Ruthless Compassion: Wrathful Deities in Early Indo-Tibetan Esoteric Buddhist Art Hardcover – Aug 1999

Synopsis

The historical development of Esoteric Buddhism in India is still known only in outline. A few verifiably early texts do give some insight into the origin of the ideas which would later develop and spread to East and Southeast Asia, and to Tibet. However, there is another kind of evidence which can be harnessed to the project of reconstructing the history of Esoteric Buddhist doctrines and practice. This evidence consists of art objects, mainly sculpture, which survive in significant numbers from the 6th to the 13th century. The author has gathered a large number of these works of art together and analyzed them on the basis of their formal style to determine chronology in different regions of eastern India. These stylistic chronologies are then factored with the iconographic themes portrayed. It was discovered that the theme of the wrathful diety underwent continous development in the art and ideology of Esoteric Buddhism. The author shows that there were three distinct phases of Esoteric Buddhism, and that wrathful deities play a different role in each. This text examines the evolution of the forms and the unfolding significance of wrathful deities. The primary source materials are a large body of images surviving in South Asian contexts, cross-referenced in a few cases against early counterparts from the western Himalayas, Tibet and China. Along with Sanskrit and Tibetan texts already studied by scholars, Indic texts translated into Chinese in the 8th and 9th century are particularly utilized for the light they shed on the increasingly pivotal role of the wrathful image in Esoteric Buddhist ideology. Because of its growing importance within Esoteric Buddhism, the history of the wrathful deity image provides an overview of the history of Esoteric Buddhist art and practice.