History Museum Puts Spotlight on Tibetan Tangkas, Meditation
Tuesday, January 25, 2011 The American Museum of Natural History
(AMNH) is taking some time for meditation. On Tuesday, the
museum invited the public to meditation sessions guided by
Buddhist monks to celebrate its "Body and Spirit" exhibit of
historical Tibetan medicine paintings. The paintings on view,
called tangkas, illustrate the holistic history of Buddhist
medicine. In them, the heart represents a lotus flower or the
lower intestine is an ocean. The depictions go back as far as
the 6th century B.C., but anyone who remembers the medicinal
"humors" from history class will recognize some of the same
themes in the 16th century Tibetan works. "We think of it in the
Buddhist terms that body and spirit are the same," the show's
curator Laila Williamson said. "In Tibetan medical knowledge,
there must be a balance between the bodily and spiritual aspects
of a human being before the person can be continuously in good
health or recover from ill health,"