PAINTING
MARIA MOERTL
 
DETAILS
Oil on canvas
100 x 100 cm
2025
 
DESCRIPTION
There was one very special period in my life: together with my husband, I went through a three-month silent retreat.

A retreat is a time of deep inner practice, when you step away from the usual noise of the world, meditate, observe your mind, and try to transform not the external reality, but the very state of your own consciousness. It is a space where the more subtle and profound capacities of the mind gradually begin to open.

For me, this retreat became especially meaningful because it was there that I began to paint. Over the course of three months, I created 29 paintings. It felt as if some incredible abilities had opened within me — abilities I had never even suspected before. And the painting “Lineage of Knowledge” is one of the works born during that period.

It depicts the Buddhist lineage of transmission — the Teachers who, for more than two and a half thousand years, have been passing these teachings from heart to heart, from teacher to student. Teachings on karma, emptiness, compassion, wisdom, and the true nature of our reality. Teachings that give a person the possibility not merely to live within chaos and suffering, but to gradually transform the mind and become truly happy.

For me, this painting is not simply an image of saints or great masters. It is my gratitude to the entire lineage. It is my bow to those who preserved these teachings, often at the cost of their own lives, and carried them forward like a sacred fire. Just as Prometheus brought fire to humanity, these Teachers brought into our world the knowledge that can free a human being from suffering.

While I was painting this work, I had the feeling that I was not alone. It seemed as if the Teachers themselves were appearing in the space of the painting and taking part in the process. And the brush in my hand felt as though it was being guided by someone else — not by me, but by some higher channel of ideas, forms, and meanings.

In the end, twenty-two Teachers appeared on the canvas. Each of them reflects their own branch of the tradition and my personal spiritual connection with this lineage. Together, they seem to create a living stream — an unbroken transmission of knowledge from the past into the future.

For me, this painting is a way to say thank you. Thank you to all those thanks to whom, even in our complex, unstable, and chaotic world, we still have a chance for salvation. A chance to encounter true knowledge. A chance to transform our mind. A chance to become freer, wiser, and happier.