In 1960, the Tibetan lama Dezhung Rinpoche (1906-87) arrived in Seattle after being forced into exile from his native land by the Communist Chinese. Already a revered master of the teachings of all Tibetan Buddhist schools, he would eventually become a teacher of some of Western Buddhism's most notable scholars. This is the inspiring and unlikely biography of a modern buddha.

A Saint in Seattle: The Life of the Tibetan Mystic Dezhung Rinpoche

Biographies & Memoirs

Jackson, David P.

Historical

Wisdom Publications

Tibetan Thangka Painting : Methods & Materials

Religion & Spirituality

Jackson, Janice A.

Buddhism

Snow Lion Publications

The University of Washington Press is pleased to distribute a series on Tibetan art from the Rubin Museum of Art, New York City. These volumes will share the history, style, and method of Tibetan art and will document a different constellation of style, religious tradition, period, and place. In studying the sacred arts of Tibet, scholars and collectors seldom know who the artist was, let alone what his life might have been like, where he went, and whom he met. Yet some is known about the life of the painter Situ Panchen Chokyi Junge and his revival of a great painting tradition. Born in January 1700 in Derge, he was identified as a Karma Kagyu trulku (an incarnate lama) and he studied with the great Karmapa lamas, in turn becoming a great teacher himself. He traveled widely, met with the military, political, and religious leaders of his time, and became renowned for his knowledge of medicine. The most important of Situ's many impressive accomplishments is his revival, as a painter and patron, of the Karma Gardri style of painting (also known as the Encampment style). It was established by the Tibetan painter Namkha Tashi in the court of the Ninth Karmapa (1555-1603). Namkha Tashi based his painted figures on Indian figural models but placed them in Chinese-inspired landscapes based on masterpieces of the Yuan and Ming courts. However, most of what is known of this tradition comes from the eighteenth-century school fostered by the great scholar-painter Situ Panchen. Even more important to the history of Tibetan art than Situ's place as an individual painter is his role as a patron and designer of paintings, many of which continue to be copied to this day. Patron and Painter focuses on the work of this important historical artist. His great stylistic tradition is considered by some to be a veritable rebirth of Tibetan painting. It is clear, precise, and spacious, with marked Chinese influence evident in the use of pastel colors and prominent stylized features of landscape. David P. Jackson has unlocked Situ's diaries and journals and mapped his journeys, putting some of his endeavors in the context of almost seven centuries of the Karma Kagyu school's history. Since 1994 more than a dozen major sets commissioned by Situ Panchen or his circle have been identified, and more continue to turn up, not only outside Tibet but also in Kham. This publication begins to visually tell the story of Situ's paintings. David P. Jackson is the author of A History of Tibetan Painting and a curator at the Rubin Museum of Art. Formerly professor of Tibetan at Hamburg University, he lives on Whidbey Island, Washington.

Patron and Painter: Situ Panchen and the Revival of the Encampment Style (Masterworks of Tibetan Painting)

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Rubin Museum of Art

The Newar painting style (Beri) in Tibet, which originated in Nepal, is the most recent of two early Indian-inspired painting styles to take hold in Tibet. The style flourished in Tibet for about four centuries, from the late 12th to the early 17th century. Alone among styles, it was adopted universally across Tibet for a century at its height (1360-1460). Later in its development, some of the best-known thangkas in this style were commissioned by abbots of Ngor Monastery, an important Sakyapa monastery in Tsang Province.Most previous scholars linked the paintings in this style exclusively with the Sakyapa religious school and Tsang Province, if not with the monastery of Ngor. In addition to exploring the powerful aesthetic appeal of the Beri style, one of the main goals of this publication is to overcome the erroneous limiting of the style to the Sakyapa and to demonstrate its full historical and religious extent. Another main goal is to introduce a method for analyzing structure and lineages in Tibetan paintings.

The Nepalese Legacy in Tibetan Painting (Masterworks of Tibetan Painting)

University of Washington Press

In their art, Tibetans aimed at faithfully transmitting and preserving Buddhism as a spiritual discipline as they had learned it from earlier teachers. Each thangka painting was a small contribution to the larger cause of keeping Buddhism alive and radiant. In this third volume on Tibetan painting, David Jackson investigates painted portraits of early Tibetan teachers. Images of these eminent personages embodied Buddhist ideals in human form. In creating these depictions, Tibetan painters of the 12th through the 14th centuries imitated the artistic conventions developed in Pala- and Sensa-ruled eastern India (Bengal). This style, called Sharri, spread from India to many parts of Asia, but its classic Indian forms, delicate colors, and intricate decorative details were emulated most faithfully by the Tibetans.

Mirror of the Buddha: Early Portraits from Tibet (Masterworks of Tibetan Painting)

Historians of Tibetan painting struggle to establish such basic points as iconographical content, place of origin, age, religious affiliation, and painting school or style, especially when confronted by portable works that were removed from their original monasteries and scattered throughout the world. In this groundbreaking book, the authors locate paintings geographically using a method similar to that used for locating paintings in time. In both cases they identify the historical people connected with the painting by analyzing the portraits, inscriptions, and lineages that it contains. Then, by establishing where the key people involved in the painting lived and died, and with which monasteries and traditions they were most closely linked, they draw conclusions about the painting's provenance and style, providing a bedrock of scholarship to support a new era in the field of Tibetan art history.
David Jackson is a curator with the Rubin Museum of Art, New York, and formerly professor of Tibetan in the Asia and Africa Institute of Hamburg University. Rob Linrothe is associate professor of art history at Northwestern University.

The Place of Provenance: Regional Styles in Tibetan Painting (Masterworks of Tibetan Painting)

Though the Drigung Kagyu was one of the most prominent and powerful schools of Tibetan Buddhism during its early period (12th - 14th century), its art is still relatively poorly known, even among Tibetans. With its mother monastery destroyed twice, once in the late 13th century and again during the Great Cultural Revolution, much of the art was lost or dispersed. The iconography of the Drigung School is examined with regard to its three main periods - early, middle, and late - in combination with the distinctive influences of the Sharri, Khyenri, and Driri styles. The book aims elucidate to the painting traditions of the Drigung Kagyu School and investigate lineage depictions and methods of dating, while referring to previously overlooked Tibetan sources, both ancient and modern. The publication and related exhibition also explores the beneficial quality ascribed to the works of art and the elements they contain.

Painting Traditions of the Drigung Kagyu School (Masterworks of Tibetan Painting)

Painting Traditions of the Drigung Kagyu School

In A Tibetan Artistic Genius and His Tradition, David Jackson's focus is the Khyenri style, the least known among the three major painting styles of Tibet, dating from the mid-fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. The painting of Khyentse Chenmo, founder of the Khyenri style who flourished in the 1450s–1490s, was significant for his radical rejection of the prevailing classic Indic (especially Nepalese-inspired) styles with formal red backgrounds, enthusiastically replacing them with the intense greens and blues of Chinese landscapes. Khyentse was famed for his fine and realistic looking work, both as a painter and sculptor. His painting style has often been overlooked or misunderstood by scholars, but is a missing link in the history of Tibetan painting as it has often been misidentified as early examples of the Karma Gardri style. The Khyenri style is now most closely linked with a small sub-school of the Sakya school, the Gongkarwa. The most important in-situ murals of the Khyenri style survive at the Gongkar Monastery in southern Tibet, south of Lhasa near the Gongkar airport. There we find murals by the hand of Khyentse Chenmo himself, many of them were covered by a layer of whitewash and thus escaped destruction during the Cultural Revolution. Dr. Jackson recently discovered several of Khyentse's paintings in museums outside Tibet, some of which had been unrecognized for over a century.

A Revolutionary Artist of Tibet: Khyentse Chenmo of Gongkar

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jackson, David P.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Jackson, David P.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jackson, David P.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A Saint in Seattle: The Life of the Tibetan Mystic Dezhung Rinpoche

Tibetan Thangka Painting : Methods & Materials

Patron and Painter: Situ Panchen and the Revival of the Encampment Style (Masterworks of Tibetan Painting)

Patron and Painter: Situ Panchen and the Revival of the Encampment Style (Masterworks of Tibetan Painting)

The Nepalese Legacy in Tibetan Painting (Masterworks of Tibetan Painting)

Mirror of the Buddha: Early Portraits from Tibet (Masterworks of Tibetan Painting)

The Place of Provenance: Regional Styles in Tibetan Painting (Masterworks of Tibetan Painting)

Painting Traditions of the Drigung Kagyu School (Masterworks of Tibetan Painting)

Painting Traditions of the Drigung Kagyu School

A Revolutionary Artist of Tibet: Khyentse Chenmo of Gongkar