Two Deer, One Wheel – and Two Months of Handwork
Anyone driving to the Tibet Institute monastery in Rikon in the Töss valley sees it first at the entrance: above the roof stands the golden wheel of Dharma, flanked by two reclining deer stretching their heads towards it. The institute is the first Tibetan monastery in Europe, created at the end of the 1960s on the initiative of the Zurich industrialist family Kuhn for the Tibetan refugees who had come to Switzerland at the time. The ensemble on the roof is not decoration but the classic marker: here the teaching is preserved and passed on.
The dharmachakra, in Tibetan chos kyi ’khor lo, is the wheel of Dharma. It goes back to the Buddha’s first discourse, given in the deer park of Sarnath near Varanasi – in images: the first turning of the wheel with its eight spokes, symbolising the Eightfold Path.
The two deer belong to the place of that first discourse. The deer park was a place where the animals were protected, and in the tradition it is they who listen first. Their posture – lying down, heads raised towards the wheel – is read as an image of attentive listening.
Such ensembles are hardly available commercially. They are made for monasteries, not for sale – and anyone who wants one has to commission it. That is what we did.
The sculpture was made in Nepal, in copper, worked and chased by hand. From the first design to the finished piece took just under two months. We were able to follow the work over that time: the modelling, the forming of the individual parts, the chasing of the lotus petals blow by blow, the assembly – and finally the gilding.
At the end came the fire gilding – a process that has practically disappeared in Europe and is still mastered in Kathmandu today. The gold is not applied but burned in; hence the depth that electroplating cannot achieve.
What can be seen in the workshop pictures looks like very little equipment – a wooden block, a few punches, an open fire. It is the technique that has been used in the Kathmandu valley for centuries, passed down from ancestors to today’s generation. There is nothing nostalgic about it: these workshops work this way because it works.
Last week the sculpture arrived in Zurich after its long journey. It now stands in the shop window at Münstergasse 10 until it has found its new owner.