KVPT’s Patan Darbar Earthquake Response Campaign - Work to Date - September 2016

A Brief History of the Emergence and
Development of the
Kirtimukha Motif in Nepal
By Niels Gutschow
Overview — levels of symbolism
Kirtimukha is essentially a lion’s face, albeit as a hybrid
representation, with horns and, eventually, with winged
arms. The lion has been, from earliest times, a symbol
of royalty and as such made its way from the Etruscan
culture to be absorbed by the Greeks, the Romans, and
the Sassanians, and may have parallel roots in Central
Asia and among the Scythian tribes. This is not the place
to trace origins of the lion in South Asian Art. The lion
appears in pairs in the 2nd to 1st-century BCE caves
of Pithalkora. Reduced to its face Kirtimukha is seen
neither at Pithalkora or at Kanheri, but appears in wide
variety at the late 5th century caves of Ajanta (fig. 2) and
at Ellora, at 6th century caves of Badami, at 7th century
temples of Bhubaneswar and at 8th-century temples of
Pattadakal and Aihole, India.
Given this sequence, the earliest representations of
Kirtimukha must have come from the cave temples of
western India. In all examples “kirttimukha masks [are]
spouting forth crocodilian and exuberantly florescent
forms”, as Walter M. Spink wrote in his seminal account
of the Ajanta caves in 2009. “Florescent” refers to “flowering
and budding”, although the “mask” spouts forth
strands of beads, which are either absorbed by pairs of
Makaras, held by flying spirits (vidyadhara) in the fashion
of garlands, or in case of a frieze, by the neighbouring
masks. Spouting and absorbing has to be understood
as the act of inhaling and exhaling as the ultimate representation
of life.
The beads, however, have to be identified as water drops,
as Gautam Vajra Vajracharya established in the first
meaningful article on the subject in 2015. Kirtimukha
thus turns into one of those cloud borne celestial creatures
such as Makara (the crocodilian amphibian creature),
the birdmen Gandharva or Kinnara. Bestowing
water, the face or mask of Kirtimukha turns into a motif
that spreads across various architectural elements: it occupies
the bottom or top of a column or pillar, the capital
bracket, and the top of cow-eye motifs.
1
The earliest known Kirtimukha appear on the corner
pillar of an open miniature shrine, on friezes of a Shikhara
temple within the inner compound of the Pashupatinath
temple (fig. 1) and on the corner pillars of a former
miniature shrine at Panauti – all of them dedicated
to Shiva, dated to the 6th or 7th centuries. The head has
ears, whiskers, traces of the mane framing the cheeks,
but no horns. The mouth spouts forth strands of beads
or simply or simply seven to ten parallel strands without
any indication of beads.
2
At about the same time Kirtimukha came to crown the
niches of Buddhist votive structures, caityas. There,
Kirtimukha spouts forth strands of beads or snake bodies
which often serve as the niche’s frame. The strands
end up in the mouth or tail of a Makara, the tail of a
lion, or simply in profuse foliage. On Licchavicaityas,
Kirtimukha is rarely horned but crowned by an elongated
crescent and the cheeks tend to dissolve into foliage.
Teeth are rarely seen and occasionally the mouth is
1
Pashupatinatha, Kirtimukha on a
string course of a Licchavi-era
Shikhara temple in miniature form,
ca. 6th–7th centiury.
2
Ajanta, Kirtimukha on a column of
the porch of cave 1, dated 469–473
CE
333