Nine Diety Offering

This type of painting, which depicts the objects and attributes of wrathful deities along with offerings made to them, would commonly hang in special chapels devoted to protector deities. Unusually this wrathful subject is represented against a uniform background suggesting a grassy ground at the bottom, a foggy horizon, and a blue sky. Hanging from the top edge of the sky are heads, animal pelts, flayed skins, intestines, and bones, a wrathful valance demarcating the space.

Located at the center of this painting above a lotus are the handheld objects, garments, and ornaments of Vajrabhairava, one of the most important personal meditation deities of the Gelug School of Tibetan Buddhism, to which most Mongolians adhere. He is flanked by four deities on each side. Along the bottom of the painting, among the many offerings made to the wrathful protector deities, are the “five snouts” essential to Mongolian life: horses, bovines (cows and yak), camels, sheep, and goats.