Color With Meaning

Buddhist painting follows its own coded system, where pigment carries doctrine. In Tibetan thangka paintings, each color signals a quality:

• Blue stands for the limitless, like open sky and deep water
• White signals purity and the cutting away of delusion
• Red marks power and life force
• Gold radiates the enlightened state itself

A painter wasn't choosing colors for beauty alone — each one told a trained viewer exactly what the figure represented.