What Is a Thangka? Meaning, History, Types and How One Is Made

Framed Amitabha Buddha thangka hanging in a quiet room under warm light

A painting made to be rolled, a grid under every figure, eyes painted last, and an honest note on the kinds of thangka you can buy today.

What is a thangka? It is a Tibetan Buddhist image on cloth, painted, sewn or printed, mounted in silk and made to be rolled up and carried. Most show a single deity or teacher at the center, drawn to fixed proportions, with smaller figures around them. Thangkas hang in temples and household shrines, they are used in meditation and teaching, and on festival days the largest ones are unrolled down the face of a hill. Everything about the form follows from one practical fact: this is a picture you can roll up and take with you.

What is a thangka? The word and the object

The Tibetan is thang ka. Britannica glosses it as "something rolled up". Gilles Béguin, writing in the catalog Wisdom and Compassion, gives it as "thing that one unrolls". Both describe the same object from opposite ends of its day. In the Kathmandu Valley, Newar Buddhists call their own scroll paintings paubha.

Britannica notes that a rod is fixed along the bottom edge so the painting can be rolled, and that thangkas were carried in religious processions. When one is not on display it is kept rolled. That is why the form looks the way it does: a flexible cotton ground, a soft silk border, a rod at each end.

The Tibetan tradition sorts sacred objects into three kinds of support, and the scholar David Jackson places painted thangkas among the "bodily supports", images of the enlightened body. They were hung in temples and family shrines, carried in processions and used to illustrate teaching, and Britannica stresses that they were never free artistic creations. The painter worked to canonical rules, because the image had a job to do.

Where thangkas come from

Britannica traces the thangka to the cloth paintings of India, the paṭa, to mandalas once drawn on the ground for a single ritual, and to the scrolls of itinerant storytellers. In style it drew on the painting of the Himalayan valleys, Kashmir and Central Asia, and its landscapes on China.

The oldest surviving Tibetan paintings on cloth come from a sealed room. Cave 17 at the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang, now called the Library Cave, was walled up early in the eleventh century; the latest dated document inside is from 1002. When the Daoist abbot Wang Yuanlu opened it in 1900 he found manuscripts by the tens of thousands and more than a thousand paintings on silk, banners and embroideries. Tibet held Dunhuang from 787 to 848, and much of the cloth painting from the cave is thought to come from those decades or near them.

Aurel Stein took a large share to London in 1907. One piece now in the British Museum, 1919,0101,0.140, is a Tara seated among other deities, painted in ink and color on hemp, 66.5 by 40 centimeters. The museum catalogs it as Tibetan and probably much later than most of the cave's contents.

Thangkas certainly made in Tibet itself survive from the eleventh century on. Steven Kossak and Jane Casey Singer, in the Metropolitan Museum's catalog Sacred Visions, count about twenty from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. One of them is at the Met, accession 1989.284: Amitayus, the Buddha of Eternal Life, distemper on cloth, 138.4 by 106.1 centimeters, dated to the eleventh or early twelfth century. Amitayus sits golden-skinned with a jar of elixir in his lap. In the bottom register are a couple, probably the donors, and a monk, probably their teacher. They are small and plainly drawn beside the deity. More than nine hundred years ago a family paid for this painting, and they are still in it, at the edge.

Britannica adds that thangkas are never signed and seldom dated. From the fourteenth century Chinese elements entered Tibetan painting more and more strongly, reaching a peak in the eighteenth, and in that same century woodblock printing in Tibet reached its height.

How a thangka is made

The sequence below follows the Rubin Museum's account of a painting made in 2022 by the painter Buchung Nubgya, set beside the conservator Ann Shaftel's technical notes from 1986.

The cloth and the ground

The support is usually cotton, more rarely silk. Wikipedia's summary of the literature gives widths of about 40 to 58 centimeters, and cotton grounds wider than about 45 centimeters often have a seam. The cloth is sewn to four wooden rods and laced into a larger frame so it is held taut on every side.

Then it is primed. A thin coat of weak glue goes on first, then a ground of glue and lime or chalk. Shaftel records the eastern Tibetan recipe as lime, hide glue and water mixed to the thickness of buttermilk, worked into both sides of the cloth by hand, coat after coat, dried in the sun. When it is dry the painter polishes it with a smooth stone or a shell until the surface is hard and even. Yak-hide glue was the usual binder, and it dissolves in water.

The grid: iconometry

Before any figure is drawn, the layout lines go down. Shaftel gives the Tibetan as thig tse: a thread coated in chalk is stretched across the canvas and snapped, leaving a clean straight line. A central vertical, two diagonals, and the further lines the figure needs.

This is iconometry, the measurement of sacred figures. Its units are relative, not absolute. The Rubin's summary is "twelve small units to every large unit", and Jackson describes the classical measures as face-lengths and palm-widths, each made of twelve finger-widths. A buddha is laid out in one set of proportions, a peaceful goddess in another, a wrathful protector in another, a human teacher in another. Main figures are drawn larger than minor ones by rule, so the hierarchy of a painting can be read from the sizes alone.

Jeff Watt of Himalayan Art Resources names the tantras the measurements come from, the Manjushri Mulakalpa, Samvarodaya, Krishna Yamari and Kalachakra, and adds two cautions. There has never been one system used by everyone. And a painter who leans too hard on the grid produces stiff figures. Students begin by copying grids, starting with the Buddha, and use fewer lines as they advance; masters often draw a single center line and the rest freehand.

We take that seriously. If the proportions drift, the image stops being that deity, whatever its attributes say.

Color: mineral pigments

The sketch goes down in charcoal, then is inked in black. Painting comes next, and the order is strict. The Rubin describes the background first, sky and water and clouds, one color at a time across the whole canvas. Then the central figure, beginning with the lotus throne, then the clothing, then the body, lighter colors before darker. Then shading, which Tibetan painters call dang; Shaftel records one painter's description of it as darkness falling evenly and gradually over the mountains.

The paint is ground mineral and organic pigment in a warm animal-glue medium. Technically that makes it distemper, not gouache. Shaftel lists the core palette: azurite for blue, malachite for green, each ground finer for the paler shade; vermilion for red; minium for orange; orpiment for yellow; indigo and a brownish red lac for outlines and some pinks. The blues and greens of an old thangka are ground stone.

Gold

Gold comes near the end. Fine gold line, which Shaftel gives as ser ri, traces the patterns on brocade, the edges of petals and leaves, the cracks in rocks. Flat gold areas go on after the other flat colors. Then the gold is burnished with a smooth gem such as onyx, and selected parts are polished to a high shine while the rest stay matte, so that a crown can glint while the robe beside it glows.

The eyes, last

The very last thing painted is the eyes. In the Rubin's words, once they are complete the painting becomes a true representation of the deity. The Smithsonian Folklife Festival's account of thangka painting describes the pupils being painted in during the final consecration. Until then the face is there and the figure is complete, but no one is looking out of it.

Types of thangka

By ground color

Jeff Watt sorts Himalayan paintings into four grounds, the base color laid under everything else. Wikipedia's list of Tibetan terms gives most of their names.

  • Multi-colored (tson-tang). The ordinary thangka, painted in full color, and by far the most common. Watt notes that its making is discussed in the Manjushri Mulakalpa Tantra.
  • Black (nag thang, often written nagthang or nagtang). Gold line on a black ground. Watt dates the form to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and connects it to older images of wrathful figures drawn on surfaces blackened with charnel-ground ash. It was kept at first for wrathful subjects. The Casa Asia collection in Lisbon notes that black-ground protector paintings became popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and were hung in dark, closed rooms set aside for the guardians.
  • Gold (ser thang, serthang). A ground of powdered gold, used mainly for buddhas and long-life deities. Watt thinks it began with painting directly onto Chinese gold silk. The Philadelphia Museum of Art describes its Vaishravana, Lord of Wealth, of the late sixteenth to seventeenth century, as its only ser thang: paint of pure gold suspended in glue, a format wealthy Tibetans had favored since the fifteenth century. Large ones are rare because of the cost.
  • Red (mar thang, marthang). Gold line on a ground of vermilion or iron oxide. Watt says it became popular in seventeenth-century central Tibet under the patronage of the Fifth Dalai Lama and his regent Desi Sangye Gyatso. Red and gold grounds were often combined, and can be hard to tell apart.

Later painters added silver grounds, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and blue and green ones more recently. Watt also notes something important for anyone buying today: contemporary painters use black, red and gold grounds for peaceful deities too, not only for the subjects the grounds were first reserved for. We go into the three single-color grounds, and which deities each was made for, in Black, Gold and Red Thangkas.

The Met keeps a black-ground painting worth looking at closely: Mahakala, Protector of the Tent, about 1650, accession 2006.105, image 73.7 by 52.1 centimeters. Mahakala tramples a corpse and holds a flaying knife and a skull cup, with Palden Lhamo and two Sakya hierarchs nearby. The catalog calls it a black-ground painting and lists its medium as distemper and gold on blue silk. The name of the ground and the cloth under it are two different facts, and the catalog records both.

By technique

  • Silk appliqué (gos sku, göku). The word means "cloth image". Cut pieces of colored silk and satin brocade are sewn into the figures instead of paint. The Rubin's Orgyen Dorje Chang (below) is one figure from such a set.
  • Giant festival thangkas. Usually appliqué. At Tashilhunpo a display wall built in 1468, about 32 meters high, carries one great image a day during a three-day festival in the fifth Tibetan month; Hans Henss, cited on Wikipedia, gives the old Buddha banner there as about 28 by 19 meters. In Bhutan these are called thongdrel.
  • Embroidery (tsem-thang). Stitched rather than painted, usually on silk.
  • Woodblock prints and painted prints. Himalayan Art Resources lists both. A block carved after a famous composition is pressed onto paper or cloth; in the painted print, which HAR calls parma, the print on cotton is then painted over and mounted as a thangka.
  • Tsakli. Small painted cards used in tantric initiation, up to about 15 centimeters across.

The silk mounting

A thangka is not finished when the paint is dry. It is trimmed, edged with cord and sewn into a textile mount, and the mount has its own anatomy.

  • The rainbows. Narrow strips of colored silk sewn tight around the painted panel. HAR dates the fashion for red and yellow borders to the seventeenth century, and it has lasted.
  • The broad border. Usually brocade, widening slightly toward the bottom. The Rubin gives the traditional proportions: the bottom panel half the height of the painting, the top panel half of the bottom, the side strips half as wide as the top is tall.
  • The door. A square of special silk set into the lower border. Shaftel notes that it was often cut from a Qing court robe. Britannica records the explanation that it stands for the source of all creation.
  • The veil. A thin silk cover hung from the top and lifted to view the image. HAR notes that ordinary paintings have one or none, important works three or four, the grandest up to five.
  • Rods and cords. Britannica describes a flat stick at the top and a roller at the bottom. The Rubin adds that the bottom rod is capped at each end, weighs the painting down when it hangs, and is what you roll it around. A cord ties it when rolled.

Two notes of caution sit beside that list. Himalayan Art Resources points out that mounts were not designed from religious texts or iconography, whatever meanings were later read into them. And the history is physical rather than symbolic: HAR traces the earliest mounts to plain cotton strips, often blue or green, and the brocade and the veil to gifts from Yuan dynasty China. The Smithsonian's account notes that today printed brocade or polyester is common. Shaftel, as a conservator, is firm on one point. The mount is part of the thangka and should not be thrown away.

Consecration: when the painting is finished

For the people who use them, a thangka is not complete when the painter puts down the brush. Shaftel names the ceremony rab ne, consecration, and the opening of the eyes, cen je, performed by a monk or teacher. The Smithsonian account describes monks chanting and invoking the deity, then three syllables, om ah hum, written on the back of the cloth. The Rubin places them behind the deity's head, throat and heart.

Turn an old thangka over and you will often find them. Wikipedia notes that most old thangkas carry inscriptions on the back, usually the deity's mantra. The back of the Met's eleventh-century Amitayus carries some of the commonest Buddhist mantras, among them the Buddhist creed. After consecration, in the tradition's own understanding, the image is the deity present, not a picture of one. Britannica likewise notes that a thangka was held to have no religious value until a lama had consecrated it.

We describe all of this as Tibetan practice. A thangka from us is an image made with care to traditional proportions; we do not claim it will bring blessings or change anything for the person who owns it.

Three more museum thangkas to look at closely

  • Met 2004.139, Amitabha, the Buddha of the Western Pure Land, about 1700, central Tibet. 142.9 by 100.3 centimeters, a whole paradise under a flowering tree, with pools at the bottom where the reborn arrive.
  • LACMA M.83.105.17, Palden Lhamo, about 1750 to 1850. Mineral pigments and gold on cotton, from a Gelug monastery in central Tibet. The goddess rides through a sea of blood with her attendants Makaravaktra and Simhavaktra; a Gelug lama at the top marks whose painting it was. Her story is in Palden Lhamo.
  • Rubin C2003.34.2, Orgyen Dorje Chang, 19th century, Tibet or Bhutan. Silk appliqué, over two meters tall, and only one of the eight manifestations of Padmasambhava that once surrounded a larger central image, made to be unrolled on a mountainside.

The kinds of thangka you can buy today

This part is about honesty, ours included. A great many objects are sold as "thangkas", and the word alone tells you little. They fall into three groups.

Fully hand-painted thangkas

Painted the way described above, on primed cotton, with ground mineral and organic pigments and real gold, by a painter who trained for years in a lineage. A good one takes a long time and is priced accordingly, and it is worth every hour. The painters who do this work are keeping an old discipline alive, and if what you want is a painted thangka, buy one from a painter, or from a workshop that tells you who the painter is and what the pigments are. Nothing we make is a substitute for that.

Printed reproductions

Photographic or digital prints on paper or canvas, sometimes of an old painting, sometimes of a new one, sometimes framed or sewn into brocade. They put a sacred image within reach of anyone. A print should be sold as a print.

Printed and hand-finished thangkas

Between the two sits a third kind, and it has a long history. The Rubin explains that woodblock printing in Tibet reached its height in the eighteenth century, that blocks were carved after famous compositions, and that painters then added the detail and color to each print, so a single block became the base for many individual paintings. HAR's parma are exactly this: a print on cotton, painted over, mounted as a thangka.

Ours belong to this third group, and here is precisely what they are. The image is our own drawing, kept to the traditional iconometric proportions, printed on heavy card. They are not hand-painted, and they are not mineral pigment. Each one is then finished by hand at a temple, by elderly lay Buddhists who practice there: glass crystals are set into it one at a time, and its outlines are traced over in gold glitter. That finishing takes about two days a piece. The glitter is not gilding and the crystals are glass, not gems. Part of every order goes to that temple, so every thangka is also an offering.

Each is framed at 55 by 71 centimeters around an image of 40.2 by 56.2 centimeters, with a silk brocade border inside the frame, a wood frame and an acrylic front. The brocade comes in four colorways: Night Sky, Ink & Gold, Crimson Cloud and Warm Sun. The brocade frame-within-a-frame is our nod to the traditional mount, in a form that can hang on an ordinary wall.

All of them are in the thangka collection, and each deity has its own guide in the Journal:

Questions worth asking any seller

  • Is the image painted, printed, or printed and finished by hand? If finished, what was added?
  • What are the pigments, and what is the gold: gold leaf, powdered gold, gold paint, or something else?
  • Who drew it, and to what proportions?
  • Who did the hand work, and where?

A seller who knows can answer each in a sentence.

How to hang and care for a thangka

Most of what follows comes from Shaftel's two conservation papers, written for painted thangkas on cotton. The causes of damage she sees most are changes in humidity, water, careless handling, and soot and grease from butter lamps and incense.

  • Keep it dry. The ground is bound with animal glue, which water dissolves. Don't hang a thangka on a damp outside wall or in a bathroom. Shaftel describes paintings against monastery walls taking up damp from behind, and the cotton and silk cockling unevenly as the air changes.
  • Keep it away from smoke. Lamp and incense soot is among the hardest things to remove from a painting. If you keep a shrine, set the lamp to one side, not directly below.
  • Roll from the bottom up. With the veil rolled in, which is both the traditional way and the respectful one. Rolling presses and rubs the paint, so roll loosely, and a crease in the cloth becomes a crack in the ground.
  • Hold the mount, not the painting. When you move or roll a thangka, your hands go on the brocade.
  • Don't leave a rolled thangka lying flat for months. The ground can fold and crack under its own weight.

A framed thangka behind acrylic is spared the rolling and the handling, though not the damp. Keep it out of direct sun as well, and hang it in a clean place, at or above eye level, where it can be seen without being brushed past. More in How to Hang and Care for a Thangka.

Thangka questions

What is a thangka used for?

As a support for meditation and devotion, a focus for a shrine, and a way of teaching. Thangkas hang in temples and homes, are carried in processions, and on festival days giant appliqué ones are displayed on monastery walls.

What does the word thangka mean?

The Tibetan thang ka is glossed by Britannica as "something rolled up" and by Gilles Béguin as "thing that one unrolls". The painting is mounted on cloth so it can be rolled and carried.

What are thangkas painted with?

Traditionally, ground mineral and organic pigments in animal glue on primed cotton: azurite, malachite, vermilion, minium, orpiment, indigo and lac, with gold for line and ornament.

What is a black thangka, or nagthang?

A thangka drawn in gold line on a black or very dark ground. It began with wrathful protectors, and contemporary painters also use it for peaceful deities.

What is the difference between a thangka and a mandala?

A thangka is the format, a mounted image on cloth. A mandala is a subject: HAR describes it as a geometric model of a pure universe, the dwelling of a deity. Many mandalas are painted as thangkas, but most thangkas are not mandalas.

Is a printed thangka a real thangka?

It is a real image of the deity, and printing has been part of the tradition since woodblocks. It is not a painted thangka, and it should never be sold as one. Ask exactly what you are buying.

Do I need to be Buddhist to have a thangka at home?

No. Treat it as you would any sacred image: hang it somewhere clean and raised, and learn who it shows. There is more on that in Can You Wear Buddhist Jewelry If You're Not Buddhist?, which applies just as well to images on a wall.

Eyes, last

On the Met's Amitayus, along the bottom edge, are a couple and a monk. Above them, the eyes of the buddha were the last thing painted, and someone had to decide that the painting was ready for them. Everything else on the cloth, the chalked line, the stone ground into blue, the gold rubbed bright with onyx, was preparation for that.

May whatever you hang on your wall be worth looking up at.

Thangka collection · Black & Gold Thangkas · Buddha Thangkas · Tara & Goddess Thangkas · Bodhisattva & Protector Thangkas

More from the Journal: Amitabha Buddha · What Is a Stupa? · The Eight Auspicious Symbols · Tibetan Buddhist Jewelry: Ten Sacred Symbols