
  • ninth panel – a buffalo with a collar round its neck

Note that the bull and buffalo have the hump characteristic of cattle and buffalo in India.

Each of these panels has a caption above, identifying them as the elements of a divine army. The various classes of gods in Jain cosmology are each led by a king, who has up to nine parts in his army. This picture presents the king of the asura type of deity and representative elements of his army.

There is no other text apart from captions on this image, but the text on the verso has verses from the Saṃgrahaṇī-ratna by Śrīcandra. This is probably the most popular Śvetāmbara Jain cosmological work.