Subhashini Kaligotla:
Song and Dance and Music-Making Around the Buddha’s Body

Texts in Pali, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese tell of the gifts and honors the historical Buddha received after his death. Since the great teacher’s death was a final one, a parinirvana—a release from the cycle of birth and rebirth that according to the Buddhist faith ensnares all living beings—it was an occasion for celebration. Celebratory acts included singing, dancing, music-making, and gifts of flowers, perfume, and cloth. Considering sculptural images from the “great” or maha stupas at Sanchi (1^st century BCE) and Amaravati (early centuries CE), this talk focuses on such acts of celebration as well as on a mode unique to the visual realm: the use of images of architecture to convey the joy in the Buddha’s achievement.

Subhashini Kaligotla is an art historian of premodern South Asia, with research interests in sacred architecture, the agency of makers, text-image relations, and death and afterlife studies. She is at work on a book project entitled Seeing Ghosts that is interested in telling the life story of the dead through art historical materials, large and small. Kaligotla is Barbara Stoler Miller Associate Professor of Indian and South Asian Art History at Columbia University.