Howling in anger and wearing skulls as ornaments, this goddess is a fierce form of the compassionate and beautiful Tara. Buddhist deities are peaceful, enlightened beings, but sometimes their passion turns to rage—particularly when they are protecting devotees and sacred teachings. A master craftsman sculpted her seventeen human and animal heads.
The sculpture was once part of a frieze (a horizontal band of painted or carved images) on a shrine at Densatil, a Buddhist monastery in Tibet. The monastery burned down in the 1960s, and fragments from the frieze were acquired by American and European collections. Experience these seventeen heads of ferocity in our galleries of South Asian and Himalayan art.
