Yang Jin is a Tibetan who moved to Beijing as a child. As a result, she cannot speak her native language any more. She has the face of a Bodhisattva, with thin, curved eyebrows and eyes which evoke compassion. Her cousin, An Sang, is a painter in Tibet. He paints her eyes. Ms Yang had told me that I must seek out An when I got to Lhasa. I found him living in a quiet house in a quieter lane near the old casabas, close to Jokhang Temple. As I stared at his painting of a thousand-hand, thousand-eye Guanyin, I realised that I was actually looking at Ms Yang. 'She went to Beijing and found a good life there,' he said. 'Yes, materially Beijing has everything. But in Lhasa I have inspiration for my paintings. To leave this atmosphere would be to leave my inspiration. Lhasa is a place of spirit. I will stay here until I die. As an artist I could not find a better place. It has not yet been destroyed. It is pure. Here, you can see and feel the force of religious inspiration. 'But in China's many big cities, this has been destroyed. In Tibet, there are still people whose face is pure. A person's value is found within that person. That is the reason I must stay.' An pointed to his painting of the young Bodhisattva. 'Guanyin has many hands to help those in difficulty. She has many eyes to see all those in need. These are my beliefs. So I paint these hands and eyes so that more people can know that many people still live in poverty, do not have enough to eat or wear, and need the help of others. If more people can help others with pure action, they will be repaid for their purity. To be human is to be pure. People's hearts are expressed through their eyes. So I paint many eyes to remind people that they should reach out with many hands.' His paintings express a sense of solemn power through recurring images. Tibetan women covered in turquoise; thousands of hands and eyes; the unrestrained energy of white eagles. For Tibetans, white eagles carry a special symbolism - they eat the corpses at 'sky', or open-air, funerals. An explained the symbolism: 'Buddhism is purity and the ultimate contribution. A Tibetan sky funeral is the final contribution a person can make. You present the meat of your body to the eagles, and they take you to heaven. This is part of the human experience. 'In Tibet, white eagles encircle an altar where the corpses are prepared. The priests who cut the bodies recognise each eagle, and even call them by name. A dead eagle is never found on the ground, because when they die, they fly to heaven. It is all very pure. I feel the eagle's spirit. There is no great difference between the eagle and my family. My father and mother were pure, and he is quite pure, too.' Laurence Brahm is a political economist and lawyer based in Beijing. This is part of a bi-weekly series tracing the alternative cultural movement in western China
