Five Senses

This appliqué depicts a key element of Vajrayana Buddhist meditative and ritual practice: the offering of the five senses. Such offerings are typically made to fierce deities like Mahakala, who appears in two other paintings in this group of artworks.

The offerings appear in a skull bowl. The skull, placed upside down, has eyes (sight) popping out of its sockets. Above them are a heart (touch), ears (hearing), tongue (taste), and nose (smell). By meditating on one’s sensory awareness by visualizing its various organs in this rather gory manner, the Vajrayana practitioner realizes that the world of the senses has no independent existence, but is instead created through multiple interacting causes. By internalizing this insight, the meditator is released from the false notion that the world is an objective entity and thus ultimately unchangeable.

Five Senses is based on a detail from a Mahakala painting created by Vajrayana Buddhists of the Sakya lineage currently in the collection of the Asian Art Museum.