The Metropolitan Museum of Art is, in these darkest days of midwinter, one of the city’s spiritual hot spots, thanks to the harmonic convergence of two outstanding and very different exhibitions, both closing soon.
On a visit to the treasure-chest display called “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350,” a survey of religious art from one of Italy’s major alt-Renaissance art capitals, you’ll find yourself wandering hushed paths among grave-faced saints — ordinary people stunned into wisdom by grace.
“Siena” has been pulling in a lot of foot traffic since it opened, but another show of comparable size and beauty, “Mandalas: Mapping the Buddhist Art of Tibet,” seems to be less traveled. Celestials are gathered in force here, too. But their vibe is different. They encircle you, as if alert to your attention. They smile and snarl, boogie and plié, all against jewel-bright geometric designs that pulse with a dance-floor beat.
Mandalas — the word has roots in a Sanskrit word for “round” or “surround — come in many forms, the most common being paintings. Some 50 examples, large and small, most from the 11th to the 15th centuries, make up the bulk of this show organized by Kurt Behrendt, the Met’s associate curator of South Asian art.
Like most religious objects, mandalas are conceived to be spiritually functional, though judging by descriptions in the exhibition catalog, their function seems not to be fixed. Depending on the account, painted mandalas can serve as GPS-style guides to the cosmos; as attention-sharpening aids to meditation; and as learner’s manuals in the ways and means of personal salvation as prescribed by Buddhist disciplines.
Visually, they also have something of the character of shrines. The image in a classic mandala painting is based on a kind of architectural design: a central circular or squared shape inside a larger squared shape with doorlike openings on all four sides. You can imagine this as a diagram of a temple, or palace, or fortress.
Not coincidentally, the Met’s Lehman Wing, where the show is installed, roughly conforms to this model: It’s shaped like an angled sphere set within the four-square monument that is the Met. As you do in a Buddhist temple or with a stupa, you circumambulate it, ending where you began.
And it’s the image set at the center of the mandala structure that gives the design power. Here you find the personage — divine, human or some combination of those — to whom the work is dedicated. One of the show’s earliest large-scale works, of the kind called a thangka painting in Tibet, is a portrait of the Indian monk Atisha (A.D. 982 to A.D. 1054), who was instrumental in introducing later schools of Buddhism — Mahayana, Vajrayana — to Tibet. With his peaked cap and pudding of a face, he looks adorably babyish. But his gilt-painted skin and henna-stained hands let you know that spiritually he is an extra-special being.
Extra special too was a class of wild-and-crazy characters known as mahasiddhas (or “great adepts”). They practiced tantric Buddhism, an offshoot of Vajrayana, which espoused a counterintuitive path to salvation. To achieve it — right now, in this life, not after a string of stressful rebirths — you had to undergo a kind of moral shock therapy, which consisted of doing things you weren’t, socially speaking, supposed to do: spend your time getting high, having sex, and living rough in the streets.
The thinking was that by pushing the ethical envelope, you turned ordinary notions of badness and goodness inside out, and moved beyond them to a different, realer, nonbinary plane. In the process, you made your soul whole and, if you were lucky, gained superhuman power.
A mahasiddha named Virupa did, and in a large 13th-century thangka we see him showing it off. One day when he was drinking himself sodden in a bar, a server approached and demanded that he pay his tab by sundown, closing time. “No problem,” Virupa said, as he reached skyward, froze the sun in its path and kept guzzling. In the painting we see the miracle in action, and we also see that he’s not alone. Around him, dense as a swarm of tiny insects, float tiny images of fellow adepts engaged in all manner of outré shenanigans.
In the quest of for self-liberation, the hardest habit to break is the fear of death. Tantric Buddhism understood this, and reminders of mortality abound in its art, in images of skeletons and corpses, and in portraits of deities associated with death. Some of these beings are monstrous, dreadful to contemplate. But, again with contrarian logic, their dreadfulness is deceptive: Horror, it turns out, can be healthy.
It is so in the case of a carved wood sculpture of the apoplectically fierce-looking Yama Dharmaraja. Squat and scowling, he wears a crown of human skulls and a belt of severed heads, and has incisors as sharp as sabers. Yet he is revered as a protective presence, an action hero. His job is to oversee the mechanics of mortality (who dies when, and how), but also to defend and promote the Buddhist teachings — the dharma — that help us deal with our fear of death.
If some guardians win through intimidation, others gain power from sheer inner and outer beauty, and the Met show has several of these. One is the savior goddess Tara, as seen in a 14th-century gilt copper sculpture from Nepal. With her lithe figure and wholesome blondness, she is a Himalayan Taylor Swift, and has an avid devotional fan base to prove it. Another is the shape-shifting, multitasking bodhisattva named Avalokiteshvara. Depicted as having, in one incarnation, dozens of arms and open-palmed hands, he is an icon of generosity.
And in a 14th-century painting called “Diamond Realm Mandala,” we see a version of the heaven these beings call home. Sometimes referred to as the Pure Land, it’s imagined here as a many-tiered hall, rigorously linear in its design, sensuous in its glowing-ember colors.
It is filled with hundreds of minute figures — human, divine, everything in between — most at quiet attention (the saints of Siena would feel comfortable here), as if gathered for a stadium-scale yoga class. And embedded at the very center, small and pale as a seed pearl, is the Buddha, around whom everything turns.
By contrast with this vision of a meditational paradise, the show’s largest mandala, installed in the Lehman Wing’s skylit central atrium, is a walk-in image of an Impure Land, our 21st-century world. Titled “Biography of a Thought” and composed of four multipanel paintings and a set of handwoven carpets, the piece was created, on commission from the Met, by Tenzing Rigdol, an American artist born to Tibetan refugee parents in Nepal.
Like its historical predecessors, this mandala is a cosmic chart, but one of a cosmos in distress. Traditional Tibetan motifs of clouds and waves are here peppered with industrial spills and smokestacks. Old-style bodhisattvas share space with contemporary political martyrs and whistle-blowers.
You can read the paintings as evolving, thematically, from stillness to clamor, peace to violence. But in their circularity, they can also be read in the other direction. On the cusp of a year that promises — threatens? — enormous change, their suggestion that no direction is fixed is worth heeding, and that vigilance, guided by grace, works.
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