The Lion's Cave with Sthulabhadra and His Sisters, Folio 60 (verso), from a Kalpa-sutra (c. 1450): Art, History and Details

The Lion's Cave with Sthulabhadra and His Sisters, Folio 60 (verso), from a Kalpa-sutra (c. 1450) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This manuscript is open to a page with a painting that depicts the story of a Jain monk who transformed himself into a composite beast when his sisters, two nuns, came to visit him. Terrified, the nuns ran to a senior monk, at the lower left, who admonished their brother for his overly prideful display of power. Remarkably, this story is not told in the text itself, which contains only their names among a list of prominent Jain teachers. The painting would remind a reader of the story that is found in many commentaries to the text.

Object facts

• Title: The Lion's Cave with Sthulabhadra and His Sisters, Folio 60 (verso), from a Kalpa-sutra
• Date: c. 1450
• Culture: Western India, Gujarat
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper
• Dimensions: Overall: 12.5 x 25.7 cm (4 15/16 x 10 1/8 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1932.119.60.b

A detail from the museum

The three red dots in the margins and the center occur only on the reverse side of the page; the obverse side has only one red dot in the center.

Collection credit

Edward L. Whittemore Fund

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.