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The Buddha had been a prince, a family man with wife and child, an entrepreneur,
an ascetic in the forest, a monk, and a teacher. He traveled
constantly, and came to know people of all classes of society. Most of the
Sutras, or Sermons, contain episodes of the Buddha's meeting with some
individual or group. The Buddha spoke the words that would best reach the
hearts of his audience, and he had knowledge of all the dialects and slangs of
the day.
It was inevitable that different renditions of the Buddha's teachings
surfaced after he passed away. Differing renditions lead to differing interpretations of
the doctrines themselves, concerning such subjects as the monastic code and positions on what
were and were not authentic transmissions of the Buddhas own speech. The
Buddhism that reached Tibet, and that which is represented in the collection of the
Shelly and Donald Rubin Foundation, is a "universalistic" type Buddhism, one
that will admit that all the various teachings are in fact the Buddhas
teachings, but that some of these teachings are more true than others. In this
way, the heroes of every transmission of Buddhism are venerated. The manner in which
they are venerated in the Thangkas give us clues as to how they were
venerated by the viewers who saw them in places of honor.
It may be said that the sacred painting of Tibet can be divided into two
groupings:
- Those primarily devoted to showing transmitters of Enlightenment, the Gurus and Lamas.
- The teaching they transmitted, the images of the deities and their mandalas.
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