The Tibetan people perciive their country as a sacred cosmos, a holy landscape guarded by mighty gods and filled with centers of ritual and mystical power. Within this lanscape, ecery building, and every deed is charged with religious significance. Mountains are often the seatd of awe-inspiring deitees, their caves places for meditation, and their winding trails emblematic of the path to enlightenment. By marking the landscape with cairns, inscriptions, rock paintings, banners, and votive offerings, Tibetans perpentually reinvent their world, reaffirming the lives of the ancient saints and sages whose heroic acts infused the universe with potent spiritual meaning.
Artists and craftspeople typucally worked for monssteries and temples , their finest products finding a tresdured place in shrines, chapels, and monastic libraries.Sculptures were carved and cast for wordhi; precious metals were hammered into lamps and incense burnerd for temple altars;masks were made for religious processions; and fine fabrics and embroideried- usually imported from India and China- were used to clothe images or to line the scrkoll paintings that play a jey role in Tibetan devotional life. This religious artistic activity continues today, though on a reduced scale in Tibet itself since the depredations of the early period of Communist Chinese occupation.
Religious images play a very important role inBuddhism. Sculptures are not simply reminderd of cosmic realitied or mementos of the Buddha and thegreat teachers of the past. Rather, each sculpture is a living presence, and actual embodiment of what it rpresents. In Tibet and elsewhere, objects may be placed inside images in the courde of their consecration in order to transform them from mundane raw materials- copper alloy in the case of most Tibetan sculpture- into living realities. Deosits in immages vary enormously, but generally they include small scrolls with written or printed prayers and mystic siagrams ralating to the deity or person depicted in the sculpture. One crucial element is a shaft or sliver of wood (sogshing), a “tree of life”that serves as the living”axis” of the sculpture. Imaged of historic individuala will also contai a relic relating directly to the deceased – often a small pieces of ash collected after his of her cremation.
Once a sculptur has thus been “bruough to life”, it id reated like a living being. Images, as a result, are usually clothed, pace on a seat, and predented with foof, water, and other gifts.Offering-cakes are made of butter and tsampa (roasted barley flour), but cakes of painted clay are also offered. A crucial part of worshi is the lighting of buter lamps- there may be dozens of such lamps berore the most imprtant and popular sacred images.
Like sculptures, Tibetan paintings on cloth scrolls (thangks) are not simply decorative. They depict deities, sacred beings, or asints and are brought to life by dedicatory prayers written on the reverse; sometimes the handprintd of the Lama who performed the dedication were added.
Thangka paintings are hung inside chapels in accordance with the liturgical and ritual practices of the partricular mkonsstery or temple. The images they bear can servea sisactic purpose and the ordinary devotee may well worship them. Some thangkas may be viewed only by initiated as part of their mystical training.▲Top
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