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Ngorchen Kunga Zangpo (1382-1456) and the Sakya Lamdre Lineage
Tibet (Eastern Tibet)
16th century
- Medium
- Mineral pigment with gold on cotton
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 75.1 × 58.7 cm (29 7/8 × 23 1/8 in.)
- Culture
- Tibet
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Arts of Asia
- Credit line
- Gift of Marilynn B. Alsdorf
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
This thangka depicts members of the Sakya Lamdre teaching lineage, a tradition of Buddhist practice based on a specific set of texts. The two central figures are most likely Buddhashri (1339-1432) on the left and Ngorchen Kunga Zangpo (1382-1456) on the right. The remaining smaller figures with the appearance of monks are earlier lineage holders, and the Buddhist deities shown are ones important to the Sakya tradition.
Although the central figures are these two individuals, the subject matter of the thangka is actually the lineage it represents. Lineage in this context means a chain of teachers and students through whom the study, interpretation, and practice of a specific sacred text is passed. This is predicated on the idea that fully understanding a Buddhist text requires that one be taught it by a teacher who has previously been taught it, going back through the generations to the original Buddha or enlightened deity who disseminated the text to the human world, according to the individual texts's description of its origin.
This thangka would have been part of a set, each of which depicts a pair of teachers going down through the generations of the whole lineage; however,…
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
