To view a statue carved by the Busshi—a community of Japanese sculptors who create intricate wooden replicas of Buddhas and bodhisattvas—is to view a style of sculpture that has been virtually unchanged for nearly 1,400 years.

In Yujiro Seki’s documentary Carving the Divine: Buddhist Sculptures of Japan—which is currently available to watch for free as part of Tricycle‘s Film Club series—viewers get an inside look at how the Busshi have passed on their meticulous carving techniques from generation to generation. The film introduces us to Master Koun Seki, who has devoted his life to his craft while also running a school for apprentices and other emerging artists. Watching Master Seki interact with his pupils, viewers quickly learn that the craft requires immense dedication.

Tricycle spoke with Yujiro Seki about this ancient art form and its preservation.

How would you describe the traditions of the Busshi to those who are unfamiliar with this community?
Simply put, Busshi are the practitioners of a 1,400-year-old lineage of Buddhist wood carving that’s at the heart of Japanese Buddhism. The Busshi tradition was most likely introduced by the artisans from the Asian continent, one of whom was Tori Busshi, in the mid-seventh century. At first, the styles of Japanese Buddhist sculptures were very similar to their contemporaries from China and Korea, and the primary material they used was bronze instead of wood. But around the 11th century, because of Japan’s diplomatic break from China and the advent of a legendary Busshi named Jocho, among other factors, Japanese Busshi began producing their own style, called Wayo style.

Even today, the craft of a Busshi differs considerably from Western notions of creativity. Busshi are almost always required to create the exact figures that have been established by generations of predecessors—though Carving the Divine features one great exception to this rule. This rootedness in tradition has led to an almost unbelievable level of technique and stylistic refinement among Busshi. Throughout history, Busshi have worked closely with the government, temples, wealthy patrons, and middle-class laypeople. Undoubtedly, the Busshi tradition is one of the greatest legacies of Japan.

What inspired you to create a film about these carvers?
Making a documentary about Busshi was the last thing I had in mind when I was younger. I am a son of a butsudan (Buddhist altar/furniture) maker. When I was little, I was surrounded by Buddhist objects: furniture, statues, incense, shrines, and so on. My father took me to temples all the time, where he’d meet with clients, so I didn’t think there was anything special about the environment I grew up in. It was just a part of family business.

When I became a young adult, I grew fascinated with the art of cinema and came to the United States to pursue the path of a filmmaker. By being so far away from home, interacting with people from different cultures and seeing different kinds of art, I finally realized that the environment that I grew up in was special, and developed a new appreciation for Buddhist art.

I found that modern Busshi would be the perfect subject to put my heart into. Though many aspects of Japanese culture have been appreciated by the Western world, the Busshi tradition remains virtually unknown outside of Japan. Since my family had been in the Buddhist furniture and statues business for so long, I had access to the Busshi world. I knew my Japanese identity would allow me to make a movie few others could, and believed my American sensibility help me share it effectively with a Western audience.

Do people training to become Busshi spend a lot time studying Buddhist teachings and texts?
I’m sorry to dispel idealized notions of the Buddhist carver, but at least in initially developing one’s craft, having a deep understanding of Buddhism has nothing to do with becoming a successful carver.

In order to complete the “hard training,” as it’s called, having talent, patience, and perseverance are basic prerequisites. But I did find it interesting that, just like learning a language, the younger the apprentice, the faster he or she was generally able to learn about this craft. If you become wrapped up in your ego and refuse to suppress your anger and disobey your master, you make little progress and will quickly be dismissed.  The only way to survive is to diligently listen to your master even if you think they are wrong. So whereas I didn’t see much connection between pupils’ purported passion for Buddhism and their success at carving, the Buddhist values of patience, of overcoming the ego, and the conscious negation of suffering would all be very valuable to a Busshi in training.

How do novices adapt to this lifestyle where they are expected to be so obedient?
The Busshi culture is the epitome of a micro-authoritarian society, where the hierarchical structure is firmly established and there is no place for negotiation. The master holds power almost like that of a god. You must always obey your master—period. Below the masters, there are various degrees of seniors. If you are a novice, you cannot disobey the seniors. If you’re bullied you can talk to your master, but most of the time you must tolerate unreasonable living circumstances. It is common for novices to not even be allowed to work on wood, but constantly be kept busy with menial work for a quite some time.

Yes, the biggest challenge is to suppress your emotions, go with the flow of things, and accept the tradition as it is.

I was struck by one quote by one of the senior sculptors who essentially says that younger artists should try their hardest to attract foreign interest in their work because Japanese people tend to overlook Buddhist art, as they are desensitized to it. Have you found that to be the case?
Though this statement could be a mere opinion of one person, I believe it contains some brutal truth. As Japanese people, we grow up with treasures around us—to the extent that it’s hard to appreciate them because we see them all the time. I am a perfect example of this: I grew up seeing Japanese Buddhist objects more than an average Japanese person because of my family’s business, and I didn’t have any appreciation for them, because while they were amazing, they were also so familiar. It wasn’t until I left Japan, lived abroad, and saw Japan from the outside that I developed a new appreciation for Buddhist art.

Related: Kamakura Craftsmanship

It’s very difficult for Japanese people to see what’s truly in front of them in these sculptures. And the fact there’s still a craftsman occupation called a Busshi—artisans who make and fix these sculptures—never even crosses the mind of most Japanese people today.

Nonetheless, this is an artistic tradition that needs to be more widely appreciated to be kept alive. So I think this statement by the Busshi in the film is not about forgetting Japanese opinion and only seeking the approval from abroad, but leveraging recognition from abroad to remind Japanese people of the treasures that lie in front of them.

Update (1/23/2019): Yujiro Seki has changed the name of his documentary from Carving the Divine: The Way of Būshi, Buddhist Sculptors of Japan to Carving the Divine: Buddhist Sculptors of Japan. He has also switched the English spelling of the Japanese word Būshi in his film to the more commonly used Busshi. (Not to be confused with bushi, another term for samurai.) The article has been updated to reflect these changes.

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This article was originally published on June 1st, 2018.

The post Carving the Buddha—the Same Way—for 1,400 Years appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

This past September, artist Ines Sun was teaching Chinese calligraphy in a large outdoor tent in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park. As one of the park’s 2023 Artists in Residence, the Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist demonstrated nature-based characters and traditional posture, breathing, and brushwork with a deft hand and grounded presence, seemingly undisturbed by the strong winds that would periodically lift participants’ paper from their tables. With an enthusiastic and nonjudgmental instructional style, Sun’s teaching was less about commanding her pupils and more about the power of suggestion, as if pointing out a beautiful vista that they might care to enjoy. In a welcoming atmosphere of artistic grace and play, students of all ages dropped into the moment to experiment with their designs. This public engagement is crucial to Sun’s overall practice and conveys her bodhisattva-like approach to making art. “I see my art, including painting and installations, as a service to all,” she says.  

The stroke of a calligraphy brush flows long and deep throughout Sun’s life. As a child growing up in Taiwan, her grandfather taught her the foundations of calligraphy, a skill that was also transmitted to her father. She recalls growing up surrounded by Chinese brush paintings of flowers and birds, and how her grandfather wrote short poems in ink to express “frustration with the Communists.” (Her parents were born in China, but her grandparents felt the need to move their families to Taiwan “because of the Communist takeover.”) 

While a multidisciplinary artist, Sun’s interest in calligraphy can be seen all throughout her life’s body of work, including her practice of calligraphy as a “purification” ritual done before engaging in oil painting sessions, her workshops teaching Chinese calligraphy through regular copying of the Heart Sutra, along with her most experiential offering: the Mobile TeaHouse.

An Ephemeral Oasis

The Mobile TeaHouse installation is a one-on-one encounter with Sun that combines ink tutorials with a tea ceremony inside a temporary space, typically shaped by silk walls, sashes, and curtains, often incorporating Sun’s paintings, which can feature lush depictions of nature. Beginning with the Brooklyn Art Fair in 2011, Sun has now created the Mobile TeaHouse (sometimes referred to as a tea garden or hut) installation seven times, including at Taiwan’s Lanyang Museum and Suho Memorial Paper Museum, and at the Tenri Gallery in New York City’s Greenwich Village. 

“I transform and quiet myself down through drinking tea and calligraphy,” Sun says. “[And so] I realized, I can simplify this and share it with other people so they can find peace within themselves.”

Throughout the teahouse’s various incarnations, Sun has experimented with format and ambiance, collaborating with different artists working in sound, stone, as well as textiles, including silk art master Akihiko Izukura. As part of this installation series, Sun created the Heaven and Earth TeaHouse (“天地茶屋” or “TianDiChaWu”), in which a participant spends fifteen minutes in silence with the artist engaging in a silent meditative ritual, inspired, at least in part, by her knowledge of Japanese tea ceremonies. “I got rid of the Japanese part,” she says, “but I used that rhythm; I kept the discipline and the movement.” Sun explains her project further: 

“People gradually focus on my movement because there’s rhythm to it…I make them tea and we drink. [Then we start] grinding ink, [which is done in] a circular movement that usually quiets people down immediately. When they start to write, even if they don’t know Chinese, there’s something about touching the brush to the paper—it helps you connect with your being, and you have to pay attention. It’s body and mind.” 

A Unique Combination

The Mobile TeaHouse is a synthesis of Ines Sun’s specific life experiences: her familial tradition of Chinese calligraphy, her study of contemporary painting, and her years spent running a for-profit tea room in New York. 

In 1995, Sun studied oil painting and Abstract Expressionism at The Art Students League of New York with Frank O’Cain, a teacher who she says changed her life. This training is evident in her gestural brushwork and larger-than-life scale. Much like the Chinese calligraphers before them, action painters emphasize present-moment awareness, forming another powerful vein of Sun’s artistic lineage.

Beginning in 1998, Sun led the Wild Lily Tea Room, for close to a decade, complete with a small fish pond nestled on a bustling street in Chelsea. The Wild Lily Tea Room was a huge success for Sun in many ways, and yet, still, she sensed there was something missing. Sun wanted to change her life in a way that would deepen her artistic practice as well as her inner life; “my spiritual world was developing,” she says, “but I didn’t know how to anchor it.”

On a chance visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sun encountered Chinese calligraphy characters in the Asian Art section and immediately felt a pull to reconnect with her family’s heritage. Sun realized, “I have to go back to the root to dig out all of the treasure.” In 2007, she closed her tea room for good and moved with her husband and two daughters to China, where Sun studied calligraphy and brush painting.

This transition was not without its complications. “It was conflicting to see the Communist flag swinging in the wind outside of the classroom window, [the flag of the party] that tortured my grandfather, [the one] who taught me calligraphy,” Sun says. In spite of this feeling, her eighteen-month immersion in Chinese brushwork was very fruitful, initiating an ongoing series of lotus paintings exhibited in multiple international shows, including, most recently, in 2022 at the Painting Center in Chelsea. The lotus is an enduring symbol in Chinese brush painting as well as across Buddhism. Given that her Chinese name is “Sun, Tsai Hua” (blossom flower), the subject seems more than apt.

After focusing so intently on her own artistic development, Sun still felt that something was missing in her life. She began to feel guilty for having spent so much time focused on developing her own skills and less on helping others. To find an answer, Sun embraced a Zen-like practice of nondoing and silent contemplation by simply sitting in her thinking chair. “I call it a thinking chair, but I don’t [really] think,” Sun says. “I kind of [just] rest, but an idea will come up naturally, and one day, this mobile teahouse idea just came [into my mind]: you can put it everywhere, and people can participate; it’s like the Wild Lily Tea Room, but it’s free.” And so the Mobile TeaHouse was conceived. “Buddhas had been knocking on my door, and, this time, I listened.”

Bodhicitta in the Pandemic

Through mobile teahouses and calligraphy workshops, Sun offers contemplative experiences in-person and online, often for free or by donation. Her public offerings ramped up during the pandemic when she lived near several hospitals in a busy area of Brooklyn, where the sound of ambulances “didn’t stop, and you knew somebody in that ambulance was not going to be able to come home.”

Wanting to be of service, Sun decided to offer more creative opportunities for her local community, with an emphasis on Chinese calligraphy instruction. At first, she concentrated on virtual classes, before masking up to teach while social distancing in city parks. “The practice to arouse bodhicitta worked its way to an extreme during this time,” Sun says. Through a series of grants awarded to her, Sun was able to hold pop-up classes in an unused storefront in Brooklyn, which allowed her to introduce Chinese calligraphy to a diverse set of seniors from the area.

On visits home to Taiwan, Sun often borrowed her father’s books and copied the characters for calligraphy practice, including from the Diamond Sutra by Liu Gongquan. “Gradually, the power of the text [and] the dharma [together] started to work its magic. I copied the sutra three times alone and many times with others.” Sun led workshop participants in sutra writing, including during the pandemic, when they dedicated the Heart Sutra to those who had passed away. She also dedicated community sutra writing to the victims of the war in Ukraine, of local gun violence, and to all of those suffering, sometimes even taking requests for dedications. She still offers a weekly open Zoom “Sutra Collective” every Wednesday night. These public classes allow Sun to be more grateful and generous with her time. 

“It’s nice to see people try and take risks,” Sun says. She remembers a specific child’s brushwork from September in the Shenandoah Mountains. “He does a mountain and a river, and I [can] see the old soul coming out from that stroke…it’s very powerful,” Sun tells Tricycle. This type of volunteer work helps Sun to feel more complete in her practice. She notes, “A lot of times, it’s me receiving the gift.”

For Sun, this appreciative, bodhisattva nature also extends to the smaller, more subtle moments of her existence. In the garden, “to cut the flower and put it in front of Buddha…or to have my tea and my bun, this is a perfect match, and it makes me so happy…the little things—that’s life.”

The post Escape into This Brooklyn Artist’s Mobile TeaHouse appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In the spring of 2017, Kobori Geppo, the abbot of Daitokuji Ryokoin, a Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan, traveled to San Francisco for a conference. During the trip, he and his followers paid a visit to the city’s Asian Art Museum, which at the time was preparing two different exhibits on Buddhist art: “Flower Power,” about the symbolism of plants in contemporary paintings, sculptures, and pop art; and “A Billion Buddhas,” about the portrayal of the Buddha in Tibetan culture. 

Charmed by the museum’s warm welcome, the abbot made its curators an offer they could have neither foreseen nor refused. Back in Japan, inside the heavily guarded storage facility of the Kyoto National Museum, Daitokuji Temple kept a painting by the legendary Chinese artist and monk Mu Qi. Known as Six Persimmons, this abstract still life of autumn fruit had long been regarded as the Mona Lisa of Zen Buddhism, its enlightened composition pointing observers in the direction of nirvana. Made during the 13th century, it was famous for its beauty as well as its inaccessibility, having never been displayed outside of Japan, until now.

“The abbot chose us,” Laura Allen, the Asian Art Museum’s chief curator of Japanese art, clarifies over Zoom. “We are very honored that he thought of us as the right venue,” adds assistant curator Yuki Morishima, who together with Allen turned Daitokuji’s proposal into an exhibit titled “The Heart of Zen.” Running from November 17, 2023 until December 31, it will first show Six Persimmons, followed by another, slightly less iconic but equally hypnotizing still life Chestnuts. In addition to outlining Mu Qi’s global reception, the once-in-a-lifetime exhibit will answer an initially bewildering question: whether his paintings are truly the spiritual masterpieces we think they are. 

Mu Qi—also spelled Muqi or Muxi, and sometimes called Fachang—was a Chan Buddhist monk who lived during the final days of the Southern Song dynasty. Largely ignored by his home country—one Chinese text from 1365 refers to his work as “coarse, ugly, and lacking in ancient techniques”—his unconventionally atmospheric brushwork and preference for seemingly mundane subjects acquired a devoted following in Japan, where they would influence painting for centuries to come. 

Mu Qi’s rise in popularity is understandable, as even today his deceptively simplistic paintings possess a calming aura that cannot be easily replicated. In the case of Persimmons, this effect derives from the image’s seemingly spontaneous but actually quite meticulous construction. Foregoing the realistic detail that defines many a Western still life, the monk allows his fruits to float inside an empty space. By creating contrast between size and color, he further manages to produce a composition that is diverse yet unified, energetic but balanced.

The longer you stare at the painting, the more its design appears to illustrate concepts central to Zen Buddhism, including groundlessness. Persimmons are a powerful metaphor for human mortality. Harvested during the fall—a season of death and dying—the bittersweet-tasting fruit (described as a combination of mango, cinnamon, and roasted pepper) ripens just before it begins to rot, and can be dried and preserved to make candy. 

Rendering the fruits’ exteriors with single, circular strokes, Mu Qi evidently wanted to evoke the ensō, a Buddhist symbol of strength, connectedness, letting go of expectations, and embracing imperfection in yourself and others. Read from left to right and right to left, the arrangement of the persimmons also seems to suggest the cycle of life, with small, white fruits giving way to bigger, darker ones. As Chinese art historian Friedrich Zettl observes in his blog: 

“We enter the world with nothing as if coming from the light. In our early years, we are innocent and inexperienced (persimmon #2 from left), but full of vitality. During adolescence, we start at the very bottom (#3), looking up to our superiors. It’s worth noting that the perspective of #3 is from above, emphasizing our inferiority. We reach the zenith of our life and work (#4) and become superiors ourselves. From then on, it’s a downhill journey until we leave this life with nothing.”

Zettl goes on to note that Mu Qi chose a subject that had not yet been depicted in Chinese painting. Free of the cultural connotations that tied down paintings of bamboo and blossoms, Six Persimmons could not be scrutinized for hidden meaning, observed only for what it was. 

And yet, when approached from a Buddhist perspective, even this explicit lack of symbolism becomes, in a way, highly symbolic. Just as Zen Buddhists favor meditation over the study of scripture and sutra, so does Mu Qi’s still life depict an object without imposing a narrative. 

The still life also evokes what Zen practitioners refer to as nonconceptual understanding. “Contrast Muqi’s Persimmons with Song paintings that make literary, poetic, historic references,” another Chinese art historian, the late James Cahill, once explained in a lecture at the University of California, Berkeley. “In Zen, viewer and viewed do not stand apart, but occupy a continuum. Chan artists cut though the overlays of style and literary references to present direct, unmediated image without intrusion of styles.”

For a long time, Cahill’s interpretation of the painting—as an unrivaled illustration of Zen teachings—reigned supreme, so much so that, to this day, many of its admirers are shocked to learn about its original reception in feudal Japan. Although certainly revered, none of this reverence was directed toward its spiritual subtext. Rather, Persimmons was appreciated for its aesthetic and aesthetic alone. Its first Japanese owners, the well-to-do Tsuda family, used it as a decoration for their tea ceremonies, held in a period when the beverage started to be accompanied by fruits and nuts. Seldom looked at directly, the still life remained in the background, contributing to the mood instead of the conversation. 

Persimmons arrived in Japan when Zen Buddhism was still restricted to monasteries, exerting little influence on wider Japanese culture. The painting became associated with Zen only once its audience had become acquainted with the movement as well. In a 2021 study published in the Korean Journal of Art History, art historian Heeyeun Kang of Seoul National University argues that the Japanese upper class began to promote Persimmons as the poster child of Zen Buddhism as part of a larger project to “emphasize Zen as their [national] identity.”

When Zen started catching on in the West, too, critic Okakura Tenshin proclaimed that Zen culture, forgotten in its native China, had become inextricably Japanese in character. Fellow critic Aimi Kōu used Okakura’s sentiment to essentially rewrite their country’s cultural history, starting with a fateful reconsideration of Six Persimmons. “Only the artist with a thorough experience of Zen could have achieved such sureness of effect with such apparently simple means,” echoed Yasuichi Awakawa’s decisively titled book Zen Painting, published in 1970. In Persimmons, the philosopher Hisamatsu Shin’ichi asserted, the true Buddha appeared as the “Formless Self,” awakened to existence’s inherent emptiness. 

By the early 1900s, Mu Qi’s painting had become such an unequivocal emblem of Japan that the government declared it an “Important Cultural Property” despite its foreign origin.  

Japan’s Zen-centered reappraisal of Persimmons was blindly accepted by Western scholars like Cahill, who himself was one of the most prominent sinologists of his time. Beating him to it, though, was the equally influential orientalist, Arthur Waley, whose 1922 essay “Zen Buddhism, and Its Relationship to the Arts” described the still life as “passion (…) congealed into a stupendous calm.” Providing contested support through the writings of a 12th-century monk named Dogen, Swiss translator Helmut Brinker later referred to Mu Qi’s fruits as “ciphers of transcendence.” 

Studying Japan’s treatment of Mu Qi not only prevents us from drawing erroneous conclusions from his work but also helps us better understand the role of art in Zen. In reality, notes one of the didactic texts at the “Heart of Zen” exhibit, paintings like Persimmons “live side by side at Zen temples with myriad visual objects: colorful priest portraits, traditional Buddhist icons, incense burners, tea wares, and ecclesiastical robes among them. Encountering them together, we can honor the heterogeneous nature of monastic experience, as well as the multiple lives and reception of objects over time.”

But even though Six Persimmons wasn’t initially received as a Buddhist masterpiece, that doesn’t mean it cannot resonate with the viewer’s own spiritual journey. Having seen the painting only in the form of reproductions, Morishima, the assistant curator of “Heart of Zen,” readily recalls her excitement when coming face-to-face with the real deal. Staring at the paths of individual brushstrokes, unbroken and confident, and sensing the weight of the empty space around the fruits, one simply cannot help but feel a certain calm. Maybe it’s a placebo effect, brought on by the painting’s inescapable reputation. Maybe it’s real and authentic, and, as such, one the reasons the Tsuda family kept it around for so long. 

The post The Untold History of ‘Everybody’s Favorite Zen Painting’ appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 initially caught my eye because of how much I enjoyed the humor-filled interstellar action of the first two films in the series. And while I knew beforehand that this movie would center more on Rocket—the anthropomorphic raccoon who is both a Guardian and former mercenary—I came away pleasantly taken aback by its explicit engagement with animal rights and liberation. In a Marvel franchise characterized by irreverence and flashy galactic battles, the third installment carries the unexpected and bodhisattva-like message to save all beings, even the nonhuman ones.

The movie opens with a cage full of baby raccoons in a dark, dingy lab. One kit is pulled from the cage for experimentation, and the scene then transitions out of the past to present-day Rocket Raccoon, revealing metal implants and scars all over his body. Rocket is critically injured shortly thereafter but cannot receive treatment due to a proprietary “kill switch” wired into his heart by the bioengineering company that created him. While his fellow Guardians race to unlock the code that would allow them to treat Rocket’s wounds and prevent his death, the movie fills in his backstory as an escaped laboratory experiment for the High Evolutionary, a scientist seeking to perfect the universe. The High Evolutionary created a planet called Counter-Earth with the aim of populating it with peaceful and intelligent humanoid inhabitants, but he first needs to recapture Rocket so he can harvest his highly intelligent brain and perfect his latest batch of specimens. And even though a perfect society is sought, viewers are pushed to consider if it’s worth the cost of countless animal lives discarded along the way as failed experiments.

Like some of the other main characters—such as Gamora and Drax—Rocket’s past is filled with suffering and pain. Yet unlike the others, Rocket’s story also highlights concerns surrounding nonviolence and compassion for all beings, beckoning viewers to consider their positions regarding the treatment of those who aren’t human and how they might work toward saving them. Buddhist ethics regarding the treatment of nonhuman animals generally follows the same perspective concerning human animals, grounded in the first of the five precepts—don’t take life, don’t cause life to be taken, and don’t encourage or facilitate the taking of life—and ahimsa (nonviolence), often phrased as “do no harm.” In his chapter on animal ethics in The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Ethics, Paul Waldau indicates that committing to the first precept amounts to “a conscious effort to refrain from intentional[ly] killing any living being” and that it “requires one to notice, and then take seriously, one’s nonhuman neighbors.” That’s certainly a unique imperative to consider in a series predicated on the protection and guarding of the galaxy’s inhabitants—since many of them aren’t human—and the focus on caged animals that demand the same level of compassion as humanlike species illustrates this well.

Ever since Rocket’s initial escape from the lab many years ago—during which he witnessed the murder of his friends and fellow test subjects—he shut out his painful past and even distanced himself from identifying with his own kind, becoming enraged if anyone called him a raccoon. It’s not until the end of the movie that Rocket decides to stop running from the suffering of his past so he can rescue others. After the Guardians board the High Evolutionary’s ship, he tells them to “save all the higher life-forms” while he heads to the control room. As he’s wandering through the ship, he finds himself face-to-face with cages of animals waiting to be experimented on—including a cage filled with baby raccoons that is all too reminiscent of his own imprisonment years earlier. In Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh’s book on Buddhist ethics, For a Future to Be Possible, he explains that it’s through suffering that compassion is born. “Our real enemy is forgetfulness,” he states, so we must stay in touch with that suffering and nourish an awareness of it so compassion can grow, which is exactly what stirs Rocket to action in that scene and shifts his perspective: a palpable reminder of the similarly grisly treatment he had pushed away. With tears in his eyes, Rocket uses the same key card he created for his own escape—having held on to it his whole life—and frees the raccoons and other animals along with the latest Counter-Earth candidates: children of a species that look and act very human.

Once all the children are off the ship and the High Evolutionary is defeated, Gamora tells the Guardians that they need to go, but Rocket replies, “We have to save them.” Peter Quill, the group’s leader, tells him they already have “all the kids on board,” to which Rocket replies, “No, Pete. The rest of them.” When all the additional animals start jumping onto the Guardians’ ship, one of the crew members assisting with the rescue remarks, “I thought we were limiting ourselves to the higher life-forms.” “Me too,” Quill replies, suggesting he still isn’t convinced that their rescue is warranted. Even Rocket’s fellow Guardians, who flew across the galaxy to try to save him, fail to extend compassion to the other nonhuman animals aboard the ship—and Rocket comes to the realization only after he encounters the room full of cages. In many ways, Rocket’s journey symbolizes the bodhisattva vow to save all beings and the cultivation of bodhicitta (arising of the awakening mind)—which is foundational along that path—as self-concern gives way to selfless concern for others. And his newfound dedication to taking seriously that shared, interrelated preference to avoid suffering and experience joy noticeably aligns with the outlook of biocentric ethicists: the recognition of inherent worth of all beings, of which humans are merely one species among many.

Resonating with Thich Nhat Hanh’s remarks above, the movie also points to the need to maintain a close connection to the suffering that exists in the world if we are to work toward transforming it. Animal testing isn’t public for a reason. It’s characteristically inhumane, and seeing it take place can be harrowing. But that’s also exactly why organizations like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Animal Liberation Front (ALF), and Last Chance for Animals (LCA) include footage of their raids or undercover operations in their campaigns and rescue announcements—to not only demonstrate what’s actually taking place but also to appeal to the emotive response of a public seeing what discreetly, if not secretly, takes place in the industries structuring our societies. 

After the young Rocket is first taken and experimented on, he’s returned to a cage with the top of his scalp exposed, implying that his brain had been subjected to some sort of manipulation. It’s at that moment when viewers hear his strained, first spoken word: “huurrttss.” This scene of a raccoon with a stitched and shaven scalp shaking in pain is eerily similar to one of the more famous rescues from the early days of documented raids: Britches, the stump-tailed macaque monkey whose eyes were sewn shut at birth and affixed to a device that “let out a constant screeching sound” as part of a sleep deprivation study. Although Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is a work of science fiction, the use-value relationship between scientist and specimen continues every day, and the movie brings us closer to that very real suffering, violence, and taking of life. And it’s important to reiterate that Rocket’s shift from wanting to just save the “higher life-forms” to setting out to save “the rest of them” doesn’t occur until he stumbles into an all-too-familiar cage-filled room on the High Evolutionary’s ship and sees the trapped animals. But simply feeling compassion isn’t quite enough, Thich Nhat Hanh adds. “We have to learn to express it” through understanding and insight. 

Such an imperative might call for a mindful release of laboratory animals suffering in the confines of their cells. But we need to eliminate the possibility of even getting to that stage to begin with—and I think Rocket would agree. In a flashback scene showing the members of his test group coming up with names for themselves, viewers finally get an explanation for “Rocket”: “Someday, I’m gonna make great machines that fly, and me and my friends are gonna go flying together into the forever and beautiful sky; Lylla, and Teefs, and Floor, and me…Rocket.” 

As Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 brings us closer to the suffering of nonhuman beings—and animals that are experimented on—to remind us that they too deserve compassion and freedom from suffering, Rocket piloting those he cares about through a forever and beautiful sky becomes a great analogy for the bodhisattva-like resemblance suggested above. But until that requisite freedom is fully recognized—until we notice and take seriously our nonhuman neighbors in a way that the first precept entails—the world will continue to be built upon the violation of those who will never catch a glimpse of anything as endless or magnificent as what Rocket dreamed. 

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We came to Nepal as pilgrims. From the US, Canada, and Hong Kong, we came to dance and sing in the power places of the Kathmandu Valley—also known as the Nepal Mandala. A mandala is an archetypal blueprint of a pure land, or sacred realm of a deity. This fertile valley at the foot of the great Himalayan range has been coined by Buddhist scholar Keith Dowman as “the playground of the Himalayan gods” due to countless myths of divine beings taking place at its many sites. Thus, the Nepal Mandala is considered to be a major power place graced by divine presence and visited by many Buddhist sages, yogis, and pilgrims throughout the ages. We came to connect with the energy of this place, to revitalize it with our own joyful devotion, and to spark an interior journey. What that inner journey would be, I could not predict.

We were a group of practitioners of Charya Nritya, the Newar Vajrayana practice, more than a thousand years old, of singing and dancing as a spiritual discipline. (Newar refers to the indigenous people and culture of the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal.) Our teacher is Prajwal Ratna Vajracharya, a 35th-generation Newar Vajrayana priest. Prajwal (as we call him) was born and raised within the nonmonastic, priestly Vajracharya caste in Kathmandu, at a time when knowledge of the Charya Nritya traditions was waning. This decline was due to the secrecy of the practices, political challenges of existing in a Hindu-majority country, and modernization. At an early age, Prajwal was instructed by his father, the renowned priest and scholar Ratna Kaji Vajracharya, to take their teachings out into the world and make them public. In fulfillment of that charge, Prajwal now lives and teaches at the Nritya Mandala Mahavihara in Portland, Oregon, which he cofounded in 2009. 

As world travel started to reopen after COVID-19 lockdowns, Prajwal decided it was time to return to his homeland and demonstrate to the local community how their traditions have been embraced and taken root in the West. We would be invigorating our own practice by connecting with the people, geography, rituals, art, and architecture that formed and framed the traditions we had learned from him.

The Kathmandu Valley is a fifteen-mile-long, elliptical-shaped mandala protected by the great Himalayan range to the north and tropical jungles to the south. Within this protected valley, Newar Buddhism, with its highly ritualistic blend of Himalayan and Indian cultural elements and Sanskrit liturgies, has remained intact since medieval times. It offers a uniquely sensorial experience of the dharma through physical practices, from creating individual pictorial mandalas during rituals to sacred dancing during deity meditation.

Deep reverence for and worship of the divine feminine as the mother-goddess, or devi, pervades both the Buddhist and Hindu religious views in this mandala. Even the exquisitely carved wooden roof-struts on Newar temples and many secular buildings pay visual homage to the endless array of goddesses wielding their innumerable gifts and weapons. In fact, the goddesses (as struts) literally emerge from the building exteriors to hold up the roof!

In Newar Buddhism, the sacred feminine frequently takes the form of Vajrayogini. Her name means “Adamantine Yogini,” and she manifests a pure and utterly blissful state of indestructible enlightenment. Her naked, red, dancing body marks her as a dynamic and joyful agent of transformation. As the supreme female Buddha of the tantric pantheon, she appears in multiple emanations, and the valley is saturated with her presence and energy. She is the central focus for much esoteric meditation and ritual—though on a mundane level, she is worshiped as a source of beneficence and blessing. Her presence is so pervasive that the sacred places devoted to her worship form their own mandala—a yogini mandala—within the greater Nepal Mandala.

Four yogini temples make up this yogini mandala: Pharping Vajrayogini Temple, Sankhu Khadga Yogini Temple, Pashupatinath Guhyeshwari Temple, and Bijeshwori Temple. Each temple honors a different form of the deity.

In Buddhist iconography, each of Vajrayogini’s forms is rendered naked, wearing only jewel and bone ornaments that sway and ripple as she moves. Her red color radiates energetic, creative power. Her left hand holds a drinking vessel made from a human skull from which she drinks blood, which she transforms into ambrosia. Meanwhile, her right hand holds a flaying knife (drigud) used to chop up dead bodies in cemeteries to feed to the animals—a reminder to dismember our own dualistic thinking and fixed notions. In fact, the yogini’s ornaments and implements are all remnants from the cemetery—a common locale for tantric meditation—with its reminders of death and impermanence to be converted into tools of spiritual practice leading to transformation.

I had learned the Vajrayogini charya dance a year prior to our trip. The goddess’s assured movements wielding her transformational tools (skull-bowl and chopper), conveying decisive action in the service of fearless presence, had powered me through a year of unimaginable challenges. I had emerged victorious, and I brought my personal experience of dancing Vajrayogini to her mandala. 

We made the hour’s drive to the town of Pharping, about nineteen kilometers south of Kathmandu. This major Buddhist pilgrimage destination was packed with devotees of Vajrayogini bringing offerings—colored powders, food, flowers, incense, butter lamps, money—and seeking blessings at her temple. Adjacent to this Newari-style structure are sites of deep import to the Tibetan tradition: the legendary cave complex of Guru Rinpoche (Asura and Yangleshod Caves) and a Tara Temple (Drolma Lhakhang) with a self-arising Tara image. 

At Pharping, we initiated our danced devotions. We performed the Charya Nritya, “Dance of Refuge,” a danced prayer of refuge in the Buddha, dharma, and sangha, and “Dance of the Sixteen Offering Goddesses” at each place we visited. Sometimes we were inspired to include an additional charya dance of a particular deity as well. We had learned these dances through online or in-person workshops with Prajwal. Metaphorically speaking, we were planting these dances back into the earth where they were spawned.

The Newar village of Sankhu lies in the northeast corner of the Kathmandu Valley on the old trade route to Tibet. Here, Vajrayogini takes the form of Khadga Yogini (Sword Dakini), who wields a sword. The temple is a three-roofed pagoda with a gilt copper roof. Housed within the sanctum is the yogini statue—her red face and four arms barely peek out from beneath countless layers of adorning silks and glittering metal ornaments. The shrine room on the upper floor contains a larger gilded copper statue of Khadga Yogini, which is paraded through the town of Sankhu by the Vajracharya priests on the annual religious procession, or jatra. 

More than the statues, I was taken with the gilt-copper repoussé torana above the door to the sanctum. Its central figure is Khadga Yogini in a warrior stance, her feet trampling two kneeling figures. A force not to be trifled with, her eight arms hold eight implements: an upraised sword, a lotus, an arrow, a bow, a vajra, a cattle prod, a hooked knife, and a skull-cup. She stands flanked by two more four-armed versions of herself. 

Although the temple of Guhyeshwari (meaning “hidden” or “secret goddess”) contains no image of the goddess, it packs a visceral punch with its evocation of female generative energy. The temple of Guhyeshwari honors the goddess in the form of Vajra Varahi, who is a more wrathful expression of Vajrayogini. (“Wrathful” in this context indicates an energetic intensity, not an emotion.) The central shrine is believed to house her womb, which is said to sustain all of Kathmandu. A spring in the well of the central shrine overflows with red water that is said to be the amniotic fluid of the goddess. Thus, Vajra Varahi’s womb is the object of veneration here.

The half-hour flight to Lumbini allowed us to stretch the yogini mandala to include the birthplace of the historical Buddha. We made the 20-minute walk along the central avenue of Lumbini, amid the tropical woodland, up to the temple monument to Queen Mahamaya, the Buddha’s mother. The large, white, stately Maya Devi Temple marks the spot where it is said that the queen took hold of the branch of a fig tree in a flowering grove for support while she labored and gave birth to the Buddha. Just outside the temple, beside the sacred pool, we danced the charya dances in gratitude to this great mother observed by pilgrim onlookers from all over the world.

We completed the yogini mandala at Bijeshwori Temple, situated above the Bishnumati River in the Swayambhu neighborhood of Kathmandu, originally at the epicenter of an ancient cremation ground. The principal statue in the temple’s altar is of the goddess Vidyadhari (“Bijeshwori” is the Newar pronunciation), meaning “Lady of Awareness.” Frequently referred to as “Akash Yogini,” or “Flying Vajrayogini,” her body is displayed in flight, with her left leg pulled up high and her right leg behind her bent at the knee. Her left hand holds a skull-bowl to her mouth, while her right arm is extended behind her holding a chopper. She cradles a khatvanga (tantric staff) in the crook of her arm, resting it against her left shoulder. 

Akash Yogini is surrounded by a sisterhood of three other yoginis. To the left of the central image is Vajra Varahi in her ecstatic dancing posture (her left foot stomps on a Hindu deity representing ignorance, while the right leg is raised up and bent), and to the right of the central image is Uddhapada Vajrayogini (Foot-in-the-Sky Yogini). The fourth yogini stands against the north wall of the temple taking the warrior stance of Naro Khechari (Naropa’s Dakini, the form envisioned by the Mahasiddha Naropa). All four yoginis hold their emblematic implements.

Our day at Bijeshwori was no ordinary visit. We were there to receive an initiation into the practice of Vajrayogini. Deity practice, also called “deity yoga,” is a Vajrayana meditation in which the practitioner adopts an archetypal role model of enlightenment (deity) to contemplate and identify with to reveal one’s own buddhanature. The ritual entry process into the tantric practice of a deity can be granted only by an empowered lineage holder, a requirement that maintains the integrity of the teachings and practices. Our initiation was performed by Prajwal’s older brother Sarbagya Ratna Bajracharya, who is a much-in-demand Vajracharya priest in Kathmandu. Prajwal served as his ritual assistant, and his extended family attended as witnesses. 

After removing our shoes, we climbed the ladder-like wooden stairs to the second floor of the temple, where we sat in two rows facing the center in the long, narrow meeting room. As in the other Newar rituals we attended, we each worked with our own personal mandala, drawn onto the floor with chalk, and an accompanying platter of varied offering substances (flowers, grains, fruit, incense, water, milk, colored powders, etc.). The chalk-drawn mandala circle is a representational model of ourselves used in the ritual process. For example, we placed offerings inside the mandala to symbolically purify our body, speech, and mind as the priest and assistant chanted prayers and performed offerings to Vajrayogini. Indeed, all the ingredients we had for our personal mandalas were multiplied fiftyfold for the ministrations performed by Prajwal and his brother at the front of the room.

The two-hour ceremony came to a powerful climax when Prajwal walked down each row and one by one gave us Vajrayogini’s tools of transformation to hold—the ritual skull-bowl in our left hand and the chopper in our right. Prajwal repeated his rounds, this time placing Vajrayogini’s mark of blessing (a tika) upon our forehead, with the tip of a vajra dipped in a black paste. He attended each one of us again, placing her metal vajra crown upon our head, giving us the necessary time to fully sense it. Feeling the physical and symbolic weight of these implements made a profound impression. 

I was shocked when I looked in the mirror. Wearing all of Vajrayogini’s iconographic adornments, I didn’t recognize myself.

After enjoying a home-cooked Nepali meal prepared by Prajwal’s family, we returned downstairs to the temple courtyard to dance. As we danced the sixteen offerings, I was reminded of Prajwal’s explanation, “The deities don’t need offerings. They have everything they need. Rather, the offerings serve to open the practitioner’s senses and provide us with the energy to engage in sacred practice.” We completed our celebration with the “Dance of Bijeshwori (Sky Dakini)” and its repeated flying posture just as the light rays flooding into Vajrayogini’s courtyard performed a sublime dance to complement our own.

Our pilgrimage concluded with a special performance at Itum Bahal, one of the largest Newar Buddhist monasteries in the old town of Kathmandu and headquarters of the Vajracharya Conservation Society. Unlike most travelers who come to see the sights, we were the performers, offering the charya dances back to the local community as a gift. The program was completely voluntary, and I had not planned to perform, as there seemed to be plenty of people who were eager to do so. The performers from our group decided on the deities they would dance—Ganesha, Avalokiteshvara, Green Tara, Vajra Varahi. But when I saw that no one was performing Vajrayogini, I changed my mind. I had danced her for a year; now, I would wear her red costume, bone ornaments, and dakini crown and publicly perform her dance to offer the energy she had given me. 

We arrived at Itum Bahal in the late afternoon and immediately began marking our dances in the courtyard, getting accustomed to the space. When a local Charya Nritya performer arrived with a suitcase full of costumes in tow, we retired with her to one of the temple rooms to transform ourselves. I was shocked when I looked in the mirror. Wearing all of Vajrayogini’s iconographic adornments, I didn’t recognize myself. 

The sun set, and the temple courtyard filled with locals and even a few tourists. The space had been set with stage lights to project the color of each deity and amplification for the two vocalists (one of whom is the chant leader from the Portland temple). They would sing the accompanying Sanskrit charya giti (vajra songs). As per our ritual, Prajwal led our group in the dances of refuge and offerings. Then we proceeded with our solos. Each dancer began by walking out toward the lit space, bowing to touch a hand to the earth, the heart center, and forehead—the gesture of gratitude and respect. Then one by one, we brought the deities to life with their dances of divine qualities and action.

The performance clearly moved those in the audience, because several days later, when most of us had headed home, Prajwal was flooded with a host of media interviews. Additionally, he was honored with several awards, including recognition for uplifting the glory of Newar ritual and its sacred dance. Prajwal is currently planning to lead another pilgrimage this spring. As for me, I now dance Vajrayogini both inside and beyond the confines of my practice room—allowing myself to acknowledge and animate the radiant Vajrayogini, who dances within me.

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Motivated by the unknown, Tibetan-Swiss multidisciplinary artist YESH speaks to the current moment through lyrical incantations of the past, drawing on Buddhist teachings, rituals, and practices of devotion in a refreshing and ever-evolving storytelling modality.

Known for her genre-defying sound and wide vocal range, YESH glides effortlessly between low and high pop-electronic frequencies. YESH’s uncanny ability to flip downtrodden and cutting lines into vibrant, reimagined futures is testament to her uniquely fluid manner of artistic expression as influenced by her diasporic identity and her time spent between New York City and Switzerland, where she was born and raised. Personally and professionally, YESH holds trust and intuition as the bedrock of her practice. Drawing across generations of knowledge systems and landscapes of personal and collective histories, her work concerns, but is not beholden to, the topics of identity, belonging, grief, memory, and the reclamation that follows.

Thus far, YESH has released several singles independently as well as a debut EP, hour 2147, which was released with Pique Project in 2020. Inspired by the esoteric tradition of Tantra, YESH collaborated with multidisciplinary artist, painter, and composer Alex Asher Daniel on the single Dakini off Daniel’s 2021 album Book of Spells. Earlier this year, for the April 2023 Issue of The Brooklyn Rail, YESH dropped her single Lhamo, produced by Yanling, with lyrics based on a Tibetan song her mom used to sing to her. “I threw a stone at the nut tree, 20 nuts fell on the ground, I only ate one, 19 I offered to the deities.” 

And as 2023 winds towards its end, YESH’s transformative and uniquely narrative art practice only continues to expand. Recently, YESH sat down with Tricycle to discuss her childhood introduction to music, her work with the collective XENOMETOK on their bardo-inspired 49 days project, and her recent casting in the upcoming Tibetan indie film Dharamsala.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Can you tell us about your early life? My parents were one of the first Tibetan refugees to find exile in Switzerland. They settled down in the Pestalozzi Children’s Village, a nonprofit organization that provides a home for war-affected families from all over the world. It was founded in 1945 in Trogen in Appenzell Ausserrhoden. I grew up in this children’s village in a house with 15 other kids and with many others from all over the world. The village is surrounded by hills, cows, and sheep. 

How did you first become interested in music? The strong presence of cultural exchange throughout my early childhood significantly shaped my voice and my artistic work. Music and dance were a part of my daily life. 

My comrades and I created our own dance group and we would perform at local gatherings. We also had a choir, where we learned songs in different languages. The mother of the Cambodian house taught us how to dance to Cambodian music, the mother of the Ethiopian house taught us to dance Ethiopian. Through that I learned their customs and traditions as well. Since it was a refugee village, living in the diaspora is what connected us and what allowed us to feel the solidarity of belonging, having a home and a community. And music was just a huge part of our everyday communication. 

Later, as an adult, I lost the connection to singing for a while until I started longing for a place where I could create freely, where I could express myself and set my own beat. About ten years ago, I suddenly knew I needed to set my focus on music and singing. 

Are there any teachers or moments in your life that have molded you into who you are today as an artist and how you approach your creative practice? I can’t really think of one particular teacher or moment. I like to think of life as a teacher in general. Some moments are like mini classes and the people you meet are your classmates. In the best case the whole world is a classroom and everything and everyone is interconnected and in constant motion. Just like music! That’s why I love collaborating with producers, instrumentalists and other artists. Creating together, flowing together–listening and observing what occurs when you create music in a certain time and space makes me feel present and alive. 

And then I also think, in contrast to life, death and losing loved ones is kind of a teacher. Letting go and coping with grief has shaped me as a person and also my creative practice. During a period of grief I came to understand that the breath of life and emotion held in every voice and in every moment is impermanent. The life philosophy of Buddhism of course helped me a lot to understand this lesson.

“During a period of grief I came to understand that the breath of life and emotion held in every voice and in every moment is impermanent.”

Could you tell me a bit about your collective XENOMETOK and the inspiration behind your performance piece, 49 days? XENOMETOK is a transdisciplinary collective and collaboration between artist Valentina Demicheli, Tibetan activist Paelden Tamnyen, and myself. Our first theater piece was 49 days. It’s a one-hour multimedia performance, orchestrated by electronic and experimental music, singing, traditional Tibetan drums, the Repa Dance, and moving images. We work thematically in the field of tension between reappropriation, Asian foreign perception, and self-perception. 49 days has to do with the period following death. The bardo is a between-state (marking the passage from death to rebirth, as well as the journey from birth to death). 

49 days bridges the individual and collective paths of three deceased sisters. The three sisters are caught in the tension between longing for a new world and an apparent afterlife. In this in-between, they experience memories of heritage and Tibetan rituals. Through this performance, we are creating a space outside of time, like the in-between of the bardo. Our next performance with this piece is in Brussels at the Kaaitheater in April 2024. 

How do you engage with these centuries-old rituals using contemporary performance styles? With old rituals, it is a bit like when you dismantle old clothes and playfully put together the patterns again in a different way. A learning by doing situation. For example, the Repa dance: we were able to borrow the drums from the Tibetan dance group in Switzerland and a friend introduced us to a Tibetan woman who studied at the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts and taught us the dance. The engagement with the drums was physically exhausting because the drums are so heavy. And that led to the fact that we danced with the drums in the hourly performance for only about twelve minutes. 

Creating 49 days was a long process. We started off with having long conversations over Zoom, imagining a tale-like narrative. In a second step, we brought in an amazingly talented crew and cast of a choreographer, a light technician, a set designer, visual artists, and dancers that made the piece at the end what it is. We were reacting organically to a situation. On one hand, our fluid improvisational approach welcomed uncertainty and allowed the piece to adapt in different situations, and on the other hand, our everyday collaborative practice became like a repetitive ritual that we could always return to. This happened very naturally, just like how we grew up with Tibetan rituals when we were kids. 

How did you find a balance when combining traditional Tibetan musical techniques and digital, audio-engineered sounds? It comes very naturally to me. It’s like reinventing and enhancing an ancient culture. I’m interested in storytelling and the use of music and performance for self-expression, for identity formation. It’s also part of a cultural interaction. I feel my role as a Tibetan-Swiss woman, who was raised by a Tibetan-born mother and is now living in diaspora, is to keep Tibet relevant. And I’m using music and performance in a liberating way. I like to see my artistry or my voice as an extension of my maternal lineage. 

If I were to just do traditional Tibetan music I think I couldn’t add anything that I’m interested in. I think I would like to learn more from the traditional Tibetan music/musicians and create my own voice/language that speaks to me and the next generation. 

“I feel my role as a Tibetan-Swiss woman, who was raised by a Tibetan-born mother and is now living in diaspora, is to keep Tibet relevant.”

I think whether it’s in making movies, creating art or music, “our” own narrative needs to be told in order to change the perception of Tibet. There’s so much power in storytelling. But the challenging part about it is relaying that what I have to say is enough. Like, my voice is enough. Getting to this point has a lot to do with confidence. 

How has performing and creating 49 days deepened your own spiritual practice? My spiritual practice influences my creative practice and vice versa. I realize this especially when I’m singing—it feels like I’m dissolving with the surroundings and becoming lost in my voice and the space. When you dissolve with the room, your ego goes, the I is gone, and it becomes more like we or us. 

How do you get yourself into the present moment before you perform? What does this process look like for you? I close my eyes, I focus on the center of my body, breathe in and breathe out, and I envision the ocean in slow motion and how the water takes over myself. 

In addition to being a singer, songwriter, dancer, and performer, you were recently cast in the indie film Dharamsala. Can you tell me more about the film and how you navigate these various art forms? I think they don’t contradict each other. More so I feel like they elevate each other. You learn from each situation and from working with different people. I’m not a singer alone—I would not be a singer if I did not have an audience. I love creating and collaborating with people. All these experiences and art forms are becoming part of the storytelling. I would like to amplify the voices and turn up the volume for Tibetan women. I hope that we can continue building a strong creative foundation for the next generation to tell their stories through various forms of media. 

I have a minor part in Tenzin Dazel’s Dharamsala, which is her first feature film and focuses on Dharamsala, a small town on the edge of the Indian Himalayas that has been the heart of the Tibetan exile world for six decades. It is the residence of the Dalai Lama, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile, and home to many other important Tibetan cultural and religious institutions. But along its narrow shop-lined lanes and in the houses clinging to the hillsides, it is also where the hopes, aspirations, and pain of Tibetans living far from their homeland are lived, and where the drama of ordinary human lives unfolds.

Since it was my first appearance in a movie it was an honor to work with such a talented Tibetan and Indian cast and crew, and to slip into a role, a character that is different from my stage persona and myself, was very inspiring and liberating. 

Are there any other projects you’re working on? Is there anything else you would like to add? I’m currently working on my debut album with Asma Maroof as the executive producer. I’m very excited about it because it’s about everything that matters to me and it feels like a stepping stone towards change.

The post Remixing Ritual appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

There was a palpable sense of anticipation in the arena. As the lights went down, the scattered energy in the venue focused on the curtains surrounding the stage. While it is hard to explain, I sensed Tina Turner before I saw her. I felt an undeniable sense of power and charisma as she took her place behind the curtains. As Turner’s artistry, determination, and spirituality had long inspired me, I could not pass up the opportunity to finally see her live for her final 2008–2009 concert tour, “Tina! The 50th Anniversary Tour.”

When the curtains finally opened, there was Turner perched on a platform some thirty feet in the air with a radiant smile on her face. She surveyed the audience before stretching out her hand, signaling her crew to lower her to the stage. For two and a half hours, the show delivered everything one would expect from a Tina Turner concert: a whirlwind of song and dance in a glitzy rock concert replete with a dazzling array of lights and special effects. At the center of it all was the incredible star power of Turner herself. And yet, the most transcendent moment in the show was the encore. The dancers and special effects were gone, as were the shimmering lights and costumes. The spotlight shone on Turner alone as she gripped the microphone and stared out at the crowd with a soft, contemplative smile. Then, she sang her haunting live rendition of “Be Tender With Me Baby.” Don’t let go, don’t let go, just stay with me another day, she sang. 

This moment was what made Turner special: as an artist, she had an almost mystical ability to engage in a soulful communion with her audience, with an entire arena singularly focused on her and her on them. To be in Turner’s presence, whether seeing her live in concert or in person (as I later would at the Broadway premiere of her musical), was to be enveloped in this charismatic force field that she emanated. As a religious studies scholar who has spent several years working on a biography of Turner, I believe that her ability to create this force field was due, in part, to the depth of her spiritual practice that centered on Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhism and included aspects of Afro-Protestant Christianity and metaphysical religious beliefs.  

Turner was raised in the Afro-Protestant Christian traditions of 1940s and 1950s Tennessee. In Nutbush, TN—memorialized in her 1973 hit song “Nutbush City Limits”—Turner attended two local Black Baptist churches with her family. On the other side of the state, near Knoxville, Turner also attended a Black Pentecostal church. While Turner would later write in her memoir Happiness Becomes You that she found church hot and boring as a child, she also explained that she saw the value in teachings like the Ten Commandments. Turner was also deeply influenced by the more mystical sensibilities of her maternal grandmother, who believed in the power of signs received in dreams, preferred to spend her time in nature rather than church, and understood the medicinal value of the plants and roots around Nutbush. Both Afro-Protestant Christianity and nature-based spirituality contributed to Turner’s religious formation.

To be in Turner’s presence was to be enveloped in this charismatic force field that she emanated.

In the late fifties, Tina met early rock music pioneer Ike Turner, and by 1960, they had formed the Ike & Tina Turner Revue. Ike and Tina married in 1962, and while professionally the duo recorded a string of hit songs—like 1960’s “A Fool in Love” and 1961’s “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine”—their personal relationship was marred by Ike’s frequent abuse of Tina. Tina’s unhappiness in her marriage led her to begin exploring her spirituality anew. Both Ike and Tina held fascinations with astrology and mythology, but in 1966, Tina went by herself to see a psychic in London. In her 1986 autobiography, I, Tina, Tina explained that this psychic gave her the crucial prediction that one day she “would be among the biggest of stars” and that her partner would “fall away like a leaf from a tree.” Tina remembered that she especially “held on to what that reader said,” and that meeting sparked a long practice of consulting with and learning from psychics of various kinds. 

Nonetheless, the biggest change in her religious life would occur in 1973 when she was introduced to the Nichiren Buddhist practice of chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo (“Devotion to the Mystic Law of the Lotus Sutra”). Beyond the literal meaning of the words, Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhists understand the chant to be “the ultimate Law or truth of the universe.” An engineer at Ike Turner’s recording studio Bolic Sound first mentioned the practice to Tina, followed by her youngest son, Ronnie Turner, and finally a woman named Valerie Bishop. “Obviously the universe had been trying to send me a message, and I was finally ready to receive it,” Tina told Clark Strand in a 2020 interview for Tricycle. Bishop gave Tina a thorough introduction to the practice and taught her the chant. Tina later wrote in I, Tina that from chanting, she could feel herself “becoming stronger—becoming less and less afraid” of Ike. In her 2018 autobiography My Love Story, she explained that the practice “removed uncomfortable attitudes from [her] thoughts. [She] started to think differently. Everything became lighter.” From there, she began to develop her practice in a largely clandestine fashion because of Ike’s disapproval. 

In 1976, Tina left Ike and began living with the late jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter and his family. With the Shorters and supported by Herbie Hancock and other Soka Gakkai members, Tina developed her Buddhist practice and officially joined Soka Gakkai. She became an active practitioner of Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhism, and during the difficult times just before her major solo success, she and Wayne Shorter’s then-wife Ana Maria Shorter would chant four hours every day. Before shows, Tina would chant and pray for up to an hour.

By the time her divorce was finalized in the spring of 1978, Turner was appearing on television and performing solo concerts, with her solo album Rough being released later that year. Turner dreamed of establishing herself as a successful solo artist and filling stadiums, so when she met producers Lee Kramer and Roger Davies in 1979, she would chant for hours every day to will them into her life as her management team. The duo agreed to work with her, and Roger Davies continued to work with Turner as her primary manager for the rest of her career. In 1984, Turner’s dreams came to fruition when she released her Private Dancer album (featuring the songs “What’s Love Got to Do With It?,” “Private Dancer,” “Let’s Stay Together,” “Better Be Good to Me,” and “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” among others). The rest, of course, is music history: Turner’s tenacity and determination fueled one of the most compelling comeback stories of the 1980s. Each of her solo albums was accompanied by record-breaking global tours that cemented her status as a dynamic performer and iconic artist. Turner took every available opportunity to explain that the “power behind” her success was her spiritual beliefs and practice, especially her practice of chanting.

In Happiness Becomes You, she spoke of making a vow—alongside Herbie Hancock and Shorter—to be a musical “bodhisattva of the earth.” In chapter fifteen of the Lotus Sutra, innumerable bodhisattvas spring up from the earth and vow to propagate the Buddha’s teachings in strife-ridden future ages. Specifically, these bodhisattvas vow to endure all manner of hardship to spread the sutra’s message. In making this vow, Turner was determining, alongside her friends and fellow Buddhist artists, to use her music and work to uplift, inspire, and transform others’ lives. From my study of Turner’s reflections on the connection between her Buddhist commitments and her performances, I am convinced that she was reconnecting to her vow to be a musical bodhisattva in those moments when she quietly smiled onstage while looking out at her audience. To this day, Turner inspires me to use my own talents—that is, my training as a scholar in religious studies—to contribute to the lives of others. Further, she encourages me to reconnect to that purpose in the midst of my work.

Alongside this vow, Turner also voiced her determination to one day become a teacher, using what she learned from her practice of Buddhism to help others. In 2009, after she retired from touring, she began to fulfill this dream by recording spiritual messages and her chanting practice for the album Beyond: Buddhist & Christian Prayers. This interfaith album featured Turner, the Swiss-Tibetan singer Dechen Shak-Dagsay, and Swiss music therapist Regula Curti. This album interwove Christian hymns and prayers with Tibetan Buddhist chants and Turner’s Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhist practice. The next album from the trio, Children Beyond, added a multiracial children’s choir and saw Turner singing prayers drawn from Islam and Hinduism. The next album, Love Within: Beyond, saw Turner return to her childhood religious formation by singing gospel. On the Beyond albums, Turner advocates for an approach to life that puts wisdom drawn from the space of contemplative practice—a space she refers to as “the beyond”—at the center of one’s existence. 

Between the 2009 release of the first Beyond album and the 2020 release of her memoir, Turner suffered a series of life-threatening health challenges and the death of her eldest son, Craig Turner, in 2018. Despite these challenges, Turner made a final public appearance in 2019 at the Broadway premiere of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical. Taking the stage after the curtain call, Turner explained that her life was like “poison that turned to medicine,” echoing the Nichiren Buddhist notion that suffering can be transformed into something beneficial. As I sat in the audience at the Broadway premiere and heard Turner say this, I thought about a quote from Soka Gakkai International President Daisaku Ikeda from the Wisdom of the Lotus Sutra, Vol. 1: 

Those who understand the wisdom of the true entity of all phenomena can transform any kind of karma into a radiantly brilliant mission. When you are absolutely confident of this, you will be filled with hope. Every person and every experience you encounter will become a precious and unique treasure.

I could not help but feel as I sat in the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre that Turner embodied this idea and demonstrated it with her life. I continue to be inspired by this. 

Five years later, on Wednesday, May 24, 2023, it was announced that Turner had died peacefully at her home in Küsnacht, a suburb of Zurich, Switzerland. On her 1996 Wildest Dreams album, Turner sang the lines, “now when I lay me down to sleep / I will be dancing in my dreams.” And now, this great Buddhist icon has indeed laid down to sleep. She has become one of our great ancestors. In Buddhist traditions, it is often said that a person can take up to forty-nine days to be reborn. So perhaps Tina Turner has already come back to teach us all once more. In a 2013 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Turner said she wanted to be remembered as the “Queen of Rock ’n’ Roll” and that her legacy was that of a person “who had stayed on track, stayed on course from the beginning to the end because I believed in something inside of myself.” So shall it be.

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Grand and utterly pristine, the opening sculpture in Asia Society’s current exhibit, “Buddha, Sage of the Shakya Clan: Masterworks from the Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection,” sets the tone for a stunning collection of Buddha images illuminated by a manuscript that depicts the “eight great events” in the Buddha’s life. The 2nd-century head of Shakyamuni Buddha, the oldest artwork in the exhibit, comes from Gandhara, an area that covers present-day northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan, during a period when the first human images of the Buddha were appearing. With its strong Hellenistic influence, a hallmark of Gandharan art, the Buddha head also displays many of the lakshana, or marks of perfection, belonging to the Buddha, including a perfectly symmetrical face, snail-shell curls, and the ushnisha, or cranial protuberance, atop his head. Unique for works of art this old, the head is perfectly intact—not even the earlobes or tip of the nose have been repaired. 

Impressively, the rest of the fifteen objects in the exhibit—thirteen of which come from the Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller collection—are similarly pristine. Curated by Laura Weinstein, the John H. Foster Associate Curator of Pre-Modern Art at Asia Society, and on view through August 27, the thoughtfully paced show allows viewers to spend ample time with and between each piece of art. As magnificent as each one is, not one of them overwhelms or distracts from the other. Together, they reveal how representations of the Buddha, as well as the way Buddhists practice, change over time and across cultures. 

An 11th-century sculpture is significant not just because a Tamil inscription at the base reveals that it was created by a metalworkers’ guild at the Buddhist site of Nagapattinam, an important place of worship in present-day Tamil Nadu. Two holes in the base also point to the rich but underappreciated processional tradition in South Indian Buddhism, wherein worshippers would carry the Buddha image around for everyone to see. The ushnisha on this sculpture is in the form of a flame, characteristic of Buddhas found throughout Southeast Asia, which were influenced by this work, or others very similar to it.

A beautiful 14th-15th-century gilded bronze sculpture from Myanmar that depicts the Buddha flanked by two disciples represents Burmese style. Here, the ushnisha takes the shape of a jewel, another common representation in Southeast Asia. Interestingly, the two attendants face the Buddha rather than the viewer, in a highly unusual orientation. The base of the statue is an anthropomorphized representation of the earth in female form, wringing water from her hair at the moment of the Buddha’s enlightenment.  

Another small, elegant bronze figure—this one from the 9th century—is typical of Thailand. Given its green patina, the sculpture was likely found buried underground. It has a unique combination of posture and mudra, where his hands are in the dharmachakra mudra—the teaching gesture—but are separate, and the Buddha is standing, not sitting. 

Around the corner, a spectacular, repair-free, Gupta-era sculpture from the late 6th century in Sarnath, where the Buddha delivered his first teaching, demonstrates more lakshana, including heavy-lidded eyes, webbed fingers and toes, and upturned fingertips and toes. With pronounced drapery close to his body, the sculpture represents a more androgynous Buddha than the masculine one in earlier depictions.

On the wall nearby, an 18th-century Korean painting that was originally commissioned for a royal setting shows the Buddha, accompanied by a number of bodhisattvas and arhats, delivering the Lotus Sutra while faint rays of light emanate from his head. 

Like this intricate painting and many of smaller statues, a remarkably intact palm leaf manuscript toward the opening of the show invites viewers in for a close look at the so-called eight great events in the Buddha’s life, including scenes from the birth of the Buddha at Lumbini, the Buddha’s awakening at Bodhgaya, his first teachings at Sarnath, his display of miracles at Shravasti, his descent from heaven where he taught the gods and his mother, his taming of the mad elephant, his accepting honey from a monkey, and his death, or parinirvana, at Kushinagar. The manuscript was created at Nalanda, the great monastic center and university in northeast India, most likely in the 10th century, but the text tells us that it made its way to Nepal and then Tibet, where it landed in the hands of monastics, including Buton Rinchen Drub, who compiled the first Tibetan Kangyur. (Read more about the manuscript’s history here.) The eight great events depicted here are blown up on panels on the wall, providing narrative context for the artwork.

While the provenance of each piece is carefully detailed, viewers may be left wondering where the artwork was before the Rockefellers collected them—origin being an issue all museums and art institutions are grappling with today. Similarly, objects of worship like these, some of which are encased in glass, may feel sterile to some viewers. But the setting for each piece is carefully controlled, for humanity and light, to maintain its condition. As with all art exhibits, viewers’s responses will vary. 

What is unquestionable is the exceptional quality of each object in the exhibit, the evident care that went into selecting them, and the clear appreciation for them—an appreciation all viewers will experience themselves.

The post Inside Asia Society’s ‘Buddha, Sage of the Shakya Clan’ Exhibit appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I started making collages when I was about 12 years old. I vividly remember the delight in pasting together unrelated pictures cut from magazines and newspapers and then reorganizing them to form another picture altogether. There was something magical about reconfiguring random elements into a new whole. Perhaps it was then that I first grasped what creativity meant: to bring into being something that had not existed before. Collage has since become a guiding principle for much of what I do in life. More and more I think of my writing as a kind of collage, the only difference being that my books are collages of words and paragraphs rather than old photographs and torn scraps of paper. The core question and struggle that drives both my collage and written work is the same: how does this go together with that? I may not be able to explain logically why two words or two scraps of colored paper go together, but I feel it aesthetically. 

I have been making collages slowly but steadily since 1995, but until this year I have never shown them in an art gallery. They cover the walls of my home in France, but I’ve had no interest in making them public—nor, until recently, have I been invited to do so. Instead, I think of them as private, non-verbal counterparts to my written work. The collages function as a kind of subconscious process that parallels the conscious act of writing, providing an invisible depth, patterning, and color that runs beneath the surface noise of words. 

I do not think of my collages as “Buddhist.” As with art from all cultures, they may reflect certain Buddhist themes and ideas, such as transience and suffering, but they rarely include recognizably Buddhist elements. Yet I cannot deny that these images have emerged from a life steeped in the dharma. Let’s put it this way: my collage work is a non-verbal medium within which to explore the same existential questions that Buddhism seeks to address verbally. Each collage tackles the wordless question: why am I here? The “here” is present in every piece of material I find on the streets or in people’s garbage, which I rescue from oblivion and restore to the world so it can be reconfigured and contemplated anew rather than be forgotten and ignored.  

As much as I try to keep Buddhism out of my work, it tends to find its way back in. It is sometimes there in the titles I give to the pieces. The first large-scale collage I made is a triptych called Trikaya, which refers to the three “bodies” of the Buddha—the Dharma Body, the Archetypal Body, and the Manifest Body. These Mahayana Buddhist ideas were doubtless always in the background, but what drove the work was the search for enough pieces of discarded paper, cloth and plastic from which to make it and the formal principles that determined how to organize the materials once I had found them. The next sequence of collages was titled Octet, which consisted of four diptychs. Each diptych consists of an abstract collage of four colors (red, blue, white, yellow) side-by-side with a matching collage made from old photographs, texts, printed remnants of cloth etc. Whether in Pali discourses or Tibetan monastic textbooks, red, blue, white, and yellow are considered the four primary colors. This fourfoldness finds itself reflected in many classic doctrines: the four tasks, the four truths, the four paths, the four immeasurables, and so on. Buddhism is more implicit in Octet but in some ways more fundamental to the work than in Trikaya.  

Both Trikaya and the first diptych of Octet will be shown in a forthcoming exhibition at Galerie 727 in Montmorillon, France. In addition, I will include a sequence of four recent works, collectively titled On Black, made during and after the COVID lockdown. These grew out of the Octet series but have taken on a life of their own, in which the Buddhist influence has almost entirely disappeared. Over time, I have learned to trust the internal logic of the collages and abandon my own desires for how they should be. I have no idea what a piece will look like until it is completed. On every occasion, I am surprised by what emerges. I find myself elated and disappointed at the same time. But the seed of the next collage always lies buried in that disappointment. The uncertainty and imperfection of the world are what keep me pursuing this path. Without suffering, there can be no beauty. 

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Collages by Stephen Batchelor will be at Galerie 727, 10, avenue de la République, 86500 Montmorillon, France, from May 20 to 27, 2023. For further information, contact gallery director and curator Keith Donovan: keith_donovan_fr@yahoo.ca. Stephen will be recording a public conversation with his brother, the artist and author David Batchelor, chaired by Ronn Smith, for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review on the afternoon of Sunday, May 21.  Stephen will be in residence at the gallery for the duration of the show. 

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In a recent solo exhibition at The Other Space gallery in McLeod Ganj, Dharamsala, India, minutes from the residence of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tibetan artist Tenzin Gyurmey delivered a complex and layered body of work that wove together Indian and Tibetan exile culture, taboos, forbidden activities, proverbs, and spiritual iconography. Titled Behind the Two Mountains, the show featured imagery ranging from the surreal—people with baboon butts as heads—to the provocative—dried meat hanging in front of a portrait of the Dalai Lama.

As the son of a respected Tibetan tulku (a reincarnated master) thangka artist, Gyurmey grew up with social and religious pressures to behave in expected ways, but he was a bit of a rebellious misfit. The exhibition title refers to a place near his high school in Dharamsala, where he and others would hang out when doing naughty or forbidden things, such as smoking and meeting foreign girlfriends. Some of his paintings are potentially more risqué and controversial, and Gyurmey told me that others had criticized them without necessarily understanding his intentions or their meaning. “If you are creating something new, a sign that you are doing something is when people criticize you because you are provoking something,” he said. “It clashes with their long-held ideas and questions them.”

When we met for an interview, Gyurmey wore a sweater that said, “I like boring things,” an Andy Warhol quote referencing the mundane’s importance (and even beauty). It reminded me of Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa, who spoke of accepting and appreciating “cool boredom” as an essential part of the journey to full awakening. Yet, Gyurmey’s art and life are anything but boring. 

Gyurmey became interested in art at an early age, but opportunities to follow his artistic passions were limited. Feeling pressured to do well by his family, teachers, and peers in India, he initially planned to study genetic engineering in college, but karma intervened. Encouraged by his sister, he returned to his love of art and enrolled at the College of Art in Delhi. During his studies, he met his mentor and inspiration, Tibetan contemporary artist Tsherin Sherpa, and held his first art exhibit at Sherpa’s art gallery in Kathmandu, Nepal. However, even as Gyurmey’s art started to receive attention and he was invited to show his work, his lack of financial resources and refugee status left him unable to travel for exhibitions. Not deterred by these challenges, Gyurmey has continued developing an artistic voice that is striking and mystifying, weaving together Tibetan and Indian symbols to create fantastical images.

Blessed features the artist in a room with his tulku father in the pose of the famous yogi Milarepa (who sang about the suffering of slaughtered animals), an image of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, and pieces of drying meat. Gyurmey explained he had fond memories of this “blessed” time during his childhood when they all lived in one room and could not separate sacred objects from worldly ones. Blessed confronts ideas about what is pure and impure, the joys and challenges of a family living in a cramped space, the ethics of meat consumption, and the contradictory gap between Buddhist teachings and their real-life implementation.  

A crime with mother portrays Gyurmey’s inner conflict about when he was young and traveled with his mother to purchase forbidden buffalo meat out of state. The symbolism in this work—such as the portraits looking on behind him of the Tibetan mythical figure Ashang Chogyel, taught to children to scare them into being good, and the Indian leader, avid vegetarian, and advocate of ahimsa (nonviolence) Mahatma Gandhi; handcuffed wrists; a half-skull face for himself; and a severed buffalo head on his mother—wrestle with the heavy weight of transgressing religious beliefs when confronting Buddhist and Hindu understandings of karma, interconnectivity, and eating animals. Plus, there’s the worldly fear of being arrested by the Indian police. Eating cow (or buff) meat in India is controversial and illegal in some places. As the cow is a sacred animal in Hinduism, such meat is banned in the Himachal Pradesh state, where Gyurmey lives. 

Many Buddhists, including Tibetans, regard meat-eating as sacrilegious, impure, and cruel and make no hierarchical distinction between animals and humans. The English expression “sacred cow” also refers to a belief, custom, or convention considered above criticism due to social or religious pressure. In more ways than one, Gyurmey creatively tackles—directly and indirectly—the stories, influence, and power of the “sacred cows” in his culture and community.

A fusion of Indian and Tibetan themes is present in much of his work, and Gyurmey makes fun of the shaming of mixed-race and cross-cultural relationships in Rama-luk.  Gyurmey explained that the Tibetan phrase rama-luk means neither a sheep nor a goat, so when someone dated a non-Tibetan, some people would say that their child was ramalug, not a pure breed. I asked Gyurmey what he thought about a notion of culturally and ethnically pure Tibetan-ness. “Identity is a very individual thing,” he told me. “All people have their own identities, what they have experienced, seen, and so on. Purity culture is like forcing people to come into one category, like this is Tibetan, this is Indian. They are forcing people to be in a homogeneous group and culture, but it is not.” He appreciates the natural richness, beauty, vitality, and aesthetic qualities of all the intercultural influences that make us unique individuals and human beings, especially in the global age of the internet and social media. 

Some significant aspects of the cross-culture experiences expressed in his art are more subtle. Unable to afford pricey canvases, Gyurmey would paint on woven taupe-colored sacks, drochak-bhureh (barley sacks), used by the United States to deliver food to Tibetan refugees, transforming them into a poignant symbol of his journey as a Tibetan in exile and struggling artist. Gyurmey states on his website that:

To me, this material bears testament to the way the Tibetan diaspora has planted themselves in a new culture and undergone changes in their own culture. Through these works, I examine and celebrate the space we have created for ourselves as Tibetans in India.

Imaginatively illustrating the seemingly mundane life of a naughty Tibetan boy in exile, Gyurmey mixes interracial and ethnic relationships with Tibetan Buddhist iconography to create both uniquely Tibetan and globally relevant images that cross cultural and spiritual boundaries. 

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