Buddha Sakyamuni and Scenes of His Previous Lives (Jataka

TAGS:

Download or edit the free picture Buddha Sakyamuni and Scenes of His Previous Lives (Jataka Tales) for GIMP online editor. It is an image that is valid for other graphic or photo editors in OffiDocs such as Inkscape online and OpenOffice Draw online or LibreOffice online by OffiDocs.

This exceptionally refined late sixteenth-century Tibetan painting (tangka) depicts a rare subject in Tibetan art, the life of Buddha Shakyamuni and his previous incarnations as told in the Jataka Tales. These stories form an essential component of the Buddhist cosmology. This tangka carries a Chinese inscription that dates the work to the reign of the Wanli Emperor (r. 1573\u20131619) of the Ming dynasty, as well as Tibetan glosses identifying the scenes depicted. The presence of the glosses is a clear indication that this tangka was made for a Tibetan client. A series of scenes are depicted around the central icon of a radiant Buddha, each in an independent location with mountains and monastic buildings serving as scene dividers. Two of the most readily identifiable jatakas are the Buddha, sacrificing his body to feed a starving tigress and her cubs (upper right), and the Shashajataka, in which the Buddha, born as a hare, jumps into a fire so that a famished hermit could be nourished (lower center). Chinese influence is discernible in the treatment of landscape and in the chromatic values employed. The hieratic scaling of figures, with Shakyamuni depicted monumentally, reflects the vogue for large-scale images in Tibetan monasteries of this period.

Free picture Buddha Sakyamuni and Scenes of His Previous Lives (Jataka Tales) integrated with the OffiDocs web apps