Jan Van Alphen; Karl Debreczeny; Philip Heylen; Christian Luczanits; Elena Pakhoutova; Rubin Museum of Art; Museum aan de Stroom, Antwerp

This book is the culmination of a long story that began with the acquisition of fifty-four paintings from an elderly priest, who had served in a Belgian mission in Inner Mongolia in the 1920s, by the Ethnographic Museum of Antwerp in 1977.

The All-Knowing Buddha: A Secret Guide focuses on this extremely rare group of richly-detailed album leaves which illustrate the visualization practice of Sarvavid Vairocana, the All-Knowing Buddha. This beautifully illustrated step-by-step visual guide provides a unique glimpse into Tibetan Buddhist meditation and ritual, normally instruction restricted to oral transmission by a teacher to his initiated disciple. These practices are usually not meant to be depicted and this is one of the only albums known to exist in which the meditative visualization process is spelled out visually. While the ritual narrative of these unusual paintings is Tibetan Buddhist in content they are expressed in a vivid Chinese aesthetic, a unique product of cultural translation through its Mongolian patrons. The album exemplifies rich patterns of cross-cultural exchange that characterized the Qing Empire.

Three essays by the Rubin Museum curators explore different aspects of Vairocana and contextualize the album, illustrated with approximately twenty-five images, followed by the leaves themselves which are featured in fifty-four full-page plates with accompanying commentary on their ritual and artistic content.

Alphen, Jan Van, Karl Debreczeny, Philip Heylen, Christian Luczanits, and Elena Pakhoutova. The All-Knowing Buddha: A Secret Guide. New York: Rubin Museum of Art; Antwerp: Bai, 2014.

Jan Van Alphen is the former chief curator at the Rubin Museum of Art. He was also assistant curator of the India and Southeast Asia department at the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, and in 1984 he became Asia curator in the Ethnographic Museum of Antwerp.

Headshot of Karl Debreczeny

Karl Debreczeny is senior curator, collections and research, at the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art. His research focuses on artistic, religious, and political exchanges between the Tibetan and Chinese traditions. His publications include The Black Hat Eccentric: Artistic Visions of the Tenth Karmapa (2012) and the coedited The Tenth Karmapa and Tibet’s Turbulent Seventeenth Century (2016). More →

Elena Pakhoutova is senior curator, Himalayan art, at the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art and holds a PhD in Asian art history from the University of Virginia. She has curated several exhibitions at the Rubin, including Death Is Not the End (2023), The Power of Intention: Reinventing the (Prayer) Wheel (2019), and The Second Buddha: Master of Time (2018). More →

Christian Luczanits was a senior curator at the Rubin from 2010–2014. He studied Tibetan and Buddhist Studies at the Institute of Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, University of Vienna, Austria, with a focus on art historical subjects. There he completed his PhD under the external supervision of the late Maurizio Taddei, Istituto Universitario Orientale, Napoli.

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