The Buddha Image: “Out of Uddiyana”

I met Nik Doulgas in 2003 in Anguilla for Dream Anguilla and he was helping me for an article for the Arawaks and since he gave a chance to work with him, from Bumper Collection to Art Books for private collections. Last month, he asked me to do a virtual our for his exhibition in the Tibet House in New York City. What a priviliege …. I do know this collection was about 40 years of this life collectiong unique pieces of arts all over the word.

From Nik: The exhibition features a wide range of very early Buddha imagery and related artworks from the Buckingham Collection, carefully and knowledgeably assembled over the past forty and more years, now exhibited for the very first time at Tibet House.

The exhibition includes a number of Gandharan sculptural masterpieces in stone; coins and seals with perhaps the earliest Buddha imagery; a large group of extremely rare bronze Buddhas and Bodhisattvas from Gandhara and Swat; important stupas of differing sizes, styles and materials – including gold and crystal; precious reliquaries in crystal, silver, gold, bronze and stone; ‘pilgrimage’ items in terra‐cotta, bone and other materials; and important Gandhara‐inspired Buddhas recovered from early Chinese cultures.

This treasury of early Buddhist art‐works demonstrates how Buddhist images and distinctive styles evolved "out of Uddiyana" ‐ an area nowadays known as Swat, in present‐day northern Pakistan ‐ and were transmitted along the Silk Route to Central Asia, China and beyond.

A key person in the transmission of tantric teachings to Tibet was Padmasambhava, "Guru Rinpoche", born in Uddiyana/Swat. The journey of this "Second Buddha," a tantric Master, "out of Uddiyana" , who transformed Tibet at a crucial time during the 8th century.

In celebration, the current Tibet House exhibition includes a group of unusually large tantric metal sculptures from Tibet, Sino‐Tibet and Mongolia ‐ originally from the collection of the Tantrik Order in America (founded in the early 1900′s) and now part of the Buckingham Collections.

Merci Nik for your trust since these long years