I have no background in the visual arts, yet when I began
my training as a thangka painter this was considered a
distinct advantage. Ngak'chang Rinpoche told me that he had tried
to teach various people to paint thangkas in the past,
and found that the creative impulse was the biggest obstacle for
people. The will toward self-expression is a handicap when it
comes to painting thangkas, and so I am fortunate in having
no interest in expressing myself in that way.
Artists are creative people with ideas
they wish to express and maybe messages they wish to convey. A
thangka painter, however, is a facilitator or a midwife
rather than an artist in the usual sense of the word. The child
delivered by a midwife is not the midwife's own child. She has
not created the child – she has simply helped a woman to give birth;
and when the child is born, her work is completed.
The parents of a thangka are emptiness and form. Emptiness is the mother
– the "unmanifest" or "creative space." Form is the father – "that
which manifests." In Vajrayana Buddhism emptiness and form relate to wisdom
and met hod. The thangka painter is a visionary midwife – through
her skill in method, she allows wisdom appearances to be born. The thangka
painter must paint from the perspective of creative space rather than painting
according to limited personal ideas.
I felt motivated to paint thangkas due to the fact that the lineage
of which Ngak'chang Rinpoche and I are the current holders desperately needed
a thangka painter – and one who could train other painters. The
visionary practices of the Aro gTér lineage needed to be preserved. Preservation
in this case actually means that they have to be brought into being, because
no painted images have survived. The Chinese invasion terminated this relatively
young Vajrayana tradition before it was disseminated beyond the encampment where
the female visionary Khyungchen Aro Lingma taught.
The Aro gTér is primarily a lineage of unusual women or "wisdom-eccentrics"
who lived either as solitary practitioners or married recluses. Khyungchen Aro
Lingma (1886 –1923) received the Aro gTér teachings through a visionary
revelation from Yeshéé Tsogyel, the female Buddha and consort of Padmasambhava.
Ngak'chang Rinpoche is the incarnation of Aro Yeshé, who was the son of Aro Lingma.
He is the current holder of the Aro gTér lineage and I am his wife. Ngak'chang
Rinpoche has given me transmission of the complete Aro gTér cycles of
teaching and practice and we now jointly hold the lineage. My participation
as a lineage holder does not lie in teaching through language either written
or in speech but through presenting the visionary image of the lineage.
Thangkas are used in Vajrayana Buddhism as a method of guiding practitioners
to experience themselves in enlightened form, to transform themselves through
"wearing the body of visions." Practitioners let go of their ordinary
sense of themselves in order to experience themselves as yidams. A yidam
is an "anthropomorphic symbol of the non-dual or enlightened state."
The appearance of such a being has the power to transform the nature of our
dualistic bewilderment.
Anyone who gains enlightenment can lend his or her appearance
as a means of transformation. Good examples are Padmasambhava
and Yeshé Tsogyel, the Tantric Buddhas. If we wish to experience
our own beginningless enlightenments we can do so through experiencing
ourselves as one of these enlightened beings. If we are able to
accomplish this totally, we can discover that we are actually
identical to them. When enlightenment is realized through them
we become what we actually are.
According to Vajrayana we are symbols of ourselves. We are all beginninglessly
enlightened beings – but because we do not recognize ourselves as
such, we exist as symbols of our enlightenment. The method of yidam is
a powerful way of accomplishing recognition. Yidams point to what we
are, through making available an "enlightened personality." The more
we practise the yidam, the more the disparity between our confused dualistic
experience and the non-dual nature of the yidam provides the friction
that burns through the illusion of duality.
This is why, in thangka painting, self-expression is an obstacle. I
am not attempting to say anything or to be creative – I am simply attempting
to be as accurate as possible in terms of portraying the visionary methods as
described in the teachings of Aro Lingma. Accuracy and complete faithfulness
to presenting the yidam is an avowed duty, because people rely upon the
images I paint to inspire them in practice. If my painting seeks to promote
my own subjectivity, I actually betray the trust of those who incorporate these
images as the most important aspects of their lives.
Our lineage Lamas, some of whom are also yidam forms, are crucial to
developing a sense of history among our students. Accounts of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century yogis and yoginis are all very well, but most students find
them a little abstract until a picture emerges. They then become flesh and blood
people – they become relatives. It is as if one were looking at photographs
of ones grandparents. That is my aim – to bring the tradition alive
for people, but not to impose myself on the images.
Ngak'chang Rinpoche works with me quite closely on new images – especially
where there is no clear iconographic reference. It is something of a mutual
process that is mainly intuitive and non-directive on either of our parts. This
is especially the case when I am trying to draw a face. It is more a case of
looking for a face through the medium of moving a pencil. I know when I have
found the face when it stops looking like a created face. A created face has
a mouth, eyes and a nose that give the impression of having been assigned their
places. The real face has its own personality and I am aware that something
has happened. Ngak'chang Rinpoche and I always know when the face is there – we
have never disagreed.
The interesting thing about the lack of self-expression in thangka painting
is that one cannot actually help expressing oneself. I now teach a small group
of our female students thangka painting, and we have a painting retreat
once a year. Each painter is distinct in her style, even though she is trying
to maintain a style that is characteristic of the Aro gTér lineage in
the West.
The thangkas I paint and that our students paint are more vivid in
terms of colour than the traditional Tibetan images. Our style has emerged as
a response to the visionary material itself, and so the Aro gTér style
is characterized by the dominance of the five elemental colours. A thangka
is intended to depict the pure light display of the elements: earth (yellow),
water (white), fire (red), air (green)and space (blue) – and so these
colours should be vivid. There are various schools or traditions of thangka
painting and they all differ according to certain considerations. Some people
have thought that my style represents a westernization – but this is a
misunderstanding of the reasoning behind the greater vividness and simplicity
of the images. The ideal thangka would be a holographic light image suspended
in space, so I attempt to portray the translucency of that visionary dimension
as faithfully as I can.
In order to be invisible as a painter I need to fail to observe myself painting.
Painting simply needs to happen. There is concentration – but the concentration
cannot be forced. I must be relaxed as well – but not sloppy or absent-minded.
When concentration and relaxation are undivided, the lines flow. If I become
self-conscious, the drawing becomes like wading through mud.
The sense of accurate observation I try to achieve is one that could be described
as spacious and honest. I need to work quite hard to make progress, especially
with a new drawing, but I cannot allow myself to become impatient or frustrated.
Like a midwife, I need to allow the image to be born, and sometimes – especially
with the initial line drawing, that can take a long time. There is no guarantee
once the paper goes into labour when the point of birth will occur. I start
with a written description of the yidam and maybe other references, which
generally guide the emerging form. When working from a visionary source, however,
this information is only half of the equation – the "form aspect."
There is then the "emptiness aspect", for which there is no description.
One might call that creativity, of course – but not if one considers
oneself to be a visionary midwife.
Maybe there is no difference in terms of pure creativity between a thangka
painter and an artist – apart from how one sees oneself and one's engagement.
If I were to polish a piece of copper until I could see my face in it – it
may be a perfect work of polishing, but each individual would see a different
face. Everyone who practises using a thangka that I have painted could
experience his or her own enlightened mind, but the reflective surface, the
yidam, is not my creation – I merely polished that mirror.
In polishing a mirror or painting a thangka, the most important consideration
is to avoid distortion, so that whoever gazes into the mirror sees their enlightened
nature – face to face.
