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Twenty-One Taras on display at the Melbourne Town Hall by Tara Institute, May 2026. Credits 21 Taras Thangka Exhibition’s Facebook Page
As part of his Vast Vision for the FPMT organization, Lama Zopa Rinpoche expressed a heartfelt aspiration: “My wish is for the big centers in FPMT to have these large thangkas.” To bring that vision to life, the Lama Zopa Rinpoche Bodhichitta Fund sponsored the creation of a dedicated workshop at Institut Vajra Yogini in France, where large-scale thangkas could be created for FPMT centers around the world. The first thangka commissioned from that workshop — a monumental thangka of 49×30 ft (15x9m), and 150 pounds (70 kilograms) by Tara Institute in Australia — stands as a remarkable testament to what that vision can achieve.
Twenty-One Taras on display at the Melbourne Town Hall. Credits Tara Institute’s Instagram
In 2014, Lama Zopa Rinpoche asked master thangka artist Peter Iseli to paint a monumental Twenty-One Taras thangka. Working alongside his wife Jangchub Iseli-Sangmo, Peter spent four years creating the painting one section at a time in the studio at Institut Vajra Yogini. At the end of 2017, Rinpoche offered the completed thangka to Tara Institute in Melbourne, Australia, with the wish for it “to be shown to as many people as possible.”
That wish has been honored. For four consecutive years, the thangka has been displayed at Melbourne Town Hall as part of the annual multicultural Vesak celebrations — one of the few venues with the height and hanging points needed to safely support a canvas of this scale and weight.
The thangka was also exhibited at a retreat with Lama Zopa Rinpoche at the Great Stupa in Bendigo in 2018. There, Rinpoche requested that Peter make further refinements: changes to Tara’s face, the addition of a rainbow around the central Tara’s aura, and adjustments to the shapes of the blue lotuses. Peter completed these changes in 2019, and the thangka has since been kept at Tara Institute, whose team works each year to fulfill Rinpoche’s wish by organizing this complex and logistically demanding exhibition.
Due to its immense size, unrolling and re-rolling the thangka from its 9.5-meter (31 ft) tube is a careful technical exercise. Done properly — to keep the canvas straight and avoid any wrinkles or damage — it takes at least an hour each time. For those who witness it unfurled, however, the thangka has become something far more than a work of art: a precious connection with Lama Zopa Rinpoche himself.
2026 poster of the Twenty-One Taras on display at the Melbourne Town Hall. Credits Tara Institute
This year on Saturday May 16, 2026 the thangka was displayed at Melbourne Town Hall by the Tara Institute team, in the annual United Nations Vesak. Next year it will be displayed on Saturday May 8.
Several other FPMT centers have since commissioned large thangkas of their own and are holding festival days where these holy objects can be experienced by the public. As Rinpoche has said of displaying such objects, doing so makes it “so easy for sentient beings to purify their heavy negative karma and making it so easy for sentient beings to create extensive merit — which makes it so easy to achieve the realizations of the path and so easy to achieve liberation and enlightenment.”
Is your FPMT center home to a large thangka? Have you attended one of these exhibitions and would like to share your experience? We’d love to hear from you — send a photo and a few words about your experience and let the whole FPMT family rejoice together!
Foundation for the Preservation of Mahayana Tradition (FPMT), is a Tibetan Buddhist organization dedicated to the transmission of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition and values worldwide through teaching, meditation and community service.