The Buddhist guardian Yama

Yama changes when he crosses the mountain passes from India into Tibet. A far cry from India’s austere first ancestor, Yama of the Himalayas now wears a buffalo head. What is more, his imagery involves to grotesque piled on lurid. Yama dances on top of a buffalo, which is itself in sexual union with a corpse. What could possibly be at stake here to generate such psychologically challenging imagery?

From a meditative perspective, interaction with Yama’s imagery releases unconscious identification with those psychological forces that might otherwise create negative states of mind and even bad rebirths—namely anger and lust, both of which you can see pushed to their gruesome limits in this sculpture. By turning such negative states of mind into a tangible artwork, the Tibetan artist has externalized, objectified, and thus rendered perceptible these otherwise inchoate forces so that they are present before any viewer.