The Buddha Shakyamuni

This thangka comes from the most famous set of Tibetan paintings in history, the Narthang Series. Modeled on woodblocks housed at the great monastery of Narthang, these thirty-one standardized paintings are based on a Sanskrit text called the Avadana-kalpalata, which details the Buddha’s hundred previous lives. During these previous existences, the Buddha performed many positive actions, and these actions in turn produced the immense store of religious merit (punya) required to attain enlightenment. The imagery is incredibly diverse; for example, to the proper right of the Buddha, figures present offerings to a king in a pavilion. To his left, a figure with a halo plays the lute in a pavilion.

Narthang paintings reveal the previous actions of the Buddha by depicting a central Buddha Shakyamuni surrounded by scenes from his lives. Hills, clouds, and Tibetan buildings create a landscape of vignettes from each specific story. Ideally, these scenes would be identified by gold text inscribed in the three small red arches above the Buddha’s right shoulder and below his knees. Here, however, the thangka painter has left the inscription incomplete. Further research on the Narthang series of thangka paintings in the Asian Art Museum collection will identify the narratives from which the imagery here is drawn.