Palazzo della Cancelleria, Piaggetta del Castello 1 58031 Arcidosso (GR)
The Museum is located in an eighteenth-century building in Arcidosso that formerly housed the Chancellery, part of the medieval complex of the Aldobrandesco Castle. The new exhibition center is located in this structure (made available by the Municipality of Arcidosso), the fruit of more than thrity-five years of collaboration between Merigar and the Municipality of Arcidosso.
The mission of the Museum is to collect, preserve, and communicate the precious Himalayan and Asian cultural heritage, and increase and stimulate intercultural dialogue. The rich collection of the Museum (collected by Prof. Chögyal Namkhai Norbu with the help of his family) is exhibited across nine thematic galleries along a sensory path that immerses visitors in various cultural and ethnographic experiences using state-of-the-art museum technologies such as panels, video, multimedia and interactive installations, and soundscapes.
In 1981 Professor Namkhai Norbu, returning to Lhasa after more than 20 years, made the first photographs of what were then considered the most secret images of Tibet, the 18th-century murals of the Lukhang, a small temple located behind the Potala Palace which contains what has become known as the Sistine Chapel of Tibetan Buddhism. An esoteric Wunderkammer, the images of the Lukhang present a panorama of Tibetan culture and an authentic visual guide to enlightenment.
This exhibition has been made possible by the support of the 8th of December Fund and the Ati Evolution Foundation.
The MACO would like to thank the international team of guest curators who have collaborated with the MACO staff, each sharing their personal perspectives, research, and experiences to enrich the exhibition:
Our special thanks to Enrica Rispoli, scholar and author, who was so fortunate to have been in the right place at the right time, and accompanied Rinpoche and his family to Lhasa in 1981.
For more information and updates regarding events, scheduled gallery talks, guided tours, publications and travel related to the Lukhang exhibition, please consult the Mirror and visit the websites of the MACO, SSUK and Merigar.
“Silk Road Pilgrimage” surveys the cultural and commercial relationships between the East and
West which have helped to shape our world.
The movement of ideas, peoples and technologies, are told through the treasures in the Namkhai
Collection, on display to the public for the first time. Spanning millennia, linking worlds and perspectives from across Asia, the exhibition explores the Buddhist principle of Interdependence.
Our guide is Xuanzang (602 - 664), the Chinese Buddhist monk who undertook the 17 year and 25000 km pilgrimage across 110 countries, along the Silk Road from China to India in search of the original Buddhist texts. Return- ing to China with 657 Sanskrit scriptures, he spent the rest of his life translating them into Chinese. His travelogue, composed for the Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty, later helped to guide a generation of European explorers, at the beginning of the last century, to rediscover lost civilisations and artefacts, which now fill the world’s great museums.
The exhibition Meditation in Motion explores the world of Tibetan dance, through costumes, photographs, and video installations. From folk dances to Tibetan sacred dances, Cham and Gar, which transforms our ordinary perception of a given place into a perception of a consecrated space of pure existence: "the great mandala of action".
Created specifically for MACO by Master Chögyal Namkhai Norbu in 2016, this sublime series of calligraphy was realized by brush, in golden ink on a deep blue lapislazzuli paper. Many masters, scholars, and oriental poets, over the centuries, have trained in the art of calligraphy, reaching real forms of artistic and meditative expression where painting and writing become one.
