Takkiraja (HAR 3313721)

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:05]Welcome to Himalayan Art Resources. My name is Jeff Watt.

[00:00:09]And today I want to talk about a painting from the what used to be the Essen collection, but is now the uh universe uh the Museum of Culture Basel, Switzerland.

[00:00:21]Um and I'm not sure that you can actually see any of these paintings. I heard some years ago that they were all put into storage and they used the space in the museum for other topics other than uh Himalayan and Tibetan art. So, I'm not sure how accessible. I haven't been there in a number of years, probably 2000 and 3 or 2004.

[00:00:44]Um but the painting I want to talk about today is HAR number 3313721.

[00:00:52]And it's part of a set. We don't know how big the set is.

[00:00:56]Um we know of three paintings right now, but it could be um more than that. It could be as many as 13 paintings possibly.

[00:01:04]Um the subject of the painting is Takki Raja. It's a Buddhist deity. It's actually a power deity. Comes out of the Guhyasamaja Tantra.

[00:01:13]Uh Takki Raja, but yes, there are other um forms uh other deities that have the name Takki Raja as well. But here we're dealing with Takki Raja, the power deity, one faced, two armed, red in color.

[00:01:28]And uh in our painting here in the composition, we just have the one central figure of Takki Raja. We have an Amitabha Buddha directly above and then we have two lamas in the upper right and left corners.

[00:01:42]Um the painting belongs to the Ngor tradition, which is a kind of a sub-school um doctrinally aligned, but um uh administratively independent under the Sakya tradition historically.

[00:01:58]And uh uh this painting is is unusual because it it it should really be early 16th century. So, it should be the early 1500s, but it's really done in an archaic style. It's done in this Nepalese Newar Valley archaic style, which was quite popular [clears throat] uh at More Monastery in the uh I would say the 1430s up until even up until uh the mid to late uh uh 16th century, we can even find some very very archaic forms in the very early 17th century uh just in keeping with some already um created lineage painting sets. And so, they just added to these sets, but they kept the same archaic Nepalese uh style.

[00:02:49]Now, how do we know it's archaic? Well, we know it's archaic because uh this style was was really fading out uh within other traditions and monasteries at this time in West Tibet, Central Tibet, and Eastern Tibet.

[00:03:04]Um what marks it really as uh Newari is uh look at the flames. Look at the hair.

[00:03:10]Look at the large bulging eyes. But but even more importantly, look at the the green scroll work of the background.

[00:03:16]This is all very much Newar. Also, with the very uh dominant red pigments.

[00:03:22]Um now, with this deity Chakrasamvara, there can be many variations of this, and I'm not sure if the variations are textual or whether or not they're artistic. But often, this form of Chakrasamvara is shown solitary, whereas in in the texts, textually, he has a consort.

[00:03:41]He's often described as uh semi-peaceful, semi-wrathful. But in this photo, we might say he's semi-peaceful, semi-wrathful, but he's far more on the peaceful side. All those eyes are slightly enlarged.

[00:03:54]Um, but we also have depictions in painting where he's wrathful. So, so there's a lot of variation when it comes to this deity and a lot of interpretation by artists based on the text. So, we're going to leave it there.

[00:04:08]It's one of the treasures of the the the museum in Basel and they and they have many they have many good paintings. So, we're going to talk about a few others that treasures which you can find in the museum of culture, Basel, Switzerland.

[00:04:27]And if you look into their painting master work page on the HAR website, you'll find it. Thank you very much.

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