Thangka

A thangka is usually kept rolled up and unrolled only for display. The painting is mounted on a textile backing with a silk cover over the front, much like a Chinese hanging scroll. Its paint is mineral and organic pigment bound in animal glue. Most thangkas were made for personal meditation or for teaching monastic students. Buddhist scripture sets the proportions, postures, and attributes of the figures, and painters place features and limbs on a grid of angles and intersecting lines. The commonest composition puts one central deity in the middle, surrounded symmetrically by smaller figures. Among the Newars of Nepal, thangkas are called paubha, and they include mandalas built from prescribed circles and squares. The exhibition at the Southern Branch of the National Palace Museum follows art from the Ganges plain over the Himalayas to Tibet; one of its works is a thangka from the Vajravali series, painted by Newar artists around 1429 to 1456.

Find the central deity first and look at its hands and what it holds; then work outward and count how many rings of small figures surround it.

Who sits at the centre of the painting, and how are the small figures around them related to them?

• Handscroll, hanging scroll, album 卷、軸、冊頁→A thangka is mounted much like a Chinese hanging scroll and kept rolled up.