Sacred Buddhist Painting

This book is a lucid account of thangka painting. A form of scroll painting integral to Tibetan Buddhist worship. It introduces readers to the irirdescence of colours representing the archetypal Buddhist images of good and evil. It features thangkas from renowned collections the world over.

Connect with the sacred art of Buddhism through the creative act of coloring. Buddhist art is rich with symbolism and meaning. Taking the time to color and interact with these symbols and motifs is a simple yet profound way to practice mindfulness and move closer to a greater awareness of one’s own essential nature. The drawings here—all meticulously painted by hand with a small sable brush—relate to the state of being completely awakened and evoke a deep sense of calm and stillness. A concise description of each drawing unravels the many layers of meaning contained within this sacred art, inviting a deeper connection with these drawings.

Accompanying an exhibition to be held in New York during late fall of 1998, Sacred Visions is a superbly illustrated volume of art works from the 11th to the mid-15th centuries which includes scholarly essays that relate to the paintings to be displayed.

Sacred art presented as coloring templates for contemplation and creativity—stunning and detailed artwork from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Drawing on his brush paintings in The Encyclopedia of Tibetan Symbols and Motifs and other works, Robert Beer has selected 50 images meant to be used as templates for coloring. The book features figures spanning centuries of the tradition, including spiritual adventurers, rebellious saints, and enlightened Tantric masters. The detailed artwork is elegant and meaningful—drawing on Buddhist teachings to give each piece greater depth.

The northern Chinese mountain range of Mount Wutai has been a preeminent site of international pilgrimage for over a millennium. Home to more than one hundred temples, the entire range is considered a Buddhist paradise on earth, and has received visitors ranging from emperors to monastic and lay devotees. Mount Wutai explores how Qing Buddhist rulers and clerics from Inner Asia, including Manchus, Tibetans, and Mongols, reimagined the mountain as their own during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wen-Shing Chou examines a wealth of original source materials in multiple languages and media--many never before published or translated—such as temple replicas, pilgrimage guides, hagiographic representations, and panoramic maps. She shows how literary, artistic, and architectural depictions of the mountain permanently transformed the site's religious landscape and redefined Inner Asia's relations with China. Chou addresses the pivotal but previously unacknowledged history of artistic and intellectual exchange between the varying religious, linguistic, and cultural traditions of the region. The reimagining of Mount Wutai was a fluid endeavor that proved central to the cosmopolitanism of the Qing Empire, and the mountain range became a unique site of shared diplomacy, trade, and religious devotion between different constituents, as well as a spiritual bridge between China and Tibet. A compelling exploration of the changing meaning and significance of one of the world's great religious sites, Mount Wutai offers an important new framework for understanding Buddhist sacred geography.

In his novel Kim, in which a Tibetan pilgrim seeks to visit important Buddhist sites in India, Rudyard Kipling reveals the nineteenth-century fascination with the discovery of the importance of Buddhism in India's past. Janice Leoshko, a scholar of South Asian Buddhist art uses Kipling's account and those of other western writers to offer new insight into the priorities underlying nineteenth-century studies of Buddhist art in India. In the absence of written records, the first explorations of Buddhist sites were often guided by accounts of Chinese pilgrims. They had journeyed to India more than a thousand years earlier in search of sacred traces of the Buddha, the places where he lived, obtained enlightenment, taught and finally passed into nirvana. The British explorers, however, had other interests besides the religion itself. They were motivated by concerns tied to the growing British control of the subcontinent. Building on earlier interventions, Janice Leoshko examines this history of nineteenth-century exploration in order to illuminate how early concerns shaped the way Buddhist art has been studied in the West and presented in its museums.

This book traces the original meaning, function, style, and history of icons and relics across various schools of Buddhism.

Illustrates, explains and celebrates 241 examples of Tibetan sacred art of the 9th to 12th centuries. The authors discuss the religious meaning and use of tangkas, Buddhist iconography and the aesthetics of tangka paintings, sculpture and mandalas.