A magnificent Indian manuscript illumination of Tārā, purchased seven years ago by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, bears a striking resemblance to the well-known Newar painting of Vanaratna’s wife giving dāna to various Buddhist and non-Buddhist ascetics.* This further bolsters a claim by Dina Bangdel that the main figure in the latter work was depicted as Vanaratna’s favourite form of Tārā — a notion which could have used a lot more support when it was first proposed.
(However the suggestion that the event depicted is an “Abhishekha (Initiation)”, as is unfortunately recorded in LACMA’s catalogue, is quite without foundation; rather it is evidently a samyak, namely, a saṅghabhojana offered to all the monasteries of a district on some auspicious occasion — in this case, the first-year anniversary of Vanaratna’s parinirvāṇa.)
* References, etc. (including an explanation of what the famed sthavira was doing with a ‘wife’) are to be found in my [unpublished] review of Circle of Bliss.
Not submitted to totallylookslike.com.