Line drawings

Khandro Déchen has studied iconographic drawing and thangka painting since 1995. She draws most of the image references for practice within the Confederate Sanghas of Aro, and provides many of the line drawings for Aro publications. Her life’s work is dedicated to drawing the entire Aro gTér cycle of one hundred and eleven awareness-beings.

The Aro gTér contains 111 yidams, or awareness beings. One of them is Wrathful Black Ögyen Jampalyang – also known as ‘The Violently Insane Vajra Cannibal’. He devours all attempts to validate unkindness or to concretize non-dual intelligence. Of Ögyen Jampalyang, Ngak’chang Rinpoche writes: “He awakens the glorious intelligence of the clear heart. Where sanity has become the uncompassionate path which spiritualises dualistic neuroses, his violent insanity destroys heartless pragmatism, mean mindedness conservatism, and passionless conformity. Where religious orthodoxy has constricted the heart of kindness, his violent insanity destroys the self-serving strategies which place philosophy above the natural intelligence of human warmth and friendship. Where cold-blooded intellectualism has clouded the wisdom of the sense-fields, his violent insanity destroys the arrogance which has no hospitality for divergence