.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
New scholarship and rediscovered provenance details have significantly advanced our understanding of this remarkable painting, allowing for a more informed attribution to the Tenth Karmapa, Choying Dorje (1604–1674). Long admired for its stylistic uniqueness and enigmatic iconography, this parinirvana thangka can now be more securely linked to Choying Dorje and his production of two sets of The Twelve Deeds of the Buddha series that he is recorded to have painted in 1653 and 1654. Crucially, its first documented appearance at Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, in 1979, with original silk mountings that included kesi tapestry panels of cranes, a specific motif that Choying Dorje employed in his artistic vocabulary, adds compelling material evidence. Further, new scholarship by Karl Debreczeny, particularly his 2021 study, provides a rigorous comparative and iconographic framework that situates the painting firmly within the Karmapa’s creative milieu. Taken together, these developments support a confident attribution to the master himself, Choying Dorje, the Tenth Karmapa.
This painting of the Buddha’s parinirvana (final nirvana) executed on silk, features the Buddha reclining on a richly decorated light green plinth, surrounded by grieving followers, with scenes of his cremation and the distribution of his relics illustrated in the upper parts of the composition. The Tenth Karmapa’s style is recognisable for its whimsical, almost naive figural forms, long heads, fleshy faces, and tiny red lips, departing from conventional Tibetan aesthetics. The elaborate plinth beneath the Buddha, decorated with animals and offering figures, echoes ancient Kashmiri throne reliefs from the 7th–8th centuries. This reference to archaic Indian models was noted by later Tibetan artists and scholars, including the Thirteenth Karmapa, who praised the Tenth Karmapa’s paintings for their inspiration from ancient Kashmiri bronzes (see Debreczeny, The Black Hat Eccentric, 2012).
Choying Dorje led the Karma Kagyu lineage through a time of existential crisis during the rise of the Gelugpa-Mongol alliance under the Fifth Dalai Lama (r. 1642–1682). The political unification of Tibet resulted in the widespread suppression of rival sects. The Karma Kagyu, one of Tibet’s wealthiest and most established traditions, was systematically dismantled, its monasteries confiscated, its monks exiled or killed, and its cultural legacy nearly obliterated (ibid, 2012, p. 256). In 1645, Choying Dorje escaped a doomed encampment in Lhadok, fleeing Mongol encirclement and ultimately taking refuge in Lijiang (modern Yunnan), under the protection of the Naxi King Mu Yi (r. 1624–1669). There, in exile, he nurtured the Karma Kagyu tradition and developed a radically independent artistic style.
Karl Debreczeny has argued that Choying Dorje’s artistic idiom parallels that of contemporaneous late Ming painters, such as Chen Hongshou (1598–1652), who also drew upon antiquity to evoke an imagined golden age (ibid.). In this context, Choying Dorje’s visual vocabulary may be interpreted as an aesthetic form of resistance, rejecting the increasingly codified visual language of the Gelugpa establishment, whose workshops emphasised rigid formulas, ornate decoration, and saturated contrasts. In contrast, Choying Dorje’s style emphasises empty, atmospheric backgrounds, simplified (possibly Naxi) clothing, and tonal harmonies, seen here in the delicate lavender-cyan sky.
This attribution is further supported by Debreczeny who offers a detailed examination focused entirely on this thangka in: “Of Bird and Brush: A Preliminary Discussion of a Paranirvana Painting in the Distinctive Idiom of the Tenth Karmapa Recently Come to Light” (2021). There, Debreczeny contextualises the painting both stylistically and historically, affirming its attribution to Choying Dorje and highlighting the importance of its iconographic and formal departures from the Gelugpa mainstream.
Debreczeny further notes that the brushwork includes the use of the “tremulous brush” technique [zhanbi], a Chinese method involving quick broken lines, especially visible in hands and faces, a method rare in Tibetan painting. “Perhaps the subtlest and most telling clue of the Karmapa’s own hand are the quick broken lines found in some of the hands and faces, a Chinese brush technique known as “tremulous brush” (zhanbi 顫笔) which is especially distinctive to Chos dbyings rdo rje’s hand.” Other features, like boneless washes of pigment in the depiction of animals and delicate rendering of fabrics, support attribution to the Tenth Karmapa. Additionally, the painting’s medium in silk, aligns with Chinese painting traditions, further distinguishing this work from typical Tibetan thangkas.
The parinirvana belongs to a larger series/set illustrating the Twelve Deeds of the Buddha, a central theme in the Tenth Karmapa’s oeuvre. This theme was introduced to him through a 1629 commentary by his main teacher, the Sixth Zhwa dmar pa, which had a lasting influence. The Karmapa composed several poetic and biographical texts based on avadana literature, which often intertwine stories of the Buddha’s life with autobiographical elements.
The Tenth Karmapa is known to have painted a series of the Twelve Deeds by his own hand in 1653 and 1654. Then in 1653, four years after composing his own praises, the Karmapa “painted by his own hand thang ka(s) of the Twelve Deeds of the Buddha.”14 A year later during the New Year festivities of the Wood Horse Year (1654) “he once again began to draw at one time the Twelve Deeds [of the Buddha]." Multiple records indicate he painted and designed these works during his exile in Lijiang, Yunnan, after fleeing political upheaval in Tibet. His compositions were often intended as models for workshop production, with textual references emphasising his collaborative methods.
This thangka of parinirvana represents the only known composition from the two sets of the series of the Twelve Deeds of the Buddha, composed in 1653 and 1654. A much later copy of the se, riesa complete narrative set painted on cotton in bright, incongruent colours, remains at Palpung Monastery, further material evidence of the existence of the original sets. Contrasting the present parinirvana image with the Palpung iteration (Debreczeny 2012, p. 166, fig. 5.9), the two works share a foundational composition but differ in numerous details: figures vary in age, attire, and pose; the couch supporting Shakyamuni has an extra tier of lambs or deer in the present version. Their palettes also diverge. While the Palpung version, painted on cotton, features hard-edged contrasts in deep blue and green, this painting favours subtler shifts between cyan and lavender in the sky, and richer purples in the landscape. The present thangka also displays greater facial variation and emotional range, suggesting a more refined hand and an earlier date, when Choying Dorje was perfecting his style.
Compare instead to the colour palette of the Palden Lhamo, recently discovered in the depths of the inventory of the Potala collection (von Schroeder, The Tenth Karmapa: Tibet’s Greatest Artist, 2025, p. 223, P12), the dark blue skin of the Sri-Devi, layered with garments, his necklace, belt, and anklets lavishly adorned with jewels, to the robes of the myriad grieving followers in the parinirvana, their costumes layered with translucent necklaces made of fish-skin, jewel-adorned headdresses, and accessorised with peacock fans and translucent vessels filled with corals and jewels. As well the similarities in the colour palette with the Buddha Shakyamuni Attended by Mahakasyapa and Ananda in the Tibet Museum in Gruyères (ibid, pp.274-5, P59) the contrasting orange and red of the buddha against the blue-green cyan and lavender backdrops of the nimbus and coffin.
A particularly notable and important feature is the painting’s original mounting, which included Chinese kesi (silk tapestry) squares decorated with birds. These were intact when the thangka first appeared on the market with Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York in 1979. These bird-themed mandarin squares are found in other works attributed to the Tenth Karmapa, and they carry symbolic and personal resonance. Birds appear frequently in his art, poetry, and autobiographies, often representing beauty, communication, and spiritual companionship. His biographers even credit him with the ability to communicate with birds, a talent inherited by the Thirteenth Karmapa.
While such bird-themed mountings are usually reserved for central paintings in a series, this parinirvana painting features them as well, suggesting either that all works in the set were richly mounted or that the scene was considered iconically important alongside Enlightenment and the First Teaching.
A set of thang kas depicting the Twelve Deeds of the Buddha "in a Chinese style" (rgya bris ma) in ten paintings by Chos dbyings rdo rje is recorded to have survived at mTshur phu Monastery in the Karmapa's private chambers into the 1920s when Kah thog Si tu visited that place.
See Kah. thog Si tu 2001: 86, 95, line 5: karma pa’i gzim khang du chos dbyings rdo rje’i phyag bris mdzad bcu rgya bris ma thang ka bcu. Also cited by Jackson 1996: 250. Karl-Heinz Everding has recently published a complete German translation of Kah. thog Si tu’s Pilgrimage Record; for the above-mentioned set of thang kas, see Everding 2019, vol. 1: 191. While mTshur phu Monastery was destroyed in the 1950s, many personal objects related to the Karmapa lineage in mTshur phu were taken to Rumtek Monastery in Sikkim, and may have survived there. Unfortunately, due to the current complicated internal political situation involving competing factions, the Rumtek treasury is locked and seems will remain inaccessible for the foreseeable future.
This painting of the Buddha’s parinirvana (final nirvana) executed on silk, features the Buddha reclining on a richly decorated light green plinth, surrounded by grieving followers, with scenes of his cremation and the distribution of his relics illustrated in the upper parts of the composition. The Tenth Karmapa’s style is recognisable for its whimsical, almost naive figural forms, long heads, fleshy faces, and tiny red lips, departing from conventional Tibetan aesthetics. The elaborate plinth beneath the Buddha, decorated with animals and offering figures, echoes ancient Kashmiri throne reliefs from the 7th–8th centuries. This reference to archaic Indian models was noted by later Tibetan artists and scholars, including the Thirteenth Karmapa, who praised the Tenth Karmapa’s paintings for their inspiration from ancient Kashmiri bronzes (see Debreczeny, The Black Hat Eccentric, 2012).
Choying Dorje led the Karma Kagyu lineage through a time of existential crisis during the rise of the Gelugpa-Mongol alliance under the Fifth Dalai Lama (r. 1642–1682). The political unification of Tibet resulted in the widespread suppression of rival sects. The Karma Kagyu, one of Tibet’s wealthiest and most established traditions, was systematically dismantled, its monasteries confiscated, its monks exiled or killed, and its cultural legacy nearly obliterated (ibid, 2012, p. 256). In 1645, Choying Dorje escaped a doomed encampment in Lhadok, fleeing Mongol encirclement and ultimately taking refuge in Lijiang (modern Yunnan), under the protection of the Naxi King Mu Yi (r. 1624–1669). There, in exile, he nurtured the Karma Kagyu tradition and developed a radically independent artistic style.
Karl Debreczeny has argued that Choying Dorje’s artistic idiom parallels that of contemporaneous late Ming painters, such as Chen Hongshou (1598–1652), who also drew upon antiquity to evoke an imagined golden age (ibid.). In this context, Choying Dorje’s visual vocabulary may be interpreted as an aesthetic form of resistance, rejecting the increasingly codified visual language of the Gelugpa establishment, whose workshops emphasised rigid formulas, ornate decoration, and saturated contrasts. In contrast, Choying Dorje’s style emphasises empty, atmospheric backgrounds, simplified (possibly Naxi) clothing, and tonal harmonies, seen here in the delicate lavender-cyan sky.
This attribution is further supported by Debreczeny who offers a detailed examination focused entirely on this thangka in: “Of Bird and Brush: A Preliminary Discussion of a Paranirvana Painting in the Distinctive Idiom of the Tenth Karmapa Recently Come to Light” (2021). There, Debreczeny contextualises the painting both stylistically and historically, affirming its attribution to Choying Dorje and highlighting the importance of its iconographic and formal departures from the Gelugpa mainstream.
Debreczeny further notes that the brushwork includes the use of the “tremulous brush” technique [zhanbi], a Chinese method involving quick broken lines, especially visible in hands and faces, a method rare in Tibetan painting. “Perhaps the subtlest and most telling clue of the Karmapa’s own hand are the quick broken lines found in some of the hands and faces, a Chinese brush technique known as “tremulous brush” (zhanbi 顫笔) which is especially distinctive to Chos dbyings rdo rje’s hand.” Other features, like boneless washes of pigment in the depiction of animals and delicate rendering of fabrics, support attribution to the Tenth Karmapa. Additionally, the painting’s medium in silk, aligns with Chinese painting traditions, further distinguishing this work from typical Tibetan thangkas.
The parinirvana belongs to a larger series/set illustrating the Twelve Deeds of the Buddha, a central theme in the Tenth Karmapa’s oeuvre. This theme was introduced to him through a 1629 commentary by his main teacher, the Sixth Zhwa dmar pa, which had a lasting influence. The Karmapa composed several poetic and biographical texts based on avadana literature, which often intertwine stories of the Buddha’s life with autobiographical elements.
The Tenth Karmapa is known to have painted a series of the Twelve Deeds by his own hand in 1653 and 1654. Then in 1653, four years after composing his own praises, the Karmapa “painted by his own hand thang ka(s) of the Twelve Deeds of the Buddha.”14 A year later during the New Year festivities of the Wood Horse Year (1654) “he once again began to draw at one time the Twelve Deeds [of the Buddha]." Multiple records indicate he painted and designed these works during his exile in Lijiang, Yunnan, after fleeing political upheaval in Tibet. His compositions were often intended as models for workshop production, with textual references emphasising his collaborative methods.
This thangka of parinirvana represents the only known composition from the two sets of the series of the Twelve Deeds of the Buddha, composed in 1653 and 1654. A much later copy of the se, riesa complete narrative set painted on cotton in bright, incongruent colours, remains at Palpung Monastery, further material evidence of the existence of the original sets. Contrasting the present parinirvana image with the Palpung iteration (Debreczeny 2012, p. 166, fig. 5.9), the two works share a foundational composition but differ in numerous details: figures vary in age, attire, and pose; the couch supporting Shakyamuni has an extra tier of lambs or deer in the present version. Their palettes also diverge. While the Palpung version, painted on cotton, features hard-edged contrasts in deep blue and green, this painting favours subtler shifts between cyan and lavender in the sky, and richer purples in the landscape. The present thangka also displays greater facial variation and emotional range, suggesting a more refined hand and an earlier date, when Choying Dorje was perfecting his style.
Compare instead to the colour palette of the Palden Lhamo, recently discovered in the depths of the inventory of the Potala collection (von Schroeder, The Tenth Karmapa: Tibet’s Greatest Artist, 2025, p. 223, P12), the dark blue skin of the Sri-Devi, layered with garments, his necklace, belt, and anklets lavishly adorned with jewels, to the robes of the myriad grieving followers in the parinirvana, their costumes layered with translucent necklaces made of fish-skin, jewel-adorned headdresses, and accessorised with peacock fans and translucent vessels filled with corals and jewels. As well the similarities in the colour palette with the Buddha Shakyamuni Attended by Mahakasyapa and Ananda in the Tibet Museum in Gruyères (ibid, pp.274-5, P59) the contrasting orange and red of the buddha against the blue-green cyan and lavender backdrops of the nimbus and coffin.
A particularly notable and important feature is the painting’s original mounting, which included Chinese kesi (silk tapestry) squares decorated with birds. These were intact when the thangka first appeared on the market with Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York in 1979. These bird-themed mandarin squares are found in other works attributed to the Tenth Karmapa, and they carry symbolic and personal resonance. Birds appear frequently in his art, poetry, and autobiographies, often representing beauty, communication, and spiritual companionship. His biographers even credit him with the ability to communicate with birds, a talent inherited by the Thirteenth Karmapa.
While such bird-themed mountings are usually reserved for central paintings in a series, this parinirvana painting features them as well, suggesting either that all works in the set were richly mounted or that the scene was considered iconically important alongside Enlightenment and the First Teaching.
A set of thang kas depicting the Twelve Deeds of the Buddha "in a Chinese style" (rgya bris ma) in ten paintings by Chos dbyings rdo rje is recorded to have survived at mTshur phu Monastery in the Karmapa's private chambers into the 1920s when Kah thog Si tu visited that place.
See Kah. thog Si tu 2001: 86, 95, line 5: karma pa’i gzim khang du chos dbyings rdo rje’i phyag bris mdzad bcu rgya bris ma thang ka bcu. Also cited by Jackson 1996: 250. Karl-Heinz Everding has recently published a complete German translation of Kah. thog Si tu’s Pilgrimage Record; for the above-mentioned set of thang kas, see Everding 2019, vol. 1: 191. While mTshur phu Monastery was destroyed in the 1950s, many personal objects related to the Karmapa lineage in mTshur phu were taken to Rumtek Monastery in Sikkim, and may have survived there. Unfortunately, due to the current complicated internal political situation involving competing factions, the Rumtek treasury is locked and seems will remain inaccessible for the foreseeable future.