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| Amitābha The Buddha Amitābha. Chromolithograph. Wellcome Collection. |
Every time I write a blog I go ahead and put it up, thinking it’s over and done with. But it usually isn’t too long, maybe an hour, a day or a week, before something I should have included comes to mind. That happened last time, which is why I put up that Postscript with something about a 15th-century painted icon of Padampa. Continuing to mine the vein of probable Padampas, I would like to add another artistic representation of unknown date of origin and unusual appearance. This artwork, not exactly in itself a thangka, could be described as a black-and-white lithographic representation of one with minimal coloration, enough to make it a chromolithograph. It is one of the many Tibet-related curiosities in the possession of the Wellcome Institute of London.
- Go to the Wellcome Institute website to get a closer look at it.
If you download at full resolution and enlarge it on your screen, you can better see what it says down below. It was taken from p. 53 of Emil Schlagintweit's Buddhism in Tibet dated according to the internet entry to a questionable year 1863? its publication credited to Dr. C. Wolf & Sons of Munich. My print copy of E. Schlagintweit’s book is an economical Indian edition, so I’m not too surprised to find it isn’t at p. 53 where it is supposed to be. In fact it doesn’t prove findable anywhere in the book. I did find after searching the internet the French version of the book, Le Bouddhisme au Thibet (1881), and there, immediately after p. 36, you can find it, not far away from a bit of discussion connected to it.
The internet entry’s description also says “The four-armed figure is Padmapani...” This isn't exactly incorrect, just that I would call this 4-armed divine figure Mahākāruṇika (Thugs-rje-chen-po) or Great Compassion. It continues, “...the other to his right is Guru Dragpo, a protector against evil spirits.” This is mistaken. It is clearly a very probable Padampa, even if not every normative feature of his iconography is present (if it were, we would cross out the word probable). It doesn’t check every box, but just enough.
Nowhere in all of this is Padampa correctly identified as being himself, and in the one context where he is identified, he is called incorrectly Guru Drakpo, or Wrathful Guru, a form of Padmasambhava. That is what led me to write this brief blog. Our quest for possible, probable and very probable Padampas may lead us through some treacherous waters, but sometimes we find a secure port that permits a fairly easy landing. This is one of those times, for sure. We can feel sure with high probability it is him. At the same time there are further considerations in trying to understand why he is there to begin with.
So why is Padampa there in such a prominent position? You might think that Padampa was regarded as a manifestation of the central deity of the thangka, Amitābha, but I’ve never heard of that idea before. More likely he was in some way connected to the Amitābha practice that was being done by the patron of the artwork. With that idea in mind, perhaps the thangka could have been meant to form part of an Amitābha practice connected to Padampa. But I know of no such practice, do you? Let’s see... While Padampa wandered the subcontinent of India in his younger years, he meditated on 12 different divine figures of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and beheld visions of each one. The list does not include Amitābha or Amitāyus, so I don’t know what I’m supposed to tell you. I have no answer.
At the bottom level of the thangka you can see the seven different possessions of the universal monarch, the Cakravartin. They are not usual in this position in thangkas. Amitābha practices often include them as a set of offerings made to the Buddha, so they fit here just perfectly. And Amitābha is often flanked by two standing Bodhisattvas, as we see here. Their exact identity is not something the sources agree about, I can’t see my way to a swift resolution of this problem, so I will leave it for a more auspicious occasion.
No expert, I understand in early lithography the picture or part of it had to be painted directly onto a slab of stone, and there was no easier way to transfer it. In the chronolithography developing in the middle decades of the 19th century, a different stone had to be prepared for each of the colors needed. If that’s accurate it means that somebody in Europe, involved in the production of the Schlagintweit book, had to do their best to copy what they saw. This would have tended to lend the product a hybrid style that isn't quite Tibetan. Do you see something like that here? I think I do.
Anyway, I've exhausted just about everything I could say about this particular artifact. What do you say about it?
Resources from here and there on the web
- * • If you want to investigate mysteries of the Schlagintweit thangka for yourself, here are some places where you might try to find clues on this or that aspect.
https://www.tibetanbuddhistencyclopedia.com/en/index.php?title=Padampa_Sangye:_A_History_of_Representation_of_a_South_Indian_Siddha_in_Tibet. The people who manage this webpage never asked me if they could put up this frightfully substandard version of a published article, and if they had asked I would have said “No!” When I asked them to take down something written by me before, they responded with sympathy, or so I thought, but finally left the pilfered material up there on their site as if our conversation never took place. DuckDuckGo* puts their messy page up first in the results if you search for "Padampa iconography." Even their entry “Dampa Sangye” was entirely lifted from Wikipedia, so I have to ask, What is the point in duplicating it? Is anyone in the world outside of the People’s Republic unable to find Wikipedia entries? I suppose I ought to be happy they changed their name from Chinese Buddhist Encyclopedia to Tibetan Buddhist Encyclopedia, but I’m not.
(*Not an advertisement in favor of this search engine, still, that's how I surf these days. Bye bye Google and its A.I., as in Atrocious [lack of] Intelligence!)
Your next question foretold: Why don’t I put up a link to a better version? The answer is, I don’t have a reasonably good scan of the article, and neither does anyone else. The page size is a problem, and the faint letters of the footnotes get in the way of photoing. That means you may just have to locate the book in an actual physical book library and look at it there. Please don’t ask me for an offprint. The best I can do is send you here for a not very happy scan of it:
Jeff Watt of Himalayan Art Resources discusses Amitābha iconography in a series of short videos. Start from here:
https://www.himalayanart.org/search/set.cfm?setID=6061
and then scroll down until you see the word "Videos." You not only hear expert explanations, you get to view some of the most beautiful Tibetan thangkas, so much more beautiful than the one I’ve shown you.
You can easily read Emil Schlagintweit's book Buddhism in Tibet (1863) on screen here at Sacred Texts dot com.
But I recommend downloading a nice PDF of it from Pahar (use their local search box)
or better, because it may be a little faster to download, the same PDF at archive.org. Archive.org has other PDFs, just that I prefer this particular one.
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| Three of the famous Schlagintweit brothers Robert, Hermann and Adolph all of them geographers of the Himalayas. Emil is notably absent. |
- * • Emil Schlagintweit’s book along with Jäschke’s dictionary appear to be the two most important sources of information about Tibetan Buddhism available to Helena Blavatsky of Theosophical Society fame. Click here for more on this.
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