How to Identify a Deity Image

Each deity figure has six principal characteristics necessary in identification: [1] gender, [2] mood, [3] colour, [4] body configuration, [5] posture, [6] gestures & hand attributes.

How to Identify a Deity Image
What is gender?
What is mood?
What are the colours?
What is body configuration?
What are the postures?
What are gestures & hand attributes?

Chakrasamvara: Organized & Updated

The Buddhist Tantric meditational deity Chakrasamvara is a popular subject in Himalayan style art. There are many forms of the deity from a one face, two armed, blue, solitary standing figure, to a seated white figure with a consort. The forms become more complicated with three faces and six arms, four faces and twelve arms and then over a thousand arms with over a thousand retinue deities inhabiting the mandala. Even though the central figure can be identical between two different mandalas, the number and appearance of the retinue figures in the mandala can be different. All of this adds to the great difficulty in correctly identifying a particular Chakrasamvara, painting, sculpture or mandala.

New pages created:
Chakrasamvara Outline Page (updated)
Chakrasamvara Deity Forms Outline (new)
Chakrasamvara Art Topics Outline (new)
Paintings Page (new)
Sculpture Page (new)
Mandala Page (new)

Selected Masterworks:
A Selected Masterworks Page has been created to look at the very best examples of the Chakrasamvara form in painting and sculpture from both an art and aesthetics, i.e. Art History point of view and from a Religious Studies point of view. A chronology page will be added later along with a further analysis of the different forms of the deity, most of which are now represented on the HAR site as central figures or minor figures.

List of Shambhala Kings by Katog Tsewang Norbu

Tsewang Norbu (1698-1755) wrote a long description of the pureland of Shambhala, associated with the Kalachakra Tantra, along with a short text listing the name of each of the seven Dharma Kings and the following twenty-five Vidyadharas, their number in the series, and from which bodhisattva or deity they are an emanation.

In general, these Shambhala Kings are commonly depicted in art either in a single composition containing all thirty-two figures or in sets of paintings with one figure, three, four, or eight figures per composition. Their are also two different traditions, or ways, to depict the Shambhala Kings: [1] Royal Appearance and [2] Deity Appearance.

The short text of Tsewang Norbu listing the names and emanation sources for all of the kings of the Deity Appearance system is essential for understanding the differences between the two systems and their differing depictions of the kings.

As time allows all of the Shambhala King paintings on HAR, from the various Palpung Composition sets, will be identified and listed (linked) next to the appropriate name in the list of Tsewang Norbu.

Five Most Powerful Tools

With the ever increasing number of art collections, museums, and image objects added to the HAR website it actually becomes more and more challenging to find the specific objects looked for along with relevant related information. These five tools are the most important on HAR for finding specific objects. To understand how objects relate to each other, and to general subjects or concepts, then look to the extensive Outline Pages.

Five Most Powerful Tools Outline Page
1. Search
2. Indices
3. Glossaries
4. Bibliographies
5. Links

HAR Temporarily Down, Monday July 6th, 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.

The Himalayan Art Resources website will be down for a short period of time Monday afternoon, July 6th between 2:00 and 4:00 p.m. The web technicians are updating certain key components of the database architecture to improve the search, cataloguing and speed of the site.

Thank you for your patience.

New Images from the Asian Art Museum

Fourteen new images of paintings from the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco have been uploaded to the HAR site. Write-ups accompany most if not all of the images. Some Asian Art entries in the database have write-ups but no images as yet. In those cases we are using a place card holder thumbnail image.

Maps!

After talking about it for nearly two years the HAR Team finally has their first linked image map of the Central Tibetan region of U-Tsang. This is the first go at making clickable geographic image maps. We hope to improve them with practice and add more links as we acquire new images of important art and architectural locations in Tibet and the other Himalayan art regions.

We have chosen the linked locations because those are the locations that we currently have images for. As we acquire new images we will add new locations to the maps. The next map will be of Lhasa City and the immediate surroundings followed by West Tibet with its extensive temple murals and cave complexes.

Maps Index:
Map of U-Tsang
Map of Lhasa Region
Map of Samye & Tsetang Region
Map of Tsang Region