Five Hundred Buddhist Deities

Contents: Preface. Introduction. List of deities. Bibliography. Figures and mantras. Index.

"The book: Five Hundred Buddhist Deities is intended to present a reproduction of Five Hundred Deities of Narthang in an enlarged size. Here in this book each square of a folio is separated and enlarged together with the mantra of each deity.

"In the fifteenth regnal year of the Manchu Emperor Chia ch'ing, i.e., in 1810, the Imperial Treasurer Blo bzang dkon mchog and others requested the Fourth Panchen Lama to initiate them into the great Mandala of the First Buddha by giving the four kinds of Tantric consecration rites. On this occasion the Fourth Panchen Lama used the book named Rin Ihan as the basic text for those rites. He was further requested to publish the wooden prints of the images of the deities described in the text.

"This enlarged edition of Five Hundred Deities of Narthan is based mostly upon the set of prints preserved at the Indian Institute, the University of Hamburg and partially upon the set kept at the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, Dharmshala.

"Recently, interest in Buddhist iconography has been increasing remarkably. This book will furnish high quality of materials for the study of Buddhist iconography." (jacket)

[Musashi Tachikawa is Professor at the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan.]