Standing in front of the “Incantation Wheel of Garuda to Conquer Enemies,” a thangka at the Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies, I had to bow my head and put my hands together in praise. Not all visitors to “Pearl of the Snowlands: Buddhist Prints from the Derge Parkhang,” will be Buddhist practitioners like myself, but the art at the Center’s current exhibit is detailed enough to inspire respect from even the most atheistic postmodernist. “Incantation” is a thangka (traditionally a painted or embroidered Buddhist banner) woodcut print displaying a disk made entirely of Tibetan text. In the center of the disk is the symbol for “OM,” and rippling out from this point is a seemingly infinite number of mantras in Tibetan. The whole thangka was created from one woodblock. The effect of looking at such a work is hypnotic; the viewer feels like they are falling into a whirlpool of text. How much time the woodcut took to make may never be known, but the love and devotion that went into its production is apparent and contagious.
“Pearl of the Snowlands” is a collection of woodcuts and thangkas from the Derge Parkhang (also called the Derge Sutra Painting Temple) in Tibet. The Derge Parkhang is famous in Tibet for its output — 70 percent of Tibet’s classical literature is represented on the woodblocks at Derge. Although the Kangyur (the 108-volume collected teachings of the Buddha) and the Dengyur (the 224-volume collected commentaries and analyses of his teachings) are the most important works Derge produced, Curator Patrick Dowdey chose to display mostly other work, like illustrations, instead.
“Westerners can’t read Tibetan, but they can appreciate the artwork,” he explained.
The show consists of 10 prints on cloth that are mounted as thangka and 24 woodcuts. One volume of the 108-volume Kangyur sits in a glass case at the end of the gallery. The Kangyur is printed on long, horizontal strips of paper to mimic the shape of the original holy texts, which were written on palm leaf.
As Dowdey promises, there are plenty of beautiful illustrations for those uninterested in Buddhist texts. One compelling example is “Mandala Group of Manjushri Dorje in a Tantric Pose,” a woodcut that depicts a wrathful emanation of the Bodhisattva of Wisdom, Manjushri, in sexual embrace with a consort. For someone unfamiliar with Tibetan Buddhism, these sorts of images are confusing to say the least. Manjushri, in addition to having sex with a female deity, has multiple arms holding skull-cups of blood. Naked, wrathful goddesses with skull necklaces surround the happy couple. It’s hard to look at this and not be somehow piqued.
Other illustrations around the room depict scenes from the life of the Buddha, the eight emanations of Padmasambhava, and illustrations of ritual objects.
Despite the incredible beauty and intricacy of the woodcuts, several of them lack the artists’ names. This is because, for the artist, creating the thangka is an act of selflessness — a selflessness that is almost mind-boggling when you consider the time and labor that went into these works.
Walking through “Pearl of the Snowlands” you can sense the history and devotion behind the art: a history that evokes the mystery of a religious tradition that has survived and evolved for thousands of years.
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