Wisdom and Compassion: The Sacred Art of Tibet

This book is an indispensible guide to the most comprehensive exhibition of Tibetan art ever seen in the West and a landmark volume for its ground-breaking scholarship and its presentation of important ideas on one of the world’s most highly evolved, most “modern” civilizations. Here are one hundred sixty of the most beautiful and spiritually profound works of Tibetan sacred art from museums and private collections around the world, described and explained with unprecedented insights into their religious meaning and use, iconography, and aesthetics. A multi-dimensional context for this sophisticated and complex art is provided by invitingly readable essays that introduce basic concepts of Tibetan Buddhist thought and practice.
Tibetans regard their tangka paintings, sculptures, and mandalas as points of transition from the ordinary world we know to perfected Buddhist realms of enlightenment. The works in Wisdom and Compassion range from a three-inch ivory carving of the Tibetan poet-saint Milarepa, to an eleven-foot tapestry of the future Buddha Maitreya, to a seven-foot-wide colored particle sand mandala, and they span a thousand years from the ninth through the nineteenth century. Nearly half the pieces have never been published; all but a handful are reproduced for the first time in color.

Marylin M. Rhie is Professor of Art and East Asian Studies at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. She is one of the world’s leading scholars of the Buddhist arts of East Asia. Robert A. F. Thurman, a celebrated Buddhologist, is Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University, New York, where he holds the Jey Tsong Khapa Chair and heads the American Institute of Buddhist Studies. John Bigelow Taylor has photographed art and antiquities. since 1978. He is based in New York City and is on the Executive Committee of Tiber House, New York. Taylor is the photographer of The Cycladic Spirit, published by Abrams (1991).