Bhutan’s art and the monks who protect it

An ancient bronze sculpture inlaid with gold and turquoise, one of the 87 featured objects at the “The Dragon's Gift” exhibition (top). The monks praying at the temporary shrine at the Rubin Museum (below).

Lama Karma Tenzin and Lopen Sonam Wangchuk, monks from the remote Himalayan Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, arrived in New York on a weighty mission: to appease and console, through daily prayer and meditation, a fleet of protective deities.
For the next four months the monks will live in Greenwich Village and spend their days at the Rubin Museum of Art, on West 17th Street in Chelsea. Twice daily they will perform puja in the museum galleries to safeguard the spiritual well being of the sacred artworks, which have travelled to New York for “The Dragon's Gift: The Sacred Arts of Bhutan,” an exhibition that will open on September 19.
Buddhist belief holds that these objects actually embody the deities and lamas, or holy men, whose images and life stories they portray. Most of these objects have never travelled outside Bhutan, and the Bhutanese government let them go on the condition that they be spiritually chaperoned, as it were, by a changing roster of monks during the exhibition's two-year journey from museum to museum.
The first comprehensive exhibition of Bhutanese sacred art in the United States, it made its first stop at the Honolulu Academy of Art in February. The 87 objects in the Rubin show -- ancient bronze sculptures inlaid with gold and turquoise, long horn trumpets, more than 40 intricate and colourful thangka paintings dating from the 16th to the 19th centuries -- offer an unparalleled glimpse into the spiritual and artistic riches of a nation that today possesses the world's most intact Vajrayana, or Tantric, Buddhist culture, having never been conquered, invaded or colonised.
Unlike the objects in the Rubin Museum's permanent collection of Himalayan art, the works in the show are still consecrated objects, having been culled by exhibition curators and the Bhutanese government from among Bhutan's 2,007 active temples, monasteries and dzongs, or fortress-monasteries.
In New York, Lama Karma and Lopen Sonam, who both hail from eastern Bhutan, will perform the same rituals the other monks did: morning purification, which involves a hand mirror and blessed saffron water, and evening prayers to reassure the protective deities and lamas that the objects are in safe hands and will be returning to Bhutan soon. Visitors will watch them create sand mandalas and demonstrate how to make tormas, small prayer cakes used as offerings.
Lopen Sonam, who is 24 and teaches English at Trashigang Dzong, an imposing white fortress in far eastern Bhutan, had never travelled outside his country. Much of what he has seen and experienced in New York is a lifetime first: first escalator, first automatic revolving door, first traffic light, first skyscraper. The tallest building in Bhutan is six stories high, he said.
Lama Karma, 37, once visited Hong Kong but had still been concerned about adapting to city life. In Bhutan he heads a monastery that has no electricity and is accessible only by a 12-hour hike from the nearest road.
During the evening prayer, at a temporary shrine at the Rubin, the two monks sit cross-legged facing jewelled sculptures of the three most important figures in their culture: Guru Rinpoche, who brought Tantric Buddhism from India to the Himalayas; Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyal, who unified Bhutan in the 17th century; and the Buddha.

Source: The New York Times