Page 52 - Bonhams Indian and Himalayan Art March 2016 New York

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A THIRTY-THREE-DEITY USHNISHAVIJAYA MANDALA
Tibet, Ngor monastery, circa 1500-50
Distemper on cloth; verso with repeated Tibetan, ‘ohm, ah, hum’, invocations in black ink;
with original cloth mount, and original red lacquered dowel inscribed in gold Tibetan translated,
‘Ushnishavijaya with Many Deities’.
Image: 20 x 17 3/8 in. (50.9 x 44.2 cm);
With silks: 33 1/2 x 19 in. (85.2 x 48.4 cm)
$400,000 - 600,000

西藏 鄂爾寺 約1500-50年 三十三神尊勝佛母壇城唐卡

Glowing in white from the center of her celestial palace, the Wisdom Goddess, Ushnishavijaya,
calmly smiles. She has three faces of white, yellow, and blue, the last being slightly wrathful.
In her eight radiating arms she holds a lotus-borne red Amitabha, a bow and arrow, a vase
of plenty, a lasso, and displays the gestures of reassurance (abhaya mudra) and wish-granting
(varada mudra). At the center, before her bosom, she balances a five-colored visvajra, itself
a color-coordinated microcosm of the her palace’s directional quadrants carefully decorated
with minute floral sprays against grounds of green, blue, yellow, and red – with her as the
center in white.

The painting is a top-down two-dimensional diagram of her celestial palace surrounded
by a multi-colored protective outer ring. It has a penultimate ring of thirty-two lotus petals,
each representing the purified state of mind of the thirty-two deities that inhabit the palace
with her. Moreover, each color-coordinated retinue figure reclines against its own petal-
background, as if her palace itself unfurls in tiers like a lotus-flower with the goddess in
bloom at the center. The imagery is consistent with complex lotus-form sculptural mandalas
such as one in the collection of Dr. David Nalin, published in Huntington, Circle of Bliss,
Columbus, 2003, p. 254, no. 68.

On her palace’s red square veranda, either side of the T-shaped gates, are sixteen tiny offering
goddesses dancing away. The outer blue and white lines forming a square enclosure represent
the palace walls with a decorative façade of looped garlands and upright gold polls with red
streamers. The elaborate lintels above each of the four gates are constructed of four-tiered
steps topped with a Dharma wheel flanked by two gold deer, with a parasol above. The palace
is placed squarely on top of a horizontal macrocosmic visvajra, with only its makara-headed
prongs visible above each doorway.

Outside of its multi-colored circle of pristine awareness, alternating figures of Amitayus and
Amitabha populate the corners against delicate red floral grounds, and the top and bottom
registers between spandrels of leaf-sprouting stupas. Among them, in the top center sits a
Sakya teacher, and in the bottom center, another figure of Ushnishavijaya.

Identified by the presence of the mandala’s core thirty-three deities, this painting belongs to
a set numbering approximately forty-four which are based on the Vajravali text by the 11th-
century Indian scholar Abhayakaragupta. The Mitra Gyatsa by Mitrayogi is another compiled
text featuring a thirty-three deity Ushnishavijaya mandala, however that text was not nearly as
popular in the Sakya or Ngor Traditions to which this painting belongs. This Ushnishavijaya
mandala forms the forty-forth and likely final mandala of the set.

50 | BONHAMS