This vibrant and well-ordered painting depicts the deity, Guhyasamaja Akshobhyavajra at the center of a thirty-two deity mandala. The mandala, a two-dimensional depiction of a three-dimensional arrangement of deities, is rendered with precision as circumscribed by the Guhyasamaja tantra. Guhyasamaja, which literally means “Assembly of Secret Factors,” is one of the oldest and most important tantras of the method-form of Anuttarayoga. Mastery of the Guhyasamaja tantras allows practitioners to go on to learn other, more complex tantras.
The two most popular Guhyasamaja tantra lineages are the Aryadeva and Jnanapada traditions, each developed by an Indian master; the present painting depicts the Aryadeva tradition, identified by the presence of Nagarjuna, the teacher of Aryadeva, as the third lineage figure in the top left (identified by the hood of snakes behind his head). The lineage figures extend across the top register of the painting and continue onto the left side of the bottom register; a group of additional deities and a single donor figure at far right fill out the bottom register.
The figures at the center of the mandala, Akshobyavajra and Guhyasamaja, are flanked by attendant figures clutching lotus stalks that support a scallop-form torana topped with a kirtimukha; such arrangements are not commonly found in the mandala paintings of the fifteenth century onwards, and bare close resemblance to the mandalas painted on the walls of the main temple of Shalu Monastery in the early fourteenth century, as illustrated on Himalayan Art Resources, item no. 62709.
The depiction of Vaishravana on the right-hand side of the lower register is depicted in a manner that closely resembles the central figure of Vaishravana in a fourteenth-century Vaishravana mandala associated with Shalu monastery, formerly in the Tucci Collection, illustrated by G. Tucci in Tibetan Painted Scrolls, vol. 2, Rome, 1949, pp. 571-8, pls. 173-7. Likewise, the image of Shadbhuja Mahakala to the left of Vaishravana in the present painting bears close affinity to the central image of the same deity in a painting also attributed to Shalu Monastery in the collection of the Rubin Museum of Art (#C2002.34.4), illustrated on Himalayan Art Resources, item no. 65165.
From the iconographic programming and the stylistic choices on the part of the artist, it is clear this painting was created by an atelier associated with Shalu Monastery in the fourteenth century, a period of artistic explosion under the patronage of the Mongol Yuan dynasty and just predating the zenith of artistic expression in Central Tibet in the fifteenth century.