“Mandala: Mapping Tibetan Buddhist Art” had more peeling than I expected, though not necessarily more than I wanted. Any visitor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition looking for tranquility will notice a 15th-century skinning knife, a pair of skinned corpses embroidered on a rug, and a wall of caution tape strung around the perimeter of the palace. You’ll find another skinned corpse with colorful internal organs laid out. They, too, may find tranquility—but not the comforting kind that American pop Buddhism touts. For Himalayan monks in the early 10th century, the ideal setting for initiation was the ossuary, where people left their dead to be eaten by wild animals. If religion cannot help us in the stench of rotten flesh, what good is it?
A thousand years ago, India was still the origin of Buddhism. Various sects drifted north and east to China and Japan, but one of them, Vajrayana Buddhism, left its richest remains on the Tibetan Plateau. The show’s nice irony is that remoteness can speed up the spread of infection. Although the Himalayas were impassable for a quarter of the year, travelers still needed to cross them, and many of them spent months waiting near the southern side of the mountain. Immerse yourself in Buddhist culture while walking through the snow. By the 13th century, Vajrayana was nearly extinct in its birthplace, and the former satellite state of Tibet became its new center. Ideologically, the remote location worked to the school’s advantage. Its leaders emphasized tantric chanting, ritualized sex, and other secret practices, but as Christian Luzanitz suggests in an eloquent catalog essay, they were not flamboyant about those secrets. There is a possibility that it will happen. Some of the most enchanting pieces here are painted with distemper on cloth, which can be rolled up and taken anywhere, unfolded and hidden again the moment it starts to get too bright.
Tibetan Buddhism is convincing with its pure pictorial beauty. Of course, it’s not just about beauty. Impatient rulers liked that Vajrayana promised enlightenment in a lifetime, rather than the decades that traditional Buddhism takes, and Kublai Khan spread its teachings for as long as his horsemen could ride them. . However, even here, paintings encouraged the expansion of religion and gave rise to other paintings. The Kings created the Mandala to ensure future success. After winning a battle or surviving a plague, they celebrated by demanding a more luxurious version. Tugh Temur, the great-great-grandson of Kublai Khan, can be seen in the lower left corner of the 14th century silk mandala he requested. Baby Khan is far from the most important of the many beings depicted here, but it’s an honor just to be included. Center and satellites are still ideas. Above him, several squares float within a circle, and as the geometric pattern gets smaller and closer to the center, the figures within it grow in importance. Vajrabhairava is not a mortal but a minor god, and not a minor god but a great man. You can recognize him by his blue skin and buffalo head.
Sound complicated? That’s true, but there is one thing that this mandala is definitely not. It’s bulky. The shapes seem to slide silently into each other. The space in between is loosened with gorgeous floral swirls of green thread. Even when I squint at the small reproductions in the catalogue, I sense a sense of complexity captured without being tamed. It’s too big to belong to one person, especially the person who paid for it.
If I had been smarter, or stupider, I would have spent the rest of this review wondering what Tibetan mandalas (not the only works of art here, but the most impressive) were used for. We will try to resolve the question of whether There’s some comfort in the fact that even the experts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art don’t agree on the exact answer. At a recent conference sponsored by the museum, one eminent professor argued that these can primarily be understood as aids to meditation. In the catalog, another claims that “this interpretation is unfounded.” Insofar as the mandala is a divine vessel and nothing symbolic, there is good reason for the interpretation that the mandala is a symbol of the divine cosmos and was designed to teach practitioners about the real thing. They are teachers, icons, maps, billboards, and propaganda for the Buddhists who create them and also for the kings who fund them. The most famous ones don’t even exist, because they are eagerly destroyed as soon as the monks finish building them out of sand.
“Portrait of the Buddha and the Kadam Masters of His Lineage” (c. 1180 – 1220).Artwork courtesy of Michael J. and Beata McCormick Collection
Looking at a mandala requires a buffet of prepositions. “at” is both “in” and “downUpon”. Start along the edge and proceed clockwise, passing pictures of monks, deities, or benefactors in orderly squares. From there, go inward to a circular plate with a palace with four gates. Generally, each gate is guarded by a pair of protrusions reminiscent of the vajra, a Buddhist scepter. If you pass through these, you have entered the house of the chief god who sits in the center. The chief god is surrounded by lesser gods, brandishing weapons and, in some versions, embracing his mate. You can imagine each layer stacked on top of the previous one (this is how 3-dimensional mandala models are arranged). The further back you move, the higher the image will pop off the screen. The inside will be facing upwards.
In any case, you are seeing in your own eyes what Buddhism says you can do in life: moving from the outside in, from the base to the noble, from the ignorant to the enlightened. That’s what we’re doing. The movement from one place to another is as important as enlightenment itself. Skipping the charnel grounds is not an option. Observe at least eight mandalas on the outskirts of one mandala in 11th century Nepal. Greenish jackals feast while the birds gnaw their skulls, but why shouldn’t they eat? They too are part of the universe. The red surrounding the central deity in this mandala is a Buddhist symbol of purity, but it also reminds us that purity begins with flesh and blood, which everyone receives for free.
Even if you don’t know anything about Buddhism or have no desire to learn, this show is worth visiting for the eerie beauty of its colors. One mandala depicting Goddess Jnanadakini shows almost no cracks, even though it has been in existence for about 700 years. All colors give off a gorgeous and hot glow. Red grabs soft pink, jade, and apricot and sets them ablaze. Slow to emerge, but no less sensational, the madly curling abstractions of the lines seem as if Himalayan artists of the late 14th century had somehow visualized brain corals. Patterns can be seen everywhere. When lines and colors work together to their fullest, as on the back of the palace walls of Jnanadakini, the pattern can become so dense that it can almost be filled. Peace feels like a state of faint, cheerful vibrations. Biography of a Thought, a giant mandala painting that contemporary Nepali artist Tenzin Rigdol contributed to the show’s atrium, is admired by comparison. Blue is just blue, solid is just solid, and after marveling at the real thing, it’s like washing down a fine wine with syrup, accepting all this.
Distemper cannot survive for seven centuries unless someone protects it from breath and sunlight. One thing all the experts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art agree on is that mandalas were not created to be viewed in groups. Most Vajrayana initiates traveled through the mandala with an experienced master as their guide. It was probably a wise move on the part of the Master. Images, at least good ones, are always richer than the official meaning, which is why so many religions police or ban them. In a circa 1800 distempered cotton mandala, the god Ekajata lives in a palace protected by corpses and surrounded by smoky darkness. There is a clear progression here from smoke to flesh and from flesh to divinity, but perhaps it is back from divinity to smoke, becoming brighter and more alive the longer you look at it. Thick clouds appear to be pushed out beyond the rectangle within them, beyond the limits anyone would try to place around them. Religious art could have done more with smoke all this time, I thought as I watched. Fire and water have dominated the spotlight for far too long. Smoke has its own charm, its own deathless writhing. In this mandala, the mandala naturally takes the leading role, whether or not the monks approve of it. ♦
