Shrines & Altars Furniture

Incense smoke, a gilt door swinging shut, a household at peace. Antique shrines and altars come from across Buddhist and Hindu Asia. Chinese zhushi shrines are small household cabinets in lacquered elm, often boxed with a standing Buddha inside; Tibetan portable shrines are painted with citipati, the dancing skeleton lords of the charnel ground; Japanese butsudan close behind gilt doors. From India and Nepal come home altars in carved wood, copper and silver, the ghar mandir where a family performs its daily puja; Burmese stacking altars in the Mandalay style, Thai and Vietnamese tabletop altars, Mongolian traveling shrines and Indonesian teak complete the range, along with a few French Colonial pieces.

Most date from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lacquer has gone soft and crackled, gilding has rubbed back to wood, bronze has darkened with years of incense. Set one into a library shelf and stillness has somewhere to live.