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"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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Sakya Field of Accumulation Paintings, or Refuge Field paintings, are not that common to the Sakya Tradition and really only appear to date from the 19th or 20th century. The reason for this is because the Sakyas do not have a standard generic visualization for the Field of Accumulation as is more common to the Nyingma Longchen Nyingtig, Kagyu and Gelugpa Traditions. In the Sakya system of practice a Field of Accumulation is unique, or customized for each and every practice, such as Hevajra, Chakrasamvara, Vajrabhairava, etc., and therefore no generic Field of Accumulation image as a support for visualization was typically required. (See Field of Accumulation Outline Page).

At the center of the Field of Accumulation is the Primordial Buddha Vajradhara with the Lamdre Lineage (1) directly above and the the Mahakala Lineage (2) descending from the viewer's upper left and the Vajrayogini Lineage (3) descending from the viewer's upper right. Below the central Vajradhara are the Meditational Deities (Tib.: yi dam), Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, Arhats, Protector Deities and Wealth Deities. At the bottom of the composition are the Sixteen Offering Goddesses.

Both numbers and colours have been used to try and make the painting more understandable. Each of the coloured blocks will be further cut out from the whole, made into individual pages, and enlarged with each figure in the coloured block numbered and the name listed in accordance with the order in the lineage. This will also accord with the Tibetan name inscription that accompanies each figure in the Sakya Field of Accumulation drawing presented here.

Tracing is common place when multiple copies of the same image are required. It is also interesting when the images being traced and the background landscape appear to have nothing to do with each other. In this painting the deities appear to float on the background composition without any relationship to the physical landscape depicted. The HAR team has taken the liberty of separating the deities from the background to see what they might look like on their own and to see how the landscape might appear in a re-construction without the deities obscuring the view.

It would make for a fascinating study to take this painting of HAR #432 and do a surface analysis with infrared photography to see if the landscape composition was painted first and the deities placed on top after. That of course would be highly unusual since Tibetan drawing generally starts with the main figures of a composition. However, this composition is already unusual and appears created as a collage of different unrelate elements. Maybe HAR visitors and users have ideas about how this art is created and the thinking that goes into it?

The new Wisdom Calendar for 2010 is available from Wisdom Publications. They have not yet been added to the HAR database. This will happen in the next few days. All of the paintings in this years calendar are from a private collection in Europe. Included in the calendar are some excellent examples of interesting iconography and a variety of painting styles. Two of the highlights in this years calendar are a Drigung Kagyu Field of Accumulation (Refuge Field) and Rudrachakrin the last King of Shambhala.

Iconographic Subjects in the 2010 Calendar:


Cover: Manjushri Riding a Lion

January: Wheel of Life from Mongolia

February: Drigung Field of Accumulation (Refuge Feild)

March: Tsongkapa appearing from the Tushita Heaven

April: Amitabha Buddha in the Sukhavati Heaven

May: Chakrasamvara Retinue Figure

June: Vajravarahi Mandala

July: Padmasambhava as Loden Chogse

August: Dralha with Eight Horsemen

September: Vajradhara with Lineage Teachers

October: The Thirty-five Confession Buddhas

November: Rudrachakrin, the Last King of Shambhala

December: Chakrasamvara Mandala



See the Wisdom Calendar Page on HAR

Another example of tracing can be seen with the first painting in a set of Eighty-four Mahasiddha paintings. The first painting depicts Vajradhara at the center surrounded by four siddhas and three deities. Note the inclusion of mountains on painting #65420 where they are absent on painting #99215.

The two paintings are HAR #65420 and HAR #99215

Another example of tracing from the same set of Karma Kagyu Teachers is Situ Panchen. In these two examples it is clear that the figures are essentially identical and the landscape on the left hand side as well, however another artist has created the landscape at the upper right of painting number #961.

The two Situ Panchen paintings are HAR #51885 and HAR #961

After an original Tibetan drawing and subsequent painting has been created it is quite common for other artists to come along and trace the original composition with the intention of copying the original. Here are two paintings of the 14th Karmpapa from a larger set depicting the lineage teachers of the Karma Kagyu Tradition. Both paintings are almost identical.

The two Karmapa paintings are HAR #51886 and HAR #54

Three interesting line drawings depicting Padmasambhava, Nyangral Nyima Ozer and Nyag Jnana Kumara. The central figures are surrounded by a host of deities and important historical figures along with noteworthy geographic locations. Each figure is accompanied by a Tibetan name inscription. See the secondary numbered image that accompanies each of the three drawings, identifying the figures in Romanized Tibetan transliteration and Romanized Sanskrit.

See other works in the database that have been numbered and greyscaled for easier identification.