News

Karmapa Masterworks Page: there are many paintings that depict the Karmapa Lamas in all of their incarnations from the 12th century up to the 20th century. Some of the paintings are masterworks as well as good examples of the various Tibetan painting styles popular over the centuries. The small selection of works represented here are only what is currently available on the HAR website. There are many more paintings and sculpture in museum and private collections that are not yet included in the HAR database.

Karma Kagyu Outline Page "The Kagyud Tradition developed from the teachings of Naropa and Maitrepa. The main founders of all the sects of the Kagyud are the three Great Masters: Marpa, Milarepa and Gampopa. From these three Masters the Kagyud Lineage scattered into the four major and eight minor Lineages. It was from Gampopa's disciple, Phagmo Drupa that most of these lineages of the Kagyud Tradition came, spreading in many different directions. Presently there are four which have not faded and still exist: the Karma Kagyud, Drukpa Kagyud, Drigung Kagyud and Taglung Kagyud. The Dharma lineages of the others have become very subtle or thin (having mostly been absorbed into larger lineages)."

(Excerpt from the Opening of the Dharma, A Brief Explanation of the Essence of the Limitless Vehicles of the Buddha. Written by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Chokyi Lodro. Translated by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Chokyi Gyatso, Malaysia, October 1984).

Choying Dorje was both a Tibetan artist and a religious teacher - head of the Karma Kagyu (Kamtsang) Tradition of Tibetan Buddhism - the 10th Karmapa (1604-1674). His art is unique and the style recognizable. The paintings are known for bright colours, simple repetitive human figures and great detail and care when depicting animals and birds. Arhats were a popular theme as well as deity figures such as Avalokiteshvara, Tara and Marichi. The only nearly complete set of paintings known to have been done by Choying Dorje, and still in existence today, are a set of paintings depicting the Life Story of Shakyamuni Buddha.

Of the nearly two hundred works of art that Choying Dorje created during his life, and subsequently recorded in the various biographies, approximately thirty pieces are currently known to exist. The paintings are most plentiful with agreement amongst most scholars as to their authenticity and attribution. However, with the sculpture, there are fewer known pieces and a greater disagreement as to which sculpture can be accurately attributed to Choying Dorje. (See the Choying Dorje Outline Page).

A new outline page for the Karma Kagyu Lineage Painting Sets has been added to the site. This page accompanies the Lineage Sets Main Page posted previously. Dozens of new thematic image set pages have been created and hundreds of images have been reviewed in the process of trying to re-construct as many Karma Kagyu painting sets as possible. The principal lineage painting set is the 'Golden Garland' which depicts the lineage from Vajradhara, Tilopa, Naropa, Marpa, Milarepa and Gampopa to the 1st Karmapa Dusum Kyenpa. There are other painting sets which appear to be primarily incarnation lineage sets however more research needs to be done. Links to the five main incarnation teachers, Karmapa, Shamar, Situ, Gyaltasb and Nenang Pawo, are found on the Outline Page, Painting Sets Page and the Karma Kagyu traditions Main Page.

Lineage Painting Sets make a up a substantial portion of Himalayan and Tibetan art. The two largest single groups of lineage painting sets are the Sakya Lamdre Lineage and the Karma Kagyu Mahamudra Lineage. The Karma Kagyu sets have been organized into a list and same set paintings grouped togther. Curently there are twenty-nine different sets identified on the HAR site. The first set has also been expanded into a custom page to re-construct the likely total number and order of the paintings. See Painting Set 1.

Tonpa Shenrab Outline Page uploaded. The page lists and links all of the various Bon art and iconography, paintings and sculpture, related to Tonpa Shenrab and his various manifestations with an emphasis on the many sets of paintings such as Life Stories.

5th Dalai Lama Outline Page uploaded. The page lists and links all of the various art, paintings and sculpture, related to the 5th Dalai Lama such as the Dalai Lama incarnation lineage, the Panchen Lamas, Desi Sanggye Gyatso and the Potala Palace.

"In April 2009, the Alain Bordier Foundation opened the Tibet Museum in the heart of the medieval town of Gruyères in the French speaking part of Switzerland.

The Tibet Museum houses an important collection of Buddhist sculptures, paintings, and ritual objects. It consists of about three hundred objects, mainly originating from Tibet. Among the statues, however, are a number of objects that were manufactured in the ancient Buddhist cultures surrounding Tibet: rare Buddhist sculptures from Nepal, Kashmir, Swat, and other Himalaya regions, in addition to examples from Northern India and Burma (Myanmar). Like other collectors of Tibetan art, Alain Bordier established his collection during the last quarter of the 20th century, when Tibetan refugees brought great numbers of religious objects into exile in India and Nepal. It was the wish of Alain Bordier to share his fascination with as many people as possible and to preserve and hold together these miraculously preserved sacred objects.

For this purpose he has founded the Alain Bordier Foundation to preserve the Buddhist collection and to maintain the Tibet Museum."  Ulrich von Schroeder

The Tibet Museum Collection:
- Tibetan Paintings

- Tibetan Sculpture 1

- Tibetan Sculpture 2

- Nepal: Painting & Sculpture

- Swat Region & Kashmir

- North Eastern India & Burma

HAR Special Features & Tools Page : Himalayan Art Resources is a fully curated art collection with over 35,000 images drawn from public and private holdings around the world. The images (objects) are identified according to subject, region, date, ethnicity, religion, set affiliation, inscription, contextual relationships and more. The site has several hundred thousand words of description, documentation and explanation, and is encyclopedic in breadth. A unique feature of the site is the extensive contextualization of single images with a wealth of related material in the database supported by the indices, glossaries, outline and custom pages. Furthermore there are embedded biographies & histories, lineage lists, chronologies, Tibetan & Sanskrit audio files, Tibetan and Sanskrit language files, along with links (TBRC) to biographical & text records.



Special Features & Tools Page:

The Five Most Powerful Tools

The Five Special Features

Art Sets - Painting & Sculpture

Custom Pages & Testmonials

The Refuge Field, or Field of Accumulation, pages have been updated with new images and sections, updated Outline Page and more links. The Gelug section has been divided between the four types of Refuge Field paintings common to the Gelug. Padmasambhava, the Longchen Nyingtig and a Miscellaneous Subjects section have also been added. There are approximately 80 Refuge Field paintings in the HAR database at the present time.

Field of Accumulation, or Refuge Field: A Refuge Field is a particular type of Buddhist, and in recent times Bon, painting composition that arranges all of the teachers and deities of a particular tradition in one painted composition as formulated by individual religious traditions and as described in liturgical texts. The function of a Refuge Field is to be a visual composition reminding the devotee of all of the most sacred objects contained in the tradition, namely the (1) Teacher, (2) Buddha, (3) Dharma - religious texts, (4) Sangha, (5) Ishtadevata - meditational deities, and (6) Dharmapala - the Religious Protectors, including wealth deities. The Refuge Field is also the basis of a visualization and meditation practice common to Tantric Buddhism. The Tibetan word 'tsog zhing' is often mistakenly translated from Tibetan to English as 'Refuge Tree' because of confusion with the Tibetan word shing meaning 'tree' and zhing meaning 'field', region or realm. The correct translation and name for this type of painting is Field of Accumulation, or more commonly known in English as a Refuge Field.

This type of composition, seen from the examples in the HAR database, appears to be a very late phenomenon in Tibetan and Himalayan art quite possibly only becoming popular in the late 18th century. The earliest examples appear to be the Gelug paintings and then the Nyimgma Longchen Nyingtig examples of the 19th century. Examples of the Bon Refuge Field only appear in the late 19th and then the 20th century. The standard Shenlha Okar Tsog Zhing - Field of Accumulation - was designed late in life by a Bon Lama from Eastern Tibet, Shardza Tashi Gyaltsen (1859 -1933), based on personal visionary experience.

A set of four unusual paintings containing the Amoghapasha Dharani and a top register of Deities. The main area of the composition is taken up by the written text of the Amoghapasha Dharani and only the top register of each painting devoted to painted depictions of the Five Deity Amoghapasha Mandala deities. Each of the four top registers have the same five Amoghapasha deities in the center of each of the four compositions. At the far right and left of the four registers there are different deities. All but one of the deities are various forms of Avalokiteshvara. The form that is not Lokeshvara is the goddess that averts epidemics and contagion - Parnashavari.

Google tags: Himalayan Art Resources

More visuals for Hevajra Mandala HAR #87225. The two visual key pages have been placed alongside the main image with the identification keys for the numbers and colours located below - all on one page.

Google Tags: Himalayan Art Resources

A new visual format Painting Sets Resource Page has been added to the recently updated Painting Sets Main Page.

As painting sets account for at least half or more of all Himalayan art it is a huge task to try and organize the different sets into catagories, then to keep track of the different versions of the same set compositions such as Shakyamuni & the Sixteen Arhats, the Margapala Lineage, Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama Nartang sets, etc. See the first draft of an index to try and catalogue just the subject names of the many painting sets.

Although the lists for each of the four sub-catagories of painting sets appears relatively short it must be remembered that there can be dozens, scores, or hundreds of copies of a single subject set of paintings, for example the Sixteen Great Arhats with over one hundred sets currently documented on the HAR site.

Google Tags: Himalayan Art Resources

The Kalachakra Page has been updated with additional information, images and sets. Also, a list of all of the many different forms and mandala configurations for Kalachakra has been added, however they have not yet been linked to known examples and works of art. The list is drawn from a number of different literary sources and traditions, but primarily from the Sakya, Jonang and Gelug Traditions of Tibetan Buddhism.

Google Tags: Himalayan Art Resources

A new Hevajra Resource Page has been added. Additional new pages have been created and added to the Hevajra section including a Hevajra Masterworks and a Hevajra Forms page. The many miscellaneous Hevajra pages have been brought together under the Resource Page. The main topics of the new page are mediums, mandalas, reading a mandala and forms.

Google tag: Himalayan Art Resources

Painting Sets Index/Glossary Page. Also located at the top of the main Glossary Page.

Painting sets account for at least half or more of all Himalayan and Tibetan painted compositions making sets a unique feature of Himalayan Art. Sets can be divided between four major subject types: [1] Life Story, [2] Teaching Lineages, [3] Incarnation Lineages, and [4] Miscellaneous Subjects. This last group can be divided into three subsets: [4a] Mytho-historical Teachers, [4b] Deity Sets and [4c] Miscellaneous Subjects (medical sets, astrology, history, etc.).

[1] The most commonplace and famous of the sets of paintings are Shakyamuni Buddhas & the Sixteen Great Arhats, followed by the Buddha's Life-story, Previous Life-stories (jataka) and Teaching Stories (avadana). The life-story of Padmasambhava condensed into the Eight Forms, along with the Milarepa and Tsongkapa life stories are also quite common.

[2] The Teaching Lineage painting sets of the Sakya Lamdre (Margapala) and the Karma Kagyu Mahamudra Lineages (sertreng) are the most common.

[3] For the Incarnation Lineage painting sets the Dalai Lama, Panchen Lama and Jonang Taranata are the most common.

[4] Miscellaneous Subjects include Shakyamuni Buddha & Sixteen Great Arhats, Six Ornaments & Two Excellent Ones, Eighty-four Mahasiddhas, Twenty-one Taras, Vajravali Deity set, Sarvadurgati Parishodhana, Four Transcendent Lords, Twelve Ritual Deities, etc.

Vajrayogini Masterworks: a selection of paintings and sculpture highlighting some of the best characteristics of the subject Vajrayogini. The most common forms of Vajrayogini are what have come to be called the Naropa (Naro Khacho) form, Vajravarahi (with the pig face at the side), Krodha Kali (the black form) and Dechen Gyalmo (of the Longchen Nyingtig).

Vajravarahi comparison images: three forms of Varahi along with suggestions as to what to look for when doing a comparison.

Shastradhara (weapon holding) Hevajra is described in the Samputa Tantra - a shared explanatory Tantra of the Hevajra Root Tantra. Aside from the Samputa Tantra, the most common reference and ritual source for the Shastradhara form of Hevajra is the Vajravali text of Abhayakaragupta.

The principal Tantric practice of Marpa Chokyi Lodro (1012-1096) is said to have been the deity Hevajra and specifically the Shastradhara form. The Shastradhara form was available through other sources of lineage transmission in Tibet and the Himalayas prior to the introduction of the Vajravali text in the 13th century.

Visually there are two main differences between the Hevajra Tantra form of the deity and the Samputa Tantra form of the deity. The first difference is in the mandala configuration where the Hevajra Tantra version is called a nine deity mandala and the Samputa version is a seventeen deity mandala. In both cases the central figures of Hevajra and Nairatmya are counted as one. In the Samputa Tantra, to account for the larger mandala size, eight additional retinue figures are described: four door keepers and four intermediate direction figures. Second, the retinue goddesses in the Hevajra Tantra each have two arms while in the Samputa Tantra the goddesses have four arms each.

See the essential components of a Hevajra mandala with numbered and labeled figures and colour coded sections.

Correct body proportions are important in Himalayan art because it matters both in iconography and also in aesthetics. For a deity figure to be iconographically accurate and identifiable then the figure must follow certain basic conventions of appearance such as peaceful, semi-peaceful/semi-wrathful, and wrathful. Also for human figures there are the different appearances of siddha, kings, monastics and lay persons. This painting of Vajravarahi from Bhutan has excellent body proportions and is one of the best examples of its kind on the HAR site.

Paintings of the Hevajra Mandala are quite numerous and at times of a very high artistic quality. This painting from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is one of the finest and best preserved in the world. It was painted in 1461 as recorded by inscription on the reverse of the composition and very likely commissioned at Ngor Monastery in Tsang Province, Tibet.

Reading a mandala is often very difficult without insider knowledge and the benefit of the explanatory literature. Painted mandala compositions are generally read from the center out and then all of the figures immediately outside of the mandala circle, followed by the top register, and then finishing with the bottom register. The important sections of the MFA Hevajra painting have been divided into colours; blue for the essential deities, red for the Eight Great Charnal Grounds, yellow for the lineage teachers and green for the miscellaneous deities added by the donor or artist.

Please let us know if the coloured image is more helpful than the plain 'greyscale and numbered' images that we have previously been using.