Tibetans create art to open windows from the ordinary, earthly world onto a perfected universe. Their tangka paintings, sculptures, and mandalas are regarded as points to transition from the coarse world we know to the perfected enlightenment realm of pure wisdom and compassion. In creating these images, Tibetan artists have produced some of the world's most sophisticated, profound, and beautiful art. Like Tibet itself, Tibetan art has been misunderstood and underestimated. This expanded edition Wisdom and Compassion: The Sacred Art of Tibet brings us even closer to the gentle people and the luminous culture of the Land of Snows by showing, explaining, and celebrating two hundred forty-one of its finest and most moving paintings and sculptures. It introduces new aesthetic and psychological interpretations of the Tibetans' ability to merge their earthly and spiritual worlds at a practical level. Written by two renowned scholars of Buddhist art and thought, Marylin M. Rhie and Robert A.F. Thurman--with contributions by a number of prominent curators from around the world--this landmark book was expanded to illuminate an enlarged international version of the most important and comprehensive exhibition of Tibetan art ever seen. The authors present Tibetan Buddhist art in terms of its religious meaning, purpose, and function, while treating the aesthetics and style of individual pieces with unprecedented depth and clarity. They present new theories for the chronology and provenance of many works and offer translations of inscriptions to support the dating and identification of individual pieces. Spanning a thousand years from the ninth through the nineteenth century, works range from a three-inch ivory carving of the Tibetan poet-saint Milarepa, to an eleven foot tapestry of the future Buddha Maitreya, to a seven-foot-wide colored particle sand mandala. The pieces are presented in a sequence organized on the principle of the mandala, leading us on a step-by-step journey from Tibet's historical, and mythical, sphere--which is entwined with its actual history--through the Buddhist practices of Tibet's four main monastic orders, to the heart of the transcendental realm of the Pure Lands at the inner, mystic core of the mandala. Tibet's sacred art is a large, ancient, and complex subject. Here it is made invitingly comprehensible even to those unfamiliar with Buddhist thought and culture. With matchless insight and clarity, Wisdom and Compassion brings understanding of Tibet's uniquely developed culture within our grasp. It is a book that astonishes, informs, and inspires.