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The thangka is a way for Tibetan Buddhist monks to bring the life and teachings of the Buddha to the people through the visual medium of paint. These paintings were rolled up and taken on journeys, used as traveling altars, or hung when certain deitieswere honored. Meulenbeld takes us through 37 thangkas that present a pictorial journey of the life of Buddha, Siddhartha Guatama, and the evolution of Tibetan Buddhism. 37 color plates. Glossary. Bibliography. Index.
The Iconography of Tibetan Lamaism is an authoritative text on the specifically Tibetan branch of Buddhism--one which possesses a rich visual history of Buddhist art and Iconagraphy. This book gives a descriptive outline of the principal gods in the Tibetan pantheon, tracing the main features and symbols that are used to denote each one. A Comprehensive illustrated list of the various ritual objects, talismans, symbols, mudras (symbolic hand poses), and asanas and vahanas (position of the lower limbs) that are used in the images of the gods is accompanied with a word list of the Sanskrit terms most commonly encountered in a study of Lamaism. A set of thirty-one thang-kas from the famous collection of Baron A. von Stael-Holstein, formerly of Peking, China, which came to America after the publication of the original edition of the book, has been included in this new and revised edition.
This book is divided into three sections. The first section introduces one specific tradition of Siddhas transmitted by artists from Nepal. This artistic legacy, which is related to a corpus of texts that go back through *Srisena and Bu ston, includes two paintings and an incomplete set of line drawings. One of the paintings is an early-sixteenth-century "paubha" of Vajradhara surrounded by the eighty-four Siddhas (now preserved in the National Art Gallery, Bhaktapur). The set of line drawings of originally all eighty-four Siddhas (now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) goes back to the seventeenth century. On the basis of a comparison of the portraits of the eighty-four Siddhas in the painting from Bhaktapur (which provides the Siddhas' names) and the line drawing (which also label the Siddhas) it is suggested that the eighty-two Siddhas surrounding the Siddha Virupa in the other Nepalese painting, from the second quarter of the thirteenth century, which is now part of the Kronos Collections of S.M. Kossak, New York, are part of the same tradition. The Siddhas in this well-known and frequently reproduced painting have so far remained unidentified since their names are not inscribed in the painting. The second section of the book focuses on lesser known manifestations of (Cakra)samvara, a form of Heruka, and includes a discussion and reproduction of images of two groups of Samvaras. The first document is a painted scroll showing the group of sixty-four Samvaras with their consorts; the second one is a set of line drawings of what appears to be another group of Samvaras (thirty-six in number) with their consorts. The last section presents a set of line drawings which is based on a section of the "parikramavidhi" found in chapter 6 of Kuladatta's Kriyasamgraha(panjika). This text is an important Tantric manual which has been particularly influential in Nepal and whose author may even have been of Nepalese origin. The set of line drawings, which dates from approximately the eighteenth century, illustrates the ritual of walking around the site of a mandala. The line drawings are of great interest for the study of Buddhist ritual, since they illustrate a large number of stances, sitting postures and hand gestures described in the Kriyasamgraha(panjika) but whose names are nor recorded in standard reference works on iconography.
Invaluable reference covers names, attributes, symbolism, representations of deities in Mahayana pantheon of China, Japan, Tibet, etc. 185 illus.