From Haaretz: Unknown faces of Tibet.
Posted on October 28, 2004 06:47 AM. Filed under: religion.After seeing the Dalai Lama moving with the clumsy grace of an elephant, his kindly, avuncular face bending toward the crowd with an expression of pure benevolence, and hearing his deep, mellifluous voice explain the purpose of Mahayana Buddhism — to bring all sentient beings to enlightenment and liberation — the monsters in the Tibetan Buddhist temples come as sort of a surprise. Ceramic faces frozen into expressions of horrible rage, fangs extending from wide-open mouths, rows of orange skulls strung like a garland across grotesque heads, huge, weapon-like sexual organs. These are the most frightening idols one can imagine. The paintings on the walls of the temples are no less gruesome. Monsters eat the entrails of a doomed, screaming man. A huge eagle flies away carrying a man's eyes in his beak. Only if you look carefully, amid all the horrors, can you see the image of a man meditating in a cave crusted with snow, an eye of calm at the center of a storm of cruelty.
"This is the protector of the monastery," explains an elderly monk in a dark room in the monastery that lies high above the village of Disket in the remote Nubra Valley region of Ladakh. He has opened the room just for us, and he is motioning toward a particularly frightening statue, whose giant white head has the face of a deranged clown. "A few hundred years ago, a Muslim army tried to conquer the region. The commander came up here to the monastery and immediately fell down dead. The monks threw the body into the river, but it kept mysteriously reappearing in the monastery. Finally, one of the monks cut off the commander's head and placed it in the arms of the idol. After that the body stopped returning." [continue]