8. Lumír Jisl, Tibetan Art (London: Spring Books, 1958?), p. 19.
9. Pal, The Art of Tibet, p. 14.
10. Charles Bell, The Religion of Tibet (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1992), pp. 5–6. Europeans were not the only ones to comment on the effects of the Tibetan landscape. A thirteenth-century Arabic text reports, “In the country of Tibet (balad at-Tubbat) are special properties in respect of their air and water, their mountains and plains. A man there laughs and rejoices continually. Sadness, danger, anxieties and grief do not affect him. . . . Smiling among them is general. It appears even on the faces of their animals.” See D. M. Dunlop, “Arab Relations with Tibet in the 8th and 9th Centuries A.D.,” Islam Tetkikleri Enstitüsü Dergisi 5 (1973): 313–14.
A view similar to Bell’s was put forward by an Australian missionary, who went to Tibet in 1901:
The Tibetan, cut off from intercourse with surrounding states, and debarred from benefiting by the experience and knowledge of older civilisations, was fitted to specialise in the wrong things thoroughly, and he uninterruptedly continued to misunderstand the operations of the unkind natural forces with his whole heart. The result was a profound belief in a spirit world inhabited by beings bent on doling out misery to humanity. Such an error dogmatically held, if existence was to be endured, logically enough, demanded a class versed in the psychology and activities of the other world, and with means at hand to confound its machinations, and defeat its activities. The lama and his magical devices seemed to answer the requirements admirably, and to-day Lamaism is viewed locally as a grand redemptive scheme with ample machinery for safeguarding man’s welfare here, and in the hereafter.
So the religion of Tibet is first of all Animism, but with much Buddhism, some Manicheism, and perhaps Nestorian Christianity grafted on. The mysterious force, however, that has moulded them all into one system, and affixed its indelible stamp, is to be found in the geographical peculiarities of Tibet.
See J. Huston Edgar, The Land of Mystery, Tibet (Melbourne: China Inland Mission, 1947), p. 10.
11. See Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 51–57. The quotation appears on page 55. Renan would go on to contrast the stark and sterile desert of Judea with the lush green land of Galilee, the place of Jesus. Renan thus saves Jesus from Judaism and makes him an Aryan. See Olender, pp. 68–74.
12. Lama Anagarika Govinda, The Way of the White Clouds: A Buddhist Pilgrim in Tibet (London: Hutchinson, 1966), pp. 62, 70. The present Dalai Lama offers a similar view when he writes: “A pilgrimage through wild, open lands provides visions that help shape the proper attitude and inner awareness for religious practice.” See His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, My Tibet, with photographs and an introduction by Galen Rowell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 140.
13. Armand Neven, Lamaistic Art (Brussels: Société Générale de Banque, 1975), p. 10. More recently, John Powers has explained that in Tibet “The grandeur of the land has inspired spiritual seekers for millennia. There is perhaps no better place on earth to experience emptiness; space imposes itself on consciousness everywhere one looks, the land seems to stretch off into infinity, and the sweeping ranges of mountains naturally draw the gaze upward toward the open sky.” See John Powers, Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 1995), p. 204.
14. Harold Osborne, ed., The Oxford Companion to Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 1135. As Philip Rawson stated more succinctly in 1991, “Tibetan art is inspired by the need both to collaborate with and reconcile the violent energies expressed in the country’s landscape.” See Philip Rawson, Sacred Tibet (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), p. 6.
15. Pratapaditya Pal and Hsien-ch’i Tseng, Lamaist Art: The Aesthetics of Harmony (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1969), p. 9. For a fascinating analysis of how Indian deities came to be seen as monsters by Europeans, see Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 7–31.
16. Pal and Tseng, p. 19.
17. Pratapaditya Pal, The Art of Tibet (New York: Asia Society, 1969), p. 13.
18. Pal and Tseng, p. 20.
19. F. Sierksma, Tibet’s Terrifying Deities: Sex and Aggression in Religious Acculturation (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1966), p. 168. Sierksma does not consult Tibetan sources, relying heavily on Evans-Wentz, Govinda, and David-Neel, along with Tucci, even citing T. Lobsang Rampa as an authority at one point.
Pal offers a simplified version of Sierksma’s theory: “The aggressive nomads . . . could hardly have been content with the sort of life demanded by a pacifist religion and imposed by a body of monks. The creation of substitutes was thus essential, and these substitutes assumed the shapes and forms of the terrifying deities, who were constantly on the warpath, in the psychic as well as the physical world.” See Pal and Tseng, p. 21.
The Oxford Companion to Art, however, maintains that there is a distinction between the wrathful deities of the “reformed” Yellow sect (the Geluk) and those of the “Red Cap” sect (a term that has no sectarian correlate in Tibetan but was sometimes used in the West to designate the Sakya and Kagyu): “The difference was primarily a psychological one. In the works of the Yellow sect the demonic forces were dominated by and subordinated to the ultimate serenity of spiritual contemplation while the Red Cap monks depicted them in their naked, undisciplined fury. The first aimed at inspiring awe, the second at paralysing dread and horror.” See Osborne, ed., p. 1135.
20. Pal and Tseng, p. 24.
21. Ibid., p. 27.
22. Pratapaditya Pal, Art of Tibet: A Catalogue of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Collection, exp. ed. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1990), p. 42. As Tucci explained, “Fearing nature, in which occult forces are hidden in ambush, they have extracted its symbols in order to defend themselves from nature by operating on and through symbols.” Cited in Pratapaditya Pal, The Art of Tibet (New York: Asia Society, 1969), p. 38.
23. Detlef Ingo Lauf, Tibetan Sacred Art: The Heritage of Tantra (Berkeley, Calif.: Shambhala, 1976), p. 47. To question the presence of the symbolic in Tibetan art as described by Lauf, Pal, and others (so reminiscent of German Romantic theories of the symbol) in no way denies that Tibetan Buddhists have developed elaborate systems of meaning to explain their iconography. As is often the case in Christian iconography, we see the connection of artistic forms with points of doctrine. For example, in the case of the famous Geluk wrathful buddha Yamāntaka, his two horns are said to represent the two truths of Mādhyamika philosophy: the ultimate truth and the conventional truth. His nine heads represent the nine categories of Buddhist scriptures. His thirty-four arms together with his body, speech, and mind signify the thirty-seven “harmonies of enlightenment,” a list of meditative states that include the eight-fold path. His sixteen legs signify the sixteen emptinesses, which include the emptiness of the internal, the emptiness of the external, the emptiness of the ultimate, the emptiness of the beginningless, and, importantly, the emptiness of emptiness. The humans and animals that he tramples with his right foot represent the attainment of the eight accomplishments, magical abilities acquired through tantric practice, including the ability to fly, to become invisible, and to travel underground. The birds that he tramples with his left foot represent the attainment of the eight powers, another set of magical abilities, including the ability to travel anywhere in an instant and the power to create emanations. His erect phallus represents great bliss, his nakedness means that he is not covered up with obstacles, and his hair standing on end symbolizes his passage beyond all sorrow. For a discussion of the various symbols of Vajrayoginī, see the essay by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche in The Silk Route and the Diamond Path: Esoteric Buddhist Art on the Trans-Himalayan Trade Route (Los Angeles: UCLA Arts Council, 1982), pp. 234–35.
24. Lauf, p. 45.
; 25. Giuseppe Tucci, Tibetan Painted Scrolls (Rome: La Libreria dello Stato, 1949), 1:290.
26. Armand Neven, Lamaistic Art (Brussels: Société Générale de Banque, 1975), p. 9.
27. P. Pal, Tibetan Paintings: A Study of Tibetan Thankas Eleventh to Nineteenth Centuries (London: Ravi Kumar/Sotheby Publications, 1984), p. 19. In another catalog we learn that “To appreciate Tibetan art one must appreciate himself, the fact of his being, the quality of his awareness and all that is manifested therein. Tibetan art is a part of this miraculous process of manifestation, not a comment on it or an attempt at an entertaining alternative to it. If one fully understands this art, then he is aware of being a Buddha in a Buddhafield.” See Sacred Art of Tibet, 2d ed. (Berkeley, Calif.: Dharma Publishing, 1974), p. 6 of the text; the catalog does not have page numbers.
28. Philip Rawson, Sacred Tibet (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), p. 13.
29. Garnet Wolseley, Narrative of the War with China in 1860 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1972), p. 220.
30. W. Y. Evans-Wentz, Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 147 n. 2.
31. Sierksma, p. 197.
32. Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols of Indian Art and Civilization, ed. Joseph Campbell, Bolligen Series 6 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1946), p. 146.
33. Fosco Maraini, Secret Tibet (Delhi: Book Faith India, 1993), p. 77.
34. Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, p. 101.
35. See Martin Brauen, The Mandala (London: Serindia Publications, 1997).
36. For a detailed description of a tantric initiation, see Tenzin Gyatso, The Kalachakra Tantra: Rite of Initiation, trans. and ed. Jeffrey Hopkins (London: Wisdom Publications, 1985).
37. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Visual Dharma: The Buddhist Art of Tibet (Berkeley, Calif.: Shambhala, 1975), p. 23. Elsewhere, he states with equal clarity, “It is widely thought that thangka painting is a form of meditation. This is not true” (p. 18).
38. Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, p. 64 n. 1.
39. Blofeld, Tantric Mysticism of Tibet, p. 250.
40. Pal, The Art of Tibet, p. 39.
41. Giuseppe Tucci, The Theory and Practice of the Mandala: With Special Reference to the Modern Psychology of the Subconscious, trans. Alan Houghton Brodick (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1970), p. 25.
42. Ibid., p. vii.
43. Marilyn M. Rhie and Robert A. F. Thurman, Wisdom and Compassion: The Sacred Art of Tibet (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991), p. 12. For other analyses of the exhibition and its catalog, see Meg McLagan, “Mystical Visions in Manhattan: Deploying Culture in the Year of Tibet,” in Tibetan Culture in Exile: Proceedings of the Seventh Seminar of the IATS, Graz, 1995, ed. Frank Korom (Vienna, 1997); Malcolm David Eckel, “On the Road to Mandala,” B & R (spring 1992): 1–8. For a historically informed critique of the misrepresentations of Tibetan history and society in the catalog, see David Jackson, “Apropos a Recent Tibetan Art Catalogue,” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens und Archiv für Indische Philosophie 37 (1993): 109–30.
44. Rhie and Thurman, p. 39.
45. Ibid., p. 36.
46. Ibid., p. 18.
47. Ibid., p. 165.
48. Ibid., p. 13.
49. Ibid., p. 312. In his trenchant review of the catalog, David Jackson challenges this portrayal:
To read Thurman’s account, however, one gets the impression that Tibet was a sort of “zone of gentleness,” and that its inhabitants also viewed it as some kind of blessed realm. But obviously such a picture is incomplete. Where in this portrayal do Tibet’s nomads, for instance, fit in, a people who lived almost exclusively on animal products and on meat that they hunted, raided or slaughtered, and who out of a resultant sense of guilt were also great patrons of religious masters? And where are we to place the ruthless bandit chieftains who regularly terrorized Lama pilgrims and traders in desolated areas? And what would traditional life in the great monasteries have been like without the delinquent warrior monks (Idob Idob)? In Tibet as in many a country, in addition to genuine religious teachers there were also a host of dubious mendicants, madmen, and charlatans who plied their trade among the faithful, and life within the big monasteries witnessed the full range of human personalities, from saintly to coldly calculating.
See David Jackson, “Apropos a Recent Tibetan Art Catalogue,” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens und Archiv für Indische Philosophie 37 (1993): no. There are, however, numerous descriptions of certain sites in Tibet as being, in reality, mandalas, and of paradisical valleys hidden in the Tibetan landscape. On the landscape as mandala, see, for example, Toni Huber, “Guidebook to Lapchi,” in Religions of Tibet in Practice, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 120–34. For a recent study of hidden valleys (sbasyul), see Franz-Karl Erhard, “A Hidden Land in the Tibetan-Nepalese Borderlands,” in Mandala and Landscape, ed. A. W. Macdonald (New Delhi: D. K. Printworld, 1996).
50. Rhie and Thurman, p. 14.
51. Pratapaditya Pal, The Art of Tibet (New York: Asia Society, 1969), p. 38. Jisl explains elsewhere that the purpose of Tibetan art is to “act, as it were, as aids and real tools, one might say instruments, for the monks, helping them to concentrate and turn their thoughts away from this world to the sphere of meditation and mystery.” See Jisl, p. 10.
52. E. Gene Smith wrote in 1970, “As more of the considerable number of Tibetan literary sources become available and as discerning eyes have the opportunity of examining representative collections of significant pieces, there will be little room left for the obscurantism and dissimulation that currently fill museum catalogues as well as the popular works in the West.” See E. Gene Smith, introduction to Kongtrul’s Encyclopedia of Indo-Tibetan Culture, ed. Lokesh Chandra, pts. 1–3 (New Delhi: International Academy of Indian Culture, 1970), p. 52.
53. The best discussion of the theory and practice of iconometrics is found in David P. Jackson and Janice A. Jackson, Tibetan Thangka Painting: Methods and Materials, 2d rev. ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 1988), pp. 45–73, 144–48. See also Kathleen Peterson, “Sources of Variation in Tibetan Canons of Iconometry,” in Tibetan Studies in Honour of Hugh Richardson, ed. Michael Aris and Aung San Suu Kyi (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1980); and Giuseppe Tucci, Tibetan Painted Scrolls (Rome: La Libreria dello Stato, 1949), 1: 291–99.
David Jackson has recently published the best single study of Tibetan art since Tucci’s Tibetan Painted Scrolls. See his A History of Tibetan Painting: The Great Tibetan Painters and Their Traditions (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1996). It contains, for example, a very useful survey and assessment of Western scholarship on Tibetan painting styles (pp. 19–42). The emphasis of Jackson’s study is the individual Tibetan artist. As he writes, “Excellent artists have always been prized, honored and patronized by the great lamas and donors in Tibet. Moreover, in the course of Tibetan history, a number of great artistic geniuses appeared who left the deep impress of their personal style on posterity, sometimes even founding schools of art named after them. The present study is precisely an attempt to find out more about these most exceptional artists and their traditions” (p. 15). If we judge Jackson’s book as representing the state of the art in the study of Tibetan painting, it can be observed that over the decades of the twentieth century this study has moved from a concern with iconography to a concern with meaning (as seen in this chapter) to a concern with “style” and artistic schools to a concern with the individual artist. In the process the Tibetan painter has gone from being an anonymous monk slavishly repeating received forms to being a creative genius with a personal style. The study of Tibetan art is moving, then, in precisely the opposite direction of much other art history, away from the dispersed subject position and toward the great man.
54. See Loden Sherap Dagyab, Tibetan Religious Art (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1977), 1:27-28.
55. The preceding description is dr
awn from Jackson and Jackson, pp. 9–13. For another useful discussion of traditional uses of Tibetan art (within a larger study of recent nontraditional uses), see Yael Bentor, “Tibetan Tourist Thangkas in the Kathmandu Valley,” Annals of Tourism Research 20 (1993): 109–12. On the role of the artist, see also Anne Chayet, Art et archéologie du Tibet (Paris: Picard, 1994), p. 165 ff. It is important to note as well that art has continued to be produced by Tibetans, both in and out of Tibet, since 1959. See, for example, Clare Harris, “Desperately Seeking the Dalai Lama,” in Disrupted Borders: An Intervention of Definitions and Boundaries, ed. Sunil Gupta (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1993), pp. 105–14; and Per Kvaerne, “The Ideological Import of Tibetan Art,” in Resistance and Reform in Tibet, ed. Robert Barnett and Shirin Akiner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 166–85. The most thorough study of contemporary Tibetan art is Clare E. Harris, In the Image of Tibet: Painters of the Post-1959 Period (London: Reaktion, forthcoming).
An earlier and somewhat neglected source on the uses of Tibetan art appears in Marco Pallis’s Peaks and Lamas. Pallis provides an interesting discussion of Tibetan arts and crafts in situ in a detailed description of the interior of a Tibetan farmhouse in Ladakh, the home of a wealthy aristocrat, a monk’s cell, and a temple. He is free of many of the interpretative excesses of later art historians. He describes how works of art were cared for and how artists spoke about their work with a general absence of aesthetic vocabulary. On the vexed question of originality, he writes, “As to originality and invention, most artists, but especially painters and sculptors, might even feel rather hurt at being suspected, as they would think, of irreverent self-assertion.” See Marco Pallis, Peaks and Lamas, 3d rev. ed. (London: Woburn Press, 1974), p. 349. He does eventually succumb to metaphysics, however, writing that “The artist may therefore regard himself as an inventor of glosses upon the Doctrine, a mediator between its pure spirit and the intelligence of dwellers within the world of sense” (p. 352). He goes on to provide a lengthy hypothetical dialogue in which a Tibetan lama speaks of “symbolism” in the most unlikely terms (pp. 354–56).
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