For a Buddhist, beginning the journey along the road to enlightenment commences with the first understanding of the possibility of realizing our Buddha nature. It is only when we fully understand this possibility of evolution into a higher being and discover the need to visualize our inner potential that we see the necessity for the development of an art form which matches our aspirations. In the religious arts of the world’s many and diverse cultures, few have provided as wide a canvas as the Tibetan on which to project visualizations of the vast range of possible aspects of the enlightened mind.
Origins
The Buddha’s task as a teacher could not even begin until works of art had opened the people’s Tibetan Monk - yellow hat sect imagination to the revelation of new perceptions. So we find that in the Buddhist scriptures almost every discourse is preceded by some sort of miracle, some dramatic revelation of an extraordinary perception to stimulate the people’s imaginations. After the Buddha’s death those who knew him began to make icons of his liberating presence, although at first it was considered that no human representation could do justice to his memory, so that symbols such as the wheel (of the Law), or the trees (of spiritual enlightenment) were used.
By the time Buddhism came to Tibet in the seventh century AD, however, the artistic expression of the Mahayana, or Universal Vehicle, had reached considerable heights of inspiration. Sakyamuni Buddha, various cosmic Buddhas, magnificent female and male Bodhisattvas, all were portrayed in splendid paradise-like settings. And with the development of Tantric Buddhism the archetypal imagery went more deeply into the unconscious mind to uncover other enlightening possibilities, both terrifying and benign.
The earliest surviving Tibetan images date from the ninth century AD, and from that time until the present a wealth of magnificent painting and sculpture survives which has served both as the focus of meditation visualizations for many generations of Buddhist adepts, as well as educational illustrations for ordinary Tibetan people. Tragically, since the Chinese occupation began in 1949, many thousands of temples with their splendid wall paintings and magnificent sculptures have been destroyed, so that today there are probably many more beautiful Tibetan works of art in Western museums and private collections than presently exist in Tibet.
Works of art are usually commissioned, either by monasteries or lay patrons, and their execution generally follows strict canonical rules as to proportions, symbols and colors, in accordance with artistic manuals.
Tibetan art is largely anonymous, and this custom of artistic anonymity is grounded in the Buddhist belief in working toward the elimination of the individual ego. The Tibetan attitude to a work of art is that when it is successfully completed it has an existence of its own and an inherent power to help the viewer come to spiritual realization. It ceases to be the property of the artist when it leaves his studio.
Form and Function
The form given to a painted or sculpted image follows a clear and well defined iconography set out in the appropriate texts, whilst artists’ manuals illustrate the strict measures to be observed in achieving correct proportion and balance. The Tibetan artist, like his Indian counterpart, is not free to improvise on his personal concepts of the appearance of an individual deity but is required to work within a well defined structure. In the tantric art of Tibetan Buddhism, benign, wrathful, serene or terrifying deities all illustrate an aspect of the Buddha mind, or the potential to be found in each of us, so that the artist projects for us archetypal images from deep within our subconscious, inviting us to contemplate those aspects of our being which usually remain hidden. For the meditation practitioner, such images are models for the process of visualisation, where the adept develops the ability, through stabilised concentration and cultivated inner vision, to visualise the deity in all its phenomenal detail and then absorb this vision into him/herself and so absorb the spiritual qualities particular to that deity.