Tibet and India: Buddhist Traditions and Transformations [adapted from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 71, no. 3 (Winter, 2014)]

Tibet and India: Buddhist Traditions and Transformations
[adapted from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 71, no. 3 (Winter, 2014)]

Behrendt, Kurt (2014)

This title is out of print.

Read online

Download PDF

Watsonline WorldCat

Publication Details

Description

As Buddhism spread out from north India, the place of its origin in the sixth century BC, the core ideas of this great religious tradition were often expressed through images. This Bulletin and the exhibition it accompanies, "Tibet and India: Buddhist Traditions and Transformations," focus on Indian and Tibetan Buddhist art of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a period that witnessed both the end of the rich north Indian Buddhist tradition and the beginning of popular Buddhist practice in Tibet. At this critical juncture in Buddhist history, a number of Tibetan monks traveled down out of the Himalayas to study at the famed monasteries of north India, where many also set about translating the vast corpus of Buddhist texts. As they visited these centers of scholarship and the pilgrimage sites associated with the Buddha's life, the monks encountered refined works of art—from complex stone carvings to delicately illustrated palm-leaf manuscripts—made by workshops that had been active for more than 1,400 years. These profound works of religious art and the Tibetan images that followed them help shed light on how the Tibetans received and transformed the north Indian image-making tradition.

Related Titles

Titles by thematic category (57)

Asian Art, South and Southeast Asia

Titles by author (10)

Kurt A. Behrendt

Related Content

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (4)

Essays (2)

Buddhism and Buddhist Art

Tibetan Buddhist Art

Timelines (2)

Himalayan Region, 1000–1400 A.D.

South Asia: North, 1000–1400 A.D.

Exhibition

Exhibition_Tibet and India Buddhist Traditions and Transformations

February 8–June 8, 2014

This exhibition singles out two periods when the Buddhist Tibetan tradition drew from outside influences to develop new vocabularies of form. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, after a period of political and religious disruption, contact with the great monasteries of North India led to considerable exchange. Looking from the Indian perspective, the exhibition examines how esoteric imagery, texts, and Vajrayana ritual practices contributed to reshaping the complex religious landscape of Tibet. Today, contemporary Tibetan artists are again addressing and incorporating ideas central to the current global reality, in an effort to recontextualize long-standing core Buddhist ideals. The exhibition will include five loans and eighteen objects drawn from department holdings.

Plan Ahead

MetPublications