Two Deer, One Wheel - and Two Months of Handwork

Driving up the Töss valley to the Tibet Institute in Rikon, it's the first thing you see at the entrance: above the roof stands the golden Wheel of the Dharma, flanked by two reclining deer with their heads raised towards it. The institute is the first Tibetan monastery in Europe, founded in the late 1960s on the initiative of the Kuhn family, Zurich industrialists, for the Tibetan refugees who had come to Switzerland at the time. The ensemble on the roof isn't ornament. It's the classic marker: here the teaching is preserved and passed on.

The Dharmachakra, in Tibetan chos kyi 'khor lo, is the Wheel of the Dharma. It goes back to the Buddha's first discourse, given in the deer park at Sarnath near Varanasi — the first turning of the wheel, as the image has it, with its eight spokes standing for the Eightfold Path.

The two deer belong to the place of that first discourse. The park was somewhere the animals lived unharmed, and in the tradition it is they who listen first. Their posture — reclining, heads lifted towards the wheel — is read as an image of attentive listening.

Ensembles like this are almost impossible to buy. They are made for monasteries, not for the trade — and anyone who wants one has to commission it. So 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, and 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.

The last step was fire gilding — a technique that has all but disappeared in Europe and is still mastered in Kathmandu. The gold isn't applied to the surface but burned into it, which gives it a depth that electroplating never reaches.

What you see in the workshop photographs looks like very little equipment: a block of wood, a handful of punches, an open fire. It is the technique the Kathmandu valley has worked with for centuries, handed down from earlier generations to this one. None of it is nostalgia — these workshops work this way because it works.

The sculpture arrived in Zurich last week after its long journey. It now stands in our window at Münstergasse 10, until it finds its new owner.