what is the point they are trying to convey here?

>>212092504 (OP)
just that one guy is super smart or something and should be worshipped by the masses?

I think this art is saying there's a lot of shit going on and it's complicated

I’ve always like the cycle of life one

>>212092548
Why did they even shove as many people as they could into these paintings. What's the point. Almost none of these people actually matter at all

>>212092565
Did they put little coomerjak heads at the top lol?

>>212092504 (OP)
I'm a bigger fan of aniconist Buddhist art tbqh, always gave off esoteric spooky vibes

>>212092565
holy fuck I was listening to a song on youtube right now and this image randomly showed up in the video before I clicked on this thread

>>212092595
what is this carving trying to convey?

>>212092600
The Enlightened One is watching you

>>212092605
The Awoken One is preaching, but when one finally wakes from this eternal dream of samsara their external vessel no longer matters. Only the Path does.

>>212092600
post video

>>212092504 (OP)
>Amitabha, Buddha (Tibetan: o pa me, sang gye. English: the Enlightened One of Immeasurable Light) seated in the pureland of Sukhavati. At the top center above the draped canopy are the Five Transcendent Buddhas. Standing at the sides of the throne are the 16 Great Bodhisattvas. Various buddhas, bodhisattvas and offering figures fill the landscape. The painting is executed in the Guge style of Western Tibet.

some kind of an abstraction for buddha, but i feel like only a buddhist would understand what this means. the black buddhas are very tibetan

>>212092821
so basically they are all lining up to suck his dick?

>>212092820

>>212092829
i think the painting is a mix of humans and spirits/gods/abstractions. its kind of a combination of buddhism with earlier tibetan peganism.

so the tibetan gods were re-framed as 'buddhas' similar to -the- buddha (gautama, who lived 2500 years ago). basically suggesting that overcoming ignorance,suffering... and achieving enlightenment makes you the same as as these pagan gods. at least thats the little i know about this

>>212093004
>>212092821
the thing I don't understand about buddhism is didn't the buddha explicitly say he didn't really believe in gods? The guy was basically agnostic. so why tf is the buddhist "religion" today not like that?

>>212093061
Buddha is not a god the way Jesus is God, he is a role model

>>212093004
This happens in quite a few places too, in China, many gods were re-intepretated as bodhisattvas. I think there is one painting in the tibetan style that depicts Tengri as one too.

>>212093061
They’re not called gods, even though they resemble it. It’s just like how we aren’t suppose to worship the Buddha like a god just venerate him as a teacher and a role-model but most people treat him as one. Someone more knowledgable can correct my answer.

>>212093061
i dont think he was agnostic, im pretty sure he believed in the same stuff everyone at the time did which is non-omnipotent smaller gods/spirits but i could be wrong. either way i dont think this view of the tibetan gods contradicts with gautama's views.

other than that it's the same type of thing that happened in the mediterranean where all the different pagans identified interpreted the other pagan's gods as their own (greek helios if phenician shemesh, roman minerva is egyptian isis....) and the same thing that happened with christianity in mesoamerica where the nahua gods became christian gods ('saints')

i think the buddhist version of the tibetan gods didnt have the same 'powers' as the original but its easier to convince tibetans to convert to buddhism if they worship the same gods they did all their lives just call them 'buddhas' now and instead of 'worship' they just need to follow their example to achieve enlightenment.

>>212093110
yep, basically religious people deeply dislike a sense of 'betrayal' if they stop worshiping the deity they worshiped all their lives so if you can convinced them by transference/sublimation that there still worshiping the same entity just more correctly or its the same thing under a different name it's much easier to convince them to change their ways.

its the same in hebrew some of the words in the language are names of gods of neaby religions. the most common example is shemesh which is the mesopotamian sun god is just the word for sun in hebrew. and 'el' which is one of the names of god is shared with hittites i think which suggests at one point an attempt to convert hittites or atleast a lot of linguistic mixing with them.

>>212093422
aren't there a lot of references to other gods in the old testament? I think it's implied that yahweh is the highest among the gods, not just the only god in several places

>>212093484
i think roughly speaking the 12 hebrew tribes had monotheistic and polytheistic factions and the tahan was written/rewritten by the monotheistic faction when it took over things
traditionally the tora was written by the prophet moshe before the people came to canaan/israel and the other 2 books of the tanah were written by others later so its not really known if they were monotheist or polytheist at the time. or if that happened after/during conquering and mixing with the local peoples of canaan. but they did archeologically find temples and carvings depicting the god yehova/el with the local goddess ashera. this might be a pre-hebrew thing where the names of those gods were later incorporated into the hebrew language or they just worshipped them both at the time and later censored and removed ashera worship.

there's much we dont know and probably never will