Geshe Langri Tangpa Statue | 7.5″ Fire Gilded | Author of Eight Verses

This 7.5″ Geshe Langri Tangpa statue is partly fire gilded in 24K gold — the face, hands, chest, and robe trim in bright gold against dark red oxidized copper outer robes, with finely detailed engravings on the robe trim — handcrafted in Patan, Nepal by master Newar artisans using the traditional lost wax sculpting method. The face is gold painted with the characteristic expression of a teacher for whom the suffering of beings was not an abstract concept but a constant, vivid, personally felt presence. The Newar artisans of Patan have supplied sacred sculpture to Tibetan Buddhist lineages for centuries, and this statue reflects that tradition at monastic quality.

Geshe Langri Tangpa (1054–1123 CE) was a Kadampa scholar and master whose primary legacy is one of the most widely studied texts in all of Tibetan Buddhism: the Eight Verses of Training the Mind (bLo sbyong tshig brgyad ma). Composed of eight stanzas, the text distills the entire practice of Lojong — mind training — into a set of commitments that work directly against the self-cherishing mind at the root of suffering, cultivating the genuine aspiration to benefit all beings above oneself. The Eight Verses is one of the most commentated-upon texts in the Tibetan tradition; the Dalai Lama has taught from it throughout his life as a concise summary of the Mahayana path in practice. Langri Tangpa was known throughout his life as “Gloomy Face” — because he was so continuously and genuinely moved by the suffering of beings that his disciples could not recall seeing him smile. This was not depression but the direct expression of the bodhicitta he cultivated: the unbearable compassion of someone who takes the reality of suffering completely seriously.

Geshe Langri Tangpa Statue Features

Geshe Langri Tangpa displays the Vitarka mudra with his right hand — the teaching and intellectual debate gesture, palm open and fingers raised — reflecting his role as a rigorous Kadampa scholar whose primary contribution was a philosophical and practical distillation of the mind training path. His left hand rests in the lap in the Dhyana mudra of meditation. He is depicted without a hat, his head showing the shaved appearance of a fully ordained monk, seated in full lotus posture on a single lotus throne — the simple, unadorned form of a practitioner whose entire orientation was not toward external display but toward the inner transformation of the mind.