TIBETAN ART. Tibetan art is to a large extent a continua tion of the mediaeval Buddhist art of Behar and Orissa, the dominions of the Pala kings, which were the strongholds of Indian Buddhism during the I 1 th and 12th centuries. The conservatism which is so marked a feature of Tibetan art is due to the peculiar character of that rude and uncultivated country, which Buddhism reached, late and in a very decadent form, in the 7th century A.D. The barbarians beyond the mountains were all the more willing to receive the pious images, so accurately representative of the religious spirit, which the missionaries brought from India, because they had no local artistic tradition to set up against them. All that they could do was to have copies made of the original models, which were deeply venerated, and then in turn to copy them for themselves. Of all the copies thus made, the most servile were the reproductions of paintings. This was due to purely technical reasons; the copies were executed by anonymous artisans by means of transfers. It is thus extremely difficult for the historian of art to decide the date of paintings of this kind. The bronzes are less puzzling, since many of them are cast by the method a cire perdue, and consequently have more originality and indeed individuality. Architecture, although to a large extent determined by the climate and the nature of the soil, shows Indian and Chinese influences. Though situated between these two countries of ancient and highly developed civilisation, and subjected to their influence, Tibet, as the great refuge of Indian Buddhism, enjoyed so great a religious prestige that it exported certain aspects of its religious art to the China of the Ming and Tsing emperors.
Temple Banners (thang-Ka).—These paintings are for the most part reproduced by means of transfers, a method used in em broidery. The transfers are applied on a piece of cotton, canvas, or more rarely silk, which has first been treated with a coating made of a mixture of glue and chalk-dust, completely smoothed by rub bing with the polished part of a sea shell. Thin silks which will not take a coating of this kind are given to experienced craftsmen who copy direct from the model without using a transfer.
Attempt at Chronological Classification.—It will be seen from the description of technical processes given above that it is an extremely difficult matter to date a Tibetan painting, unless the subject of the picture gives some chronological indication. The
main interest of a study of Tibetan paintings thus resides in a just appreciation of the antiquity of the subject represented rather than of that of the painting. One of the most ancient subjects is that treated by the somewhat rare paintings which represent the Bodhisat Siddharta, the future Buddha Sakya-muni, in the form of a young man. This is probably a pictorial representation of the celebrated statue which Sarat Chandra Das saw in the principal temple of Lhasa ; this statue will be dealt with later in the sec tion dealing with sculpture. There are certain pictures represent ing the life of the Buddha Sakya-muni, some of the many repro ductions of which are to be seen in various European museums, which are derived from Indian originals of the 9th and 1 oth cen turies. Some of the pictures representing the birth of the Bodhisat are strongly reminiscent of Indian models. The compositions based on ancient originals deal only with the principal episodes in the life of the Buddha. Taking their inspiration from these models, Tibetan artists of about the middle of the i8th century composed an abundantly illustrated life based on a biography dat ing from 1734. In these more modern pictures, however, the scenes, of which there is an infinite variety, are all represented round a central figure of the Buddha. In short, Tibetan illustra tions of the life of the Buddha may be traced to two sources, the first very ancient (9th to loth centuries), the second composed entirely by a Tibetan lama of the i8th century. The paintings of the second series show elements derived from Chinese landscape painters in the representations of scenery ; rocks are rendered by the superposition of uniform coats of blue and green, separated by gold lines. Other compositions unmistakably go back to Indian originals. Among these are the representations of the 84 great sorcerers, whose cult had been spread by means of Lamaism be yond the borders of Tibet itself. The method of representing the eighty-four sorcerers was already fixed in the 13th century, for M. P. Pelliot has discovered pictures representing them in a cave of Tuen-Huang (province of Kan-su in Western China) which was decorated during the Mongol period. The Tibetan rep resentations of these great magicians (Musee Guimet) are clearly derived from the great Indian tradition.