Portraits of Two Lineage Masters of the Kagyu Order: Phagmo Drupa (1110–1170) and Tashipel (1142–1210)
1273
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Portraits of Two Lineage Masters of the Kagyu Order: Phagmo Drupa (1110–1170) and Tashipel (1142–1210) is a 1273 unspecified by Unknown, depicting Central Tibet, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see two Tibetan monks in red robes sitting side by side, teaching. Above them floats a tiny gray-haired lama in a golden circle, watching. These are real people: high-ranking teachers from the 1100s. The monk on the right started a big monastery in Lhasa. The painting is a *thangka*—a devotional cloth scroll meant to be rolled up and carried. It’s not just art; it’s a record of who taught whom. To see more like this, look up *central Tibet*.
High-level leaders of Buddhist monastic institutions were frequent portrait subjects of early thangka painting (devotional cloth scrolls) in Central Tibet. The lama (Tibetan monk) on the right founded Taklung Monastery in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, which became an important institutional center of the Kagyu order. He is shown in discourse with his predecessor, whose teacher Gampopa (1079–1153), in turn, is the tiny gray-haired lama centered above them, between the colorful stylized mountain ranges. Their halos, lotus pedestal, and thrones with spitting elephant-trunked crocodiles and…
The Five Cosmic Buddhas in their six-armed forms are aligned at the top.
Read the full account in the museum source.
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