Uncovering Ritual Traces in Javanese Bronze Mandalas

The Lecture

Throughout the Buddhist world, mandala depictions take on many forms. They are often sculpted in stone and wood, printed on clay, painted on silk and as murals, drawn in ink on paper – but few of them are cast in bronze.

This lecture will focus on the only extant examples in 10th-century Buddhist visual culture of large ensembles of small, individual bronze sculptures forming three-dimensional mandala assemblies of deities. These were all found in Java, Indonesia, buried in jars at three locations – in Nganjuk (1913) and Kunti (1992), both in East Java, as well as in Surocolo (1976), in the Special Region of Yogyakarta.

Previous studies have focused mainly on identifying individual figures to correlate their iconographies with written descriptions of mandala assemblies in extant Tibetan and Japanese texts. While valuable in identifying Buddhist texts that may have circulated in ancient Java, this approach overlooks ritualistic knowledge and mandala-making practices that may have circulated through non-textual means.

We will explore how the Javanese mandala assemblies of deities in bronze -when studied in relation to other mandala depictions from the rest of the Buddhist world- allow us to uncover traces of ritual practices. The common modern understanding of the mandala as a colourful, geometrically complex diagram, in which deities are arranged in a system of squares and circles, tends to obscure how mandala depictions translate in material and visual forms what was originally the performance of an ephemeral ritual act. However, the Javanese bronzes, being three-dimensional, durable, and portable, are more than fixed mandala depictions; they reflect a unique modality of representing Buddhist mandalas, suggesting the direct role of permanent images in otherwise ephemeral rituals.

The Speaker

Mathilde Mechling is a postdoctoral researcher for the ERC project MANTRATANTRAM, “Monsoon Asia as the Nexus for the Transfer of Tantra along the Maritime routes” (no. 101124214) at the École Pratique des Hautes Études–Université Paris Sciences & Lettres. Her research examines the circulation of Buddhist maṇḍala depictions, ritual practices, and ritual agents across Monsoon Asia, with a particular focus on bronze statuary and ritual implements from Indonesia. She received her PhD in 2020 from University Sorbonne Nouvelle and Leiden University. Her first book, titled Bronze Images of Indonesia: Artistic and Religious Networks Across Asia (c. 6th–10th century), which will be published by NUS Press in 2025, critically engages with the legacies of colonial scholarship on the study of Indonesian bronze statuary, and interprets these materials within transregional networks of exchange using an interdisciplinary methodology.

Registration (required)

Everyone is welcome to attend. Participation is free, but registration via the webform on this page is mandatory as seating is limited.