Laura Wein, Translating the Tibetan Buddhist “Thangka”, The Tibet Journal, Vol.41, No.1, 2016.

Introduction

In this paper, I will demonstrate the possibility of discerning the dynamic connections that make these body supports efficacious tools—those that lie between the visual content of a thangka painting, Tibetan Buddhists beliefs that give meaning to that visual content, and the religious practices that utilize it. These are the types of relationships that Robert Orsi says constitute “religion” itself. I discern these connections by employing Tibetan categories and what I know about ritual forms of engagement directly from the aforementioned Tibetan Buddhists teachers and practitioners. I have chosen three particular eighteenth and nineteenth century thangka paintings from the University of Wisconsin—Madison’s Chazen Museum of Art (about which there was no prior research at all) as my means to doing so. I will begin by discussing visual content of each of these paintings by way of Tibetan Buddhist histories, liturgy, and iconographic conventions in order to establish the context for Tibetan Buddhists’ encounters and ritualized forms of engagement with the images. This is all to establish a foundation with which I then attempt, in the second half of my paper, to synthesize what it is thangka do as form of sku rten (body support) in those Tibetan Buddhist ritual contexts. I will also attempt to explain how and why they do so by drawing upon the qualities of the three thangka and associated Tibetan Buddhist views I expound in the first half of my paper. By exploring various religious activities connected to these thangka that treat them as sku rten within both lower and higher levels of Tantra, I hope to demonstrate the Tibetan Buddhist vision that unites all levels of religious engagement with thangka and, perhaps, the possibility of a deeper theoretical understanding of them. The convergence of materiality and transcendence contained within the category ‘sku rten’ helps us see the functional qualities of thangka more clearly— how paintings fit in to a systematized soteriology that      relies on practice. As a physical form of spiritual support, or sku rten, the Tibetan Buddhist thangka affords sensory access in material form to religious    experiences that transcend the physical.