ul deity. This work is joined by a rare and beautiful 18th-century Bhutanese lineage tree with its progression of historical masters—one of a number of paintings emphasizing the importance of transmitted knowledge in Tibet’s oral traditions—and a depiction from the 16th or 17th century of four teachers, each with a student. Around them, tiny mahasiddhas, or tantric practitioners, giddily levitate, dance with dakinis, fly through space, and otherwise enjoy the magical fruits of their attainment.
The yidams include Green Tara, a popular Tibetan deity. In a thangka from the 1500s, she is surrounded by eight more Green Taras addressing eight perils, including water, imprisonment, and robbers—real dangers that travelers of the time would have encountered, but also metaphors for obstacles encountered on the path to enlightenment. Elsewhere are several beautiful mandalas, aids to navigating the realms of specific deities, and a wonderful 15-century painting of Dorje Jigje, a wrathful, buffalo-headed manifestation of Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom. With his eight right feet, he tramples demons, and with his left he crushes eight kinds of birds. One of them, a goose, can be seen reaching its neck around to nip at his big toe, exacting a small but no doubt painful revenge.
Sequestered in a separate gallery, the works in the show’s final, and most exciting, section depict the protectors of the dharma. These ravishing paintings, each a masterpiece, would make a knockout exhibition by themselves, and in a way, they do: they are separated from the rest of the show as they would have been separated from less esoteric images in a Tibetan temple. A 14th-century green-faced Vaisravana, the chief of the Four Heavenly Kings, in pale blue, wine, and lavender military garb and smart white boots sits flanked by eight representations of gardens, each occupied by a beautifully rendered cow. Garuda, a deity imported from pre-Buddhist Tibetan religions, appears twice: once in a finely detailed black and gold rendering from the 1700s, and once in a more folkish painting, made 200 years earlier, that emphasizes his stocky body, wild hair, and puffy feathered thighs. The final work is an 18th-century image of the Protectoress of Tibet, Palden Lhamo, who rides a prancing mule through clouds of smoke and fire.
Though extraordinarily varied, the artworks in this show are united by the vividness of the worlds and presences they depict. Their believability, paradoxically, underscores the possibility that our own world, so real to us, is itself only an illusion.
Unknown Tibet is on view at the Asia Society in New York City through May 20.
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