THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, MAY 16, 1999

By KAY LARSON

From a nose-length away, Robert Thurman is scrutinizing the three glaring bull's-eyes and two fire-spouting horns of a fierce Tibetan deity. A row of skulls parades across the creature's blue-black head. Roaring red flames wreathe its body. But Mr. Thurman points to a peaceful face on the creature's headdress: Manjushri, representing sublime cosmic wisdom.

"Manjushri has adopted this ferocious form," Mr. Thurman says, "to subdue this guy" - he points to a small black demon at the bottom of the picture - "Yama, the god of death."

Mr. Thurman, leading a visitor through the exhibition "Worlds of Transformation: Tibetan Art of Wisdom and Compassion," at Tibet House in Chelsea, sees in this cautionary tale a message about the way to tame the violence in the human mind. Still seared by images from Littleton, Colo., and Kosovo, he ponders the human capacity for delusion.

How do you take the mind's penchant for evil and turn it into wisdom? Yamantaka, the bullish protector, brings Yama the god of death, to heel, says Mr. Thurman, by scaring him silly: "He puts death through death" by revealing the interconnectedness of all things. Mr. Thurman continues: "In Colorado, they were running around trying to act like Yama, annihilating people. Whereas what Yamantaka would have showed them is that the horrible things they were doing will only get more horrible when they die."

He describes a meditation Tibetans use: " 'Come Yamantaka, destroy my killer heart,' meaning my self centered egocentric narcissism."

Insights like these into the formerly closed world of Tibetan art are one reason the high-wattage Mr. Thurman, who is professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies at Columbia University and a co-founder of Tibet House, has become the foremost Western spokesman for Tibetan culture (although in some circles he is more famous as the father of Uma).

The exhibition he has organized with Marylin M. Rhie exhaustively analyzes 200 Tibetan paintings from the 15th century onward, taking up where the pair's 1991 exhibition, "Wisdom and Compassion," left off. "Wisdom and Compassion," which is still touring the world, offered the first significant look at what seemed at the time to be a mysteriously opaque art form.

In "Worlds of Transformation," the doors open a little wider. The catalogue is two-thirds the size of a Manhattan phone book and clearly reflects the expansion of knowledge about Tibet in the West, as well as suggesting the vastness of Mr. Thurman's mental data bank. The first Westerner to be ordained in Tibetan Buddhism, and a friend of the Dalai Lama, Mr. Thurman has a personal stake in the quest for inner liberation. He describes his own journey in two recent books, "Inner Revolution" (Riverhead Books) and "Circling the Sacred Mountain" (Bantam).

Excavating the mind, Tibetans have found terrifying things. This horrific imagery is enlisted to show people how to deal with darkness. "The fierce deities are the powers of nature transmuted into helpful forces for the teaching of enlightenment," Mr. Thurman says. "Wisdom is not just some hopeful wishful thinking that the world is nice. Wisdom is able to confront the seemingly most negative thing in the world and see through that and find the positive possibility."

Tibetan deities are flickering, shape-changing beings able to take whatever form best serves to open people's eyes. They can choose to emanate what Mr. Thurman calls "supernova flames, world-end flames -like nuclear fission, really hot." But when they're not being wrathful, they show a composed and compassionate face. Besides the scary material, the show includes pictures of peaceful, vibrant, serenely blissful beings floating in what seems like a virtual reality of radiating light and electric red, blue and yellow auras. Some of these figures are humans - saints, monastics and arhats (sages) - who successfully applied these alchemical transformations to themselves, converting their own delusions into wisdom and compassion.

But Mr. Thurman, pausing before one particularly gory flaying scene, admits that Tibetan art has been nearly swamped by New Age misinformation. "Because of the subconscious stuff, the violent and erotic imagery," he says, "people have used that already to give a wrong idea about Tibetan tantra." The Dalai Lama, he says, has decided to speak openly about tantric rituals to clear the air.

Assembling this show, Mr. Thurman and Ms. Rhie had the pick of some 1,000 paintings acquired over the last 15 years by Donald Rubin, who owns a managed care company in New York, and his wife, Shelley. Mr. Rubin, speaking from his art-filled Fifth Avenue offices, says he was drawn to Tibet; because it addresses the dual nature of the mind. For him the issue is not academic. "My father's whole family was killed by the Nazis," he says. "I was living in New York when it was happening, and I was aware of it."

He observes that violence is not confined by any borders: "Wilhelm Reich wrote that we all have a Nazi in us. It is getting a handle on that Nazi in us that is the important thing. By realizing it's there you can control it. Awareness is the first step."

Mr. Rubin says he has purchased a building in Manhattan and is in the early stages of converting it into a museum for Tibetan and other art that addresses mind's mythic archetypes. He and his foundation have also sponsored a Web site (himalayanart.org) allowing scholars and concerned advocates like Mr. Thurman to compare paintings still in Tibet-those that haven't yet been ripped from temples and private shrines-to those that have arrived in the West.

Tibetan art has been victimized by the very anarchic forces it invokes. Paintings began showing up in quantity in the West after the Chinese invasion in the 1950's. When the Dalai Lama escaped in 1959, he carried on his back a tantric painting (of the destroyer-goddess Penden Lhamo, the Tibetan form of Kali, mother of the world) that only Dalai Lamas are allowed to view. Tibetans fleeing to India in the early 60's packed out paintings, which often ended up in curio shops in Katmandu, New Delhi, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

By Mr. Thurman's estimate, the Chinese have destroyed 90 percent of Tibet's art. Of the remainder, he says, about 2 to 3 percent is safe in Western collections, while another 2 to 3 percent remains vulnerable in Tibetan temples. The rest, roughly 5 percent, is floating in the world's art markets. Now that prices have risen tenfold or so, secular Tibetans and Chinese officers have been slipping paintings into the black market. That is preferable, in Mr. Thurman's view, to the burning and shredding that was commonplace even in the early 90's.

Tibetans were originally warriors, no less inherently violent than anyone else. "A thousand years ago the Tibetans were very frightening, a Gengis Khan-type people," Mr. Thurman says. "They conquered the silk route, they beat up the Arabs, they destroyed the Chinese a few times. They were a very fierce predatory country. But then they became completely peaceful. They ceased their own ways of being conquerors and killers, and they stopped harassing their neighbors."

He points to a red female deity poised gracefully on one foot at the center of a six-sided star: Vajravarahi, the Diamond Sow, one of the erotic manifestations. Mr. Thurman lists her attributes: She is naked because there is no barrier between her and reality. Holding a skull bowl filled with demon blood elixir; waving a garland of freshly severed heads, she dances on a corpse - male- that symbolizes ignorance conquered. "We don't want to give Gloria Steinem any ideas," Mr. Thurman says, laughing. "She is both male and female. Her female side is wisdom, her male side is compassion. She's totally in balance and knows what's going on."

Having faced down and passed through the terrors' of the self, Mr. Thurman says, Vajravarahi has found "erotic, ecstatic oneness with reality." He continues: "It's total ecstatic freedom and bliss. You remain balanced and aware of the infinite interconnectedness of things. You're released from the stress of having to hold anything separate from reality." Celebrating wisdom, the Diamond Sow dances. Mr. Thurman wonders: Will the world ever dance with her?