Page 62 - Bonhams Indian and Himalayan Art March 2016 New York

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A THANGKA OF SHAKYAMUNI’S PARINIRVANA
School of Choying Dorje, Eastern Tibet or Yunnan Province, China, late 17th century
Distemper on silk.
Image: 24 1/2 x 16 5/8 in. (62.3 x 42.2 cm);
With silks: 40 x 22 1/2 in. (101.6 x 57.2 cm)
$100,000 - 150,000

西藏東部或中國雲南 十七世紀晚期 確映多傑畫派 釋迦牟尼圓寂唐卡

This enigmatic painting stems from a set illustrating the Twelve Deeds of Shakyamuni.
The Ninth, and final within the set, it depicts his departure into parinirvana with a crowd of
mourners from all walks of life, some anxious, some grief-stricken, some aghast, but most
presenting some form of offering to the Buddha. Below his altar-like couch, two dogs crouch
mournfully near four toddlers inspecting the goods in the offering pile. Above the central
crowd, another group gathers around his funeral pyre, in which Shakyamuni is cremated in the
Chinese manner within a coffin decorated with scrolling lotuses. In the top register, separated
by a cloud band, we see a circle of musicians and the dispersal of the relics.

Distinctive in the history of Tibetan painting, this thangka is painted in the fabled style of the Tenth
Karmapa Choying Dorje (1604-1674). The composition takes a fresh approach to the subject
matter, and the mourners are depicted with the Karmapa’s idiomatic faces, inspired by Ancient
Kashmiri sculpture, and a studied naiveté. Famous for being one of Tibet’s greatest artists,
all Choying Dorje’s hagiographies claim he was a prolific painter by the age of eight. When he
came of age, he led the Karmapa sect through a traumatic period under the hegemony of a
Gelugpa-Mongol alliance. An unfortunate consequence of the Fifth Dalai Lama’s unifying politics
(r. 1642-1682), the Karma Kagyu tradition, one of the wealthiest in all of Tibet, was “stripped of
its monasteries... its sangha slaughtered and scattered, and its traditions (religious and artistic)
on the verge of total eclipse.” (Debreczeny, The Black Hat Eccentric, New York, 2012, p. 256).
In 1645, Choying Dorje fled a doomed encampment in Lhadok, surrounded by Mongol forces,
eventually taking refuge in the Chinese town of Lijiang (Yunnan province), under the protection
of Naxi King Mu Yi (r. 1624-1669). There he nurtured the Kagyu sect in exile and developed his
enigmatic style.

Debrecezny draws convincing parallels between the artistic responses of Choying Dorje
and contemporaneous late Ming Chinese painters, such as Chen Hongshou (1598-1652),
returning to visual modes inspired by antiquity and an imagined golden age (ibid.). Within
the context of political upheaval and exile, it is tempting to view the Tenth Karmapa’s radical
style as a rejection of the status quo in Gelugpa-dominated Central Tibet. It was a climate of
great codification, under which guild-like workshops reproduced a more prescriptive Gelugpa
formula, emblematic of the hegemony his order suffered under. The Central Tibetan style is
typified by dense gold-patterned textiles, layers of decorative embellishments, and closely
juxtaposed bold colors. By contrast, Choying Dorje’s style incorporates plainer (possibly Naxi)
garments, empty monochrome backgrounds, and washes of similar hues – seen for instance
here in the paintings sky.

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