ENLIGHTEN ME

The secret beauty of mandalas.

- JACKSON ARN

There was more flaying than I expected, though not necessarily more than I wanted, at “Mandalas: Mapping the Buddhist Art of Tibet.” Any visitors going to the Met’s exhibition in search of tranquillity will find a fifteenth-century flaying knife, a pair of flayed cadavers embroidered onto a rug, and another flayed cadaver, with colorful guts stretched like caution tape around a palace. They may find tranquillity, too—just not the cuddly sort that American pop-Buddhism advertises. For the Himalayan monks of the early teen centuries, the ideal setting for initiation was a charnel ground, where people left their dead to be eaten by wild animals. If religion can’t help us amid the stink of rotting flesh, what good is it?

“Mandala of Jnanadakini,” a distemper painting from the fourteenth century.

A millennium ago, India was still a Buddhist headwater. Various schools f lowed north and east, to China and Japan, but one, Vajrayana Buddhism, left its richest deposits on the Tibetan Plateau. It’s a nice irony of this show that remoteness can speed up transmission: the Himalayas were uncrossable for a quarter of the year, but travellers needed to get through all the same, and many of them spent months near the southern side of the mountains, waiting out the snow and soaking up Buddhist culture. By the thirteenth century, Vajrayana was close to extinct in its own birthplace, and Tibet, the ex-satellite, had become the new center. Ideologically, too, remoteness worked to the school’s advantage. Its leaders stressed Tantric chanting, ritualized sex, and other secretive practices, but, as Christian Luczanits suggests in an eloquent catalogue essay, they could be flashy about those secrets. Some of the most ravishing works here were painted in distemper on cloth, so that they could be rolled up, transported anywhere, unfurled, and re-hidden the second they started to dazzle.