News

Hell, Subjects and Depictions:
Hell
Hell Beings Set I
Hell Beings Miscellaneous
Wheel of Life: Bon Religion
Six Buddhas of the Six Realms
Padmasambhava: Six Realms (Peling)

Miscellaneous Subjects:
Vajrabhairava Retinue Figure
Bookcovers, Ranjana/Lantsha Script
Manuscripts, Title Page
Bon Protector: Dragpa Sengge
Vajrapani, Sculpture
Stupa: Dhanyakataka

Nyingma Painting and Initiation Card Sets:
Padmasambhava: Vaishravana Form
Twenty-one Taras of the Chogyur Lingpa Tradition, Initiation Cards
Ngar Pan Yontan Terdzo Initiation Cards
Padmasambhava: Ngar Pan Yontan Terdzo Paintings
Padmasambhava: Terma Forms & Transference Paintings
Longchen Nyingtig Painting Set
Longchen Nyingtig Field of Accumulation Paintings
Yutog Nyingtig Initiation Cards(Set II)
Karling Shitro Initiation Cards
Deling Shitro Initiation Cards
Shigling Zab Dun Initiation Cards
Lama Gongdu Initiation Cards
Jangter Tugdrub Kagye Initiation Cards
Miscellaneous Initiation Cards (Rinchen Ter Dzo, Vol TSA)

A HELL Outline Page has been added to the site. It is a work in progress with more images and image sets to be linked. With luck those images will be uploaded tomorrow and more content and context added over the weekend.

The Initiation Card Sets page has been updated and doubled in size. There are now 35 sets of both Bon and Buddhist initiation cards with the latter being in the majority. The bulk of the sets are drawn from the Rinchen Ter Dzo collection of Revealed Treasure teachings of the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. More sets will be added over the next few months.

The lists for both the European museums and the Asian museums have been updated. There are still many more to add and some have been listed without proper links. If you can think of any that we have missed then please e-mail us and let us know so that we can add them. For Mongolia only the main museums have been added. There are, possibly, twenty-three provinces and each has a provincial museum. India has many more museums with collections of Himalayan art than what we have listed. Documenting all of the Himalayan art in the world that resides in museum collections is an enormous and ongoing project.

So far, in the United States, there are sixty-two (62) museums in twenty-one (21) states that have been identified as having collections of Himalayan & Tibetan style art. It is very likely that there are a number of other museums out there not yet identified. Twenty (20) of these museums with images from their collections are currently represented on the Himalayan Art Resources (HAR) website. The HAR staff are continuing to contact and work with other museums in the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia, to encourage their participation in this global cultural endeavor.

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The Newsletter is out and can be found on the Home Page under New On the Site.

As of February 2009 the HAR staff have installed new office computers and a new fully raided storage and back-up system for all in-house work. The storage and back-up system has been a long time coming. It is finally here and a welcomed improvement. The website itself has always been fully backed up by our internet service provider.

Since October of 2008 until now 48 Blog entries have been added to the site; announcing new additions, features, collections, exhibitions and links. Whenever new information or content is uploaded to the blog it is also added to the HAR database as a backup pre-caution. The Testimonial Page is growing slowly and on February 3rd, 2009, a second call for testimonials was sent out to all academics, scholars and educators who use the site. Please send testimonials to info@himalayanart.org. We are especially interested to hear from those educators that use the site in classroom settings.

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To receive e-mail updates for all postings to the HAR Blog - sign up for Google Alerts and enter "Himalayan Art Resources" with quotation marks. We have tested this and it works although it sometimes takes up to five days for the Google bots to re-visit blog sites.

Patron and Painter
Rubin Museum of Art, New York
February 6, 2009 - August 17, 2009

Much like religious princes, the Karmapas, heads of the Karma Kagyu, one of Tibet's principal schools of Buddhism, traveled for centuries in large monastic tent encampments. These courts, which included portable temples, a community of monks, and skilled artists and artisans, produced their own distinctive painting style, known as the "Encampment style" (Gardri). The painter Namkha Tashi founded the style in the court of the Ninth Karmapa (1555-1603) in Central Tibet. He looked to Indian figural models and placed them in landscapes inspired heavily by the works of Chinese court painters.

Most of what we know of this painting tradition belongs to its eighteenth-century revival fostered by the great scholar-painter Situ Panchen (1700-1774) in Kham Province, Eastern Tibet, with its new artistic center at his monastic seat, Palpung. Even more important to the history of Tibetan art than Situ Panchen's role as a painter is his role as a patron and designer of paintings, many of which continue to be copied to this day. For the first time anywhere, this exhibition traces the career and artistic legacy of one of the great patrons and artists in Tibetan history. (From the RMA website).

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Stable as a Mountain
Rubin Museum of Art, New York
March 13, 2009 - July 13, 2009

Portraiture is one of the most powerful and significant expressions of figurative art, and in the Himalayas the subjects of religious portraits are exclusively religious teachers, or gurus. By preserving the physical appearance of a guru, an icon is produced that can charismatically substitute for the teacher in his physical absence. As such these portraits often embody the teachings of the guru and the traits of the enlightened mind. (From RMA website).

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Toward Enlightenment: The Sacred Art of Tibet & Universe of a Deity: A Tibetan Sand Mandala
University Art Museum, UC Santa Barbara
April 1, 2009 â?? June 14, 2009

In conjunction with the historic fourth visit to UC Santa Barbara by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama in April, the University Art Museum announces an exclusive presentation of historic and living art of the Himalayas. Toward Enlightenment: The Sacred Art of Tibet prime examples of Tibetan paintings from the 14th to 19th centuries. The exhibition highlights the multi-level functioning of the art and its themes of transformation of the profound into the worldly with a strong emphasis on depictions of teaching. These paintings echo the purity and precision of visionary buddhas, bodhisattvas, archetypal deities, lama portraits, and protectors. (From UAM UCSB website).

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The Creatures of the Rain Rivers, Cloud Lakes: Newars Saw Them, So Did Ancient India, by Gautama V. Vajracharya.

"The magnificent works of the Newar artists and architects of the Kathmandu valley include not only paintings, sculptures, residential houses, public building and royal palaces but also water fountains comfortably positioned in public places near the residential area or inside the palaces."

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Marvels of the Malla Period: A Nepalese Renaissance 1200-1603.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art.
December 22, 2007 â?? June 1, 2008.

In this exhibition, the Philadelphia Museum presents masterpieces from its own outstanding collection of rarely seen Malla Period art. Vibrant Buddhist ritual paintings burst with energy, a marvelous goddess coyly dances, and golden Hindu and Buddhist sculptures regally invite adoration. From INTRODUCTION.

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These three images are large mural paintings at the entrance to the Deer Park Institute temple in Bir, India (the old Dzongsar Institute). They are diagrammatic prayers intended to be read in any direction and still retain their meaning. Creating visually pleasing depictions of prayers is an old Indian tradition that found its way to Tibet and the Himalayas through the Buddhist migration northward. These particular prayers were composed by Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo in the 19th century. At the top is a Shakyamuni Buddha prayer followed by Sakya Pandita Kunga Gyaltsen and finally Longchen Rabjampa at the bottom. The Shakyamuni and Sapan are on the left of the entrance and the Longchenpa on the right accompanied by a sword and lotus motif with two double headed birds (not shown here). All of these images will be uploaded to the HAR database shortly.

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To receive e-mail updates for all postings to the HAR Blog then sign up for Google Alerts and enter "Himalayan Art Resources" with quotation marks. We have tested this and it works although it sometimes takes up to five days for the Google bots to re-visit blog sites.

Hats are fascinating, hats are costume, hats are religious insignia. If you can recognize the different types of Tibetan and Himalayan religious hats then you're way ahead of the game and ahead of the rest of the pack. And yes, when you start talking about hats then it is competitive. It can even be slightly sectarian. It wasn't until I traveled to Mongolia that I fully understood the truth about the valid use of the terms Yellow Hat and Red Hat. Terms I had generally been avoiding all my life. Anyway, to the point. Here is a link to a wonderful and informative article on Tibetan religious hats. The article in Pdf format is specifically about Pandita hats. Coiffe de Pandit by Etienne Bock.

Also see the HAR Hats Outline Pages. They have not been updated since posting in December 2007. Since then David Jackson has included a discussion about Karma Kagyu (Kamtsang) hats in his latest publication: Patron and Painter, Situ Panchen and the Revival of the Encampment Style. Rubin Museum of Art, 2009.

--- Jeff Watt

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The Blue Beryl (vaidurya ngonpo) medical charts are a set of paintings based on the text of the same name compiled and edited by the Desi Sanggye Gyatso in the 17th century. It is thought that there are several original sets numbering approximately 85 paintings each. Each painting represents a single chapter from the Blue Beryl. From the Blue Beryl sets recorded on the HAR website it can be seen that since the 17th century onward the total number of paintings has been reduced by doubling up and sometimes tripling up on chapters thus condensing them into single paintings. The overall effect is various painting sets of unknown number but definitely reduced in size from the original 85 or so paintings. More research needs to be done to determine if there is an accepted system for reducing the overall number or if it is up to the artist and patron to create a Blue Beryl set according to there own resources.

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A new Charts Outline Page has been uploaded to the site. The word 'charts' is not really a Tibetan or Buddhist technical word but 10 years ago when the HAR website was first being developed we needed a word that was inclusive and described the various types of paintings that looked like instructional charts. These paintings were often of irregular shape and contained geometric compositions and substantial amounts of inscriptions, calligraphy and symbols.

Tseringma is a protector of Buddhism in both Tibet and in the Himalayan Mountain regions. She and her four sisters have a popular narrative history that is strongly connected to the life story of Milarepa. After Padmasambhava had earlier subjugated the sisters, later Milarepa became their teacher and taught them mahamudra and karma yoga. In one very detailed painting a number of scenes depict the sisters who at first try to distract Milarepa to test him and later receive personal instructions in the sexual yogas of Tantric Buddhism - karma yoga.

These paintings which appear to be executed in an obvious Chinese black ink technique are somewhat controversial. They are claimed by some to be the work of the 10th Karmapa Choying Dorje. It is true that Choying Dorje experimented with different techniques and styles a clear example of which is his version of the Buddha's life story. However, it will be left up to the 10th Karmapa experts to determine if he also did Chinese black ink compositions.

There are three of these paintings known to be in North America. Eleven paintings remain in the Himalayan Regions. Two paintings belong to a private collector. Those two are a Guardian King and the attendant Dharmatala, therefore the remaining three Guardian Kings and Hvashang are each painted in a separate composition. The centerpiece of the set, Shakyamuni Buddha, is unaccounted for but is likely to be in a composition with Shariputra and Maudgalyayana standing at the right and left side. These calculations if correct would mean that the full set of paintings is twenty-three in number.

Thirteen Golden Dharmas (Tib.: ser cho chu sum): a set of thirteen or more special meditation practices extracted from numerous different Tantra systems. There are several sets or enumerations that make up the Thirteen. The deities standard to all sets are the Three Red Ones (Marmo Kor Sum); Vajrayogini of Naropa, Vajrayogini of Indrabhuti and Vajrayogini of Maitripa - all from the Chakrasamvara cycle of Tantras. The Three Great Red Ones (Marpo Kor Sum); Kurukulla of the Hevajra Tantra, Takkiraja of the Guhyasamaja and Maharakta Ganapati associated with the Chakrasamvara. The Three Small Red Ones (Marchung Kor Sum); Kurukulla-Tara, Red Vasudhara and Tinuma. The four standard remaining deities are Black Manjushri, Shabala Garuda from the Kalachakra Tantra, Simhanada Avalokiteshvara from its own tantra and Red Jambhala from the Chakrasamvara. Alternates are the dakini Simhamukha associated with the Chakrasamvara, Amaravajradevi of the Chakrasamvara and Nine Deity Amitayus from its own Tantra.