traditionsTibetan protection craftསྲུང་བ།

The frame is old and dated. Tibetan Buddhism preserves Indian Buddhist tantric practice of the post-Gupta early medieval period, 500 to 1200 CE, along with native Tibetan developments; the Buddhist Tantras date from around the seventh century onward. In the eighth century King Trisong Detsen, who reigned 755 to 797, made Buddhism the state religion and invited Indian scholars to his court — Padmasambhava, whom Tibetans call Guru Rinpoche, and Śāntarakṣita, 725 to 788, counted as the founders of the Nyingma, the oldest school. The Bengali monk Atisha, 982 to 1054, arrived in 1042. Before all of it the predominant tradition was Bon, which prayer flags are held to come out of.

Protection is part of a lama's ordinary work, not a sideline. There has been a close association in Tibet between the religious and the secular — chos srid zung 'brel — and lamas have tended to the lay population by helping with protection and prosperity: rites for purifying karma, for avoiding harm from demonic forces and enemies, for a successful harvest, with divination and exorcism among the methods. Even the word is read that way: Tibetan Buddhists take the etymology of mantra as mind protector, and Tsongkhapa says a mantra "protects the mind from ordinary appearances and conceptions".

What the objects claim is specific. James Gentry, writing for the Rubin Museum's Project Himalayan Art, says Tibetans have used protective amulets against misfortune during travel, injury during battle, illness, harmful spirits, and any other potential calamity — and that relic pills of the kind kept in an amulet box need not be consumed to have effect, and are held to protect not only against mundane dangers but against rebirth as an animal, an anguished spirit or a hell being.

The twentieth century broke the institutions that make these things. In 1959 the fourteenth Dalai Lama and a great number of clergy and lay people left for India and neighbouring countries; the Cultural Revolution, 1966 to 1976, targeted religion, most of the several thousand temples and monasteries in Tibet were destroyed, monks and lamas were imprisoned and forced to disrobe, and much of the textual heritage went with them. Prayer flags were discouraged but not eliminated, and many traditional designs may have been lost. Inference — the trade in Himalayan amulets that a visitor meets in Kathmandu today sits on the far side of that break, which is one reason provenance questions in this material are so hard.

Made and consecrated by lamas; given to named people. This atlas prints what published scholarship describes — that an amulet is a geometric diagram with mantras and images, consecrated through contemplative ritual proceedings, folded, wrapped in five-coloured cords with sacred substances, and distributed — and prints no diagram, no mantra sequence and no consecration. The reason is the tradition's own: these practices sit inside Vajrayana, the Secret Mantra, where a practitioner must receive an empowerment from a qualified lama, and without initiation one is generally not allowed to practise the higher Tantras.

Practised across Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal, Ladakh, Sikkim, Mongolia and the Buryat, Tuvan and Kalmyk regions of Russia, and in the diaspora since 1959. Amulet boxes, wrapped amulets, prayer flags and dzi beads are also made for sale to buyers outside the tradition, and an object bought that way carries no record of who consecrated it — the market's standing problem, in metal, paper and stone alike.