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excerpt from Tibetan Furniture: offering cabinet (torgam) with macabre design pages 197,199 |
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| "This offering cabinet is decorated with remarkable paintings that depict symbolic offerings to a fierce deity. The two doors of the cabinet are painted with distinct but related schemes: the left-hand door represents a glowing red palace constructed of skeletal parts, while the right-hand door contains three triangular-shaped offerings in skull bowls. Although this latter is a standard form for an offering to a protector deity, there are some unusual features here: orange flames lick upwards from the offerings and above them rides a skeleton carrying yet another offering of sense organs (facing following page). | |||||||||
| The skeleton is balanced on a triangular fire hearth, a type of ritual hearth used for making offerings via the fire god Agni. The shape represents the mouth of Agni, which consumes the offerings and carries them to a wrathful protector deity. Tibetan Buddhists sometimes made hearths with this triangular shape for presenting physical offerings, and they were also visualized as part of meditational practices."
(this is an excerpt from the full text that accompanies photographs of this offering cabinet on pages 197-199) |
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