An informative overview of the intrinsic relationship of Buddhist deities to Tibetan art and well-captioned illustrations: temple paintings, books, wood blocks, ritual objects, robes, masks, metal work, more. 92 black-and-white illustrations.

A presentation on the Tibetan Buddhist path to enlightenment, through the lens of an artist's eye and experience. The sacred arts play an essential, intrinsic role in Tibetan Buddhist practice. Here, one of the great practitioners and master artists of our time presents a guide to the Tibetan Buddhist path, from preliminary practices through enlightenment, from the artist's perspective. With profound wisdom, he shows how visual representations of the sacred in paintings, sculptures, mandalas, and stupas can be an essential support to practice throughout the path. This work, based on the author's landmark Tibetan text, The Path to Liberation, includes basic Buddhist teachings and practices, clearly pointing out the relevance of these for both the sacred artist and the practitioner, along with an overview of the history and iconography of Buddhist art.

Religion in its most authentic part is an art form. Religion does what art does. This idea is richly illustrated and supported by materials of diverse origin. The vast range of the author's experience in the arts and in religious texts and works of aesthetics allows him to lay hold of a great mass of disparate material and to bring out new dimensions in all of it. He always has just the example he needs at his fingertips, a Tibetan Buddhist text next to a French impressionist painting and a remark about early Banogu counterpoint, and each example is seen in a new and interesting way. Through this gentle yoking together of heterogeneous materials, common roots are discovered. Most studies of art and religion describe and explain them as data. Thomas Martland identifies them as expressions of ideals and asks what they are when they are authentic rather than merely what they are when they are self-identified as art and religion. This is an identification through assessment, not an Aristotelian classification, and the means of assessment are provided.

Illustrates, explains and celebrates 241 examples of Tibetan sacred art of the 9th to 12th centuries. The authors discuss the religious meaning and use of tangkas, Buddhist iconography and the aesthetics of tangka paintings, sculpture and mandalas.

A complete introduction to Tibetan art presented in the context of Tibetan Buddhism. Amy Heller places the artwork within its historical social and religious context utilizing in situ photographs from Tibet. It spans 1400 years of art history.