Preparing the Grid

A story about practice lineages

Reading time: About 5 minutes

Scanned pages from The Art ofAwakening showing the grid for a seated Buddha and for the standing, thousand-armed Avalokiteshvara.

The Practice:

• Read several paragraphs of “The Art of Awakening”

• Take your seat in front of the paper, set on an easel, and bow to the deity, yet to be revealed

• 15 minutes meditation including chanting Om mane padme hum

• Bow to close and draw out the grid

• Dedicate the merit

  ---

When I wrote out the patriarchs lineage for Jukai as part of my chaplaincy training, I went through the motions. I copied what was given to us, following the same precise red lines and filling in the same names as had hundred of students before me. I appreciated the practice as a reminder of an unbroken lineage to the Buddha, but the names meant little to me.

When I drew out the matriarchs lineage, choosing to depict Prajnaparamita up in the left hand corner next to the title, I felt something more significant than I had with the patriarchs. Again, most of the names were just words on paper, rather than people I might relate to aside from also being Buddhist practitioners. Still, there was something more there for me, something meaningful in acknowledging the Buddhist women both known and unknown.¹ I will always feel a kinship to those who have had to fight to have their humanity recognized.

On the left, the patriarch’s lineage, traced along a red looping line from the top to the bottom of a sheet of artificial parchment. On the right, the matriarch’s lineage, with fun fancy text for the heading and an image of Prajnaparamite in the upper left corner. The names in this lineage do not follow a line, but are listed in groups and separated by a line with a lotus in the middle.

I didn’t realise, as I marked out the grid for Avalokiteshvara, that I was drawing upon another sort of lineage.

When I finished drawing the core lines for the figure, I set up the paper I was working on opposite a digital project so I could check the reference grid from The Art of Awakening.² I turned down the lights in the room and switched the projector on, the scanned grid from the book projecting onto the paper and my own grid. After a few minor adjustments to the projector’s focus, I was able to confirm that the lines I’d drawn were scaled correctly.

I was done what I had wanted to do with the projector, and could have switched it off, but I got curious. I grabbed the tablet connected to the projector and opened the reference images I’d saved weeks before when I was first getting acquainted with Lokesvarak.³ I tapped on the first of half a dozen reference images I’d been studying and once again went through the process of adjusting the projector so the image aligned with the grid. I did this again and again, opening each image, adjusting the focus until the image aligned. Despite the variations of every depiction, each resplendent image, be it from Nepal, Tibet, Korea, Vietnam, or Thailand, aligned to the grid.

I’ve long described preparing the grid for a thangka as the same as taking ones seat for meditation. There is a way one learns to position their body to prepare for being present. The position we take for meditation varies depending on the practice and our physical needs, but bringing awareness to our body is always the first step, just as bringing awareness to the divine form of a Buddha is the first step in Thangka art.⁴

The grid was supposedly developed during the time of the Buddha. It is a set of measurements passed around the globe along with the teachings. So many artists before me saw an image of a Bodhisattva or Buddha and were called to depict them again, for their time and place and culture and community of practice, and yet at the core the images are the same. By preparing my surface, I was taking my seat within a lineage of artists and art that originated in what we now know as India and has since moved around the entire globe. Within the grid I can see the lineage of all the artists before me. I did not know how my own figure would look, but I could see that they would be reflected in every depiction that came before, and every one to come after.

May it be of benefit.

K

---

Photo taken in June 2023. Chenrezig’s face and core figure on the grid, 18 of their thousand arms partially sketched in. The lines of the grid frame the figure, guiding the scale and dimensions of the Bodhisattva.

1. I often wonder about the many queer, trans and gender non-conforming practitioners lost to the historical record. How many monks and nuns were trans men and women or non-binary folks who found solace in shared robes and shaved heads?

2. Immense gratitude to one of my Chaplaincy cohort members for gifting me this book along with Robert Beer’s Encyclopedia of Tibetan symbols. Emily, you are a gem. A thousand million blessing for your gifts to my practice and our dharma kinship.

3. Because they have so many names, I’m gonna keep ya’ll on your toes by switching out Avalokiteshvara for their other monikers.

4. …and because we are all already Buddhas, it really is one and the same.

---