The Adamantine Terrifier on the Dresser

From 1920 to 1963, a collection of Chinese art—mostly from the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911)—was continuously presented at the changing addresses of Ivan and his wife Tsuneko Kondō-Kawase, who finally adopted the full Slovene name of Marija Skušek after her baptism in 1927. The collection had been assembled in Beijing where Ivan Skušek had arrived in 1914 and been a prisoner of war from 1917, and it was then shipped to Ljubljana after his release in 1920. Photographs and a film document how their private rooms were turned into exhibition rooms. They had quite a spectacular arrangement of metalworks on a dresser in front of a mirror. In all locations in Ljubljana where the Skušeks lived, one wrathful figure was always in the centre of the group: Vajrabhairava, the Adamantine Terrifier. The following article examines the significance of this Buddhist deity in the context of Buddhism in China. It inspects the function and meaning of the dresser, in particular the symbolism of the mirror in relation to the Yamāntaka group of tantric deities, among whom Vajrabhairava assumes the highest position. It further addresses Marija Skušek’s possible role as the actual curator, raising the question about a possible socio-religious concept behind the configuration of the figures.