Secret Buddha Thangka

[Secret Buddhist Thangka]

Secret Buddhist Thangka, 18th century, Tibet, cloth, color, 120 cm high, 72 cm wide, 63 cm vertical and 42 cm horizontal. The old collection of the Qing Palace
In the middle of this picture, the secret Buddha’s blue double body embraces the princess, sits on the lotus stage with folded arms, and leans against the rainbow round light. With the white clouds and green mountains as the boundary between heaven and earth, there are a large number of inheritors and achievers in India and Tibet who paint the dense Vajra Sutra in the sky. The Great Vajra is in the upper left corner, showing the source and flow of the Dharma. The lower three are Blue Vajra Hand Bodhisattva, Indra Bodhi and White Dragon Seed Yoga Mother; The three masters wearing the yellow monk’s clothes on the top of the main master are Guru Zongkaba and the sixth Panchen Lama and the seventh Dalai Lama from his left and right; The four figures in the upper right corner of the painting are the achiever Pisukari, the holy dragon tree, the achiever Salaha, and the fifth Panchen Lama Rasang Yixi. The five figures painted under the lotus platform, such as the dense Vajrasattva with white body and the dense world freedom with red body, are all secrets of the different forms of the Buddha. The bottom of the picture is painted from left to right with six arms of big black sky, the exteriors of Yan Demon and Brahman. This Thangka has many characters and orderly distribution, compact and ingenious composition, and is a masterpiece of the later Thangka
There is a white silk label on the back of the Thangka, with an inscription in four-body Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian and Tibetan characters on the ink. The Chinese text reads: “On February 11, the forty-sixth year of Qianlong’s reign, Zhongba Hutuk Tu, Ben Kang Bu, the benefit-painting portrait of the Yangti Secret Buddha, was consecrated…”.