Repeated Images Surrounding a Central Figure
Repeated images surrounding a central figure are common in Himalayan and Tibetan art. The images of paintings found on this page are only a selection from some of the larger museum collections on the HAR website.
The central subject can be almost any figure, a buddha, deity, or teacher. The surrounding subject can also be a repeat of the central subject or another figurative subject. The consistency is in the surrounding figures all being the same. Sometimes each figure is drawn individually by hand but more often the figures are created from a wood block stamping the outline of a number of figures at the same time or some other such mold to replicate the outline of a large number of images quickly and then painted to a greater or lesser degree.
The purpose of such paintings is to create large numbers of the same subject or deity. This in turn multiplies the amount of merit from creating a single holy image to a hundred-fold amount of merit from creating a hundred auspicious images.