AWAKEN: A Tibetan Buddhist Journey Toward Enlightenment

WAKE UP! That is what this exhibition asks you to do. Open your eyes, clear your head and leave this chaotic, fractured world behind you for a while. Embark on a journey that might just change you forever. We’ll provide a guide, a map and everything else you’ll need to reach your destination.

To steer you on your path, Awaken: A Tibetan Buddhist Journey Toward Enlightenment brings together Vajrayana Buddhist artworks from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Asian Art Museum, home to two of the country’s most significant collections of Himalayan art. Sculptures, paintings, textiles and book arts made between 800 and 2016 chart a transformative journey from initiation to awakening.

By inviting you to participate in a narrative experience of these artworks from the viewpoint of an adherent, Awaken proposes that it is the emphasis on meditative visualization that accounts for the particularity of Himalayan Buddhist imagery. Vajrayana Buddhism, which took hold in Tibet in the 8th century, emphasizes the act of seeing: the practice depends on artworks created as visual aids to meditation, objects that transform awareness and ultimately bring about enlightenment, or awakening.

Vajrabhairava (detail), 1400–1500 or later. China. Wood with paint. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation and Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Fund, 93.13a–oo.

Photograph © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Awaken begins with works that speak to the unbalanced nature of our contemporary existence, including Tsherin Sherpa’s 2016 painting Luxation I, a fragmented vision of cultural dislocation. You then meet your guide, or guru, in the form of an early 17th-century thangka painting of Gorampa Sonam Sengge, the sixth abbot of Ngor monastery, who will lead you on a path out of this chaos. As part of your initiation, Gorampa shows you the symbolic tools that will empower you on your voyage and anchor your meditation. These include ritual hammers and swords to fight against your negative thoughts, prayer wheels and musical instruments that generate positivity, and the bell and the thunderbolt that together symbolize the union of the masculine and feminine.

Your guide then reveals the map of your journey, a colorful, densely illustrated 17th-century mandala from Gorampa’s own monastery. A mandala is at once a floorplan of a divine palace, a chart of the entire cosmos and an inner image of the mind.

Each section of the mandala, each stage on its imaginative visual path from fierce guardians at the corners to the deity in the center, is brought to life by artworks in the galleries. Together, these objects — such as a stunning bronze sculpture of the god of death, Yama, and a luminous painting of the frightening six-armed Mahakala — lead you to confront your worst fears, including death itself.

Mandala of the Buddhist deity Vajrabhairava (detail), 1650–1750. Tibet; Ngor Monastery. Colors on cotton. Asian Art Museum, The Avery Brundage Collection, B63D5.

Photograph © Asian Art Museum.

After entering the mandala through a gateway, recreated in the museum gallery, and spiraling inward through its courtyards and outer chambers, you reach the central chamber. Here you meet the archetype of fear itself, the 34-armed deity Vajrabhairava, or Lightning Terror. Vajrabhairava is embodied in the gallery by a terrifying polychrome wood sculpture accompanied by an ominous soundtrack of his verbal manifestation. Your guide asks you to overcome your fear by visualizing yourself as Vajrabhairava, identifying his body as your own. You realize that Vajrabhairava is not a demon but instead an image of enlightened awareness. Art has catalyzed your transformation, your newfound knowledge that the world is not fragmented, but instead fundamentally interconnected. To see the cosmos as a whole is to be awake.

To symbolize your awakening, the exhibition ends with a remarkable vision, a glowing, levitating 300-pound stone sculpture from India, Standing Crowned Buddha with Four Scenes of His Life.

Flaming trident (detail), 1700–1800. Tibet. Iron, silver, and gilded copper. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Zimmerman Family Collection in honor of Joe Dye on the occasion of VMFA’s 75th Anniversary, 2010.

Photograph © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Photograph by Travis Fullerton.