ARE your nerves frazzled by daily stress, your ears deafened by traffic, your thought-system shredded beyond redemption? In short, are you a victim of late 20th-century frenzy? If so, be kind to yourself: drop into the RHA Gallery in Dublin's Ely Place where Romio Shrestha's display of Tibetan Healing Thangka (scroll paintings) will have you calm and peaceful - even loving your neighbour - within minutes.
But be prepared to give some time to looking - there are 79 paintings in all, and together they represent an encyclopaedic body of work based on Tibetan Buddhist and Ayurvedic texts relating to herbal treatments.
Some of the paintings, with accompanying Tibetan text, graphically illustrate the many ills which can afflict the body. Others show the physicians using their healing powers while others represent herbs and their uses. One chart shows the body as a house.
"The eyes are the windows," says Romio, "the drains are for the shit and pee and the rib cage is the place where you keep your valuable things." One major painting shows the moment of conception with two tiny figures loving each other beneath an ornate blue and gold bedcover while above their heads hovers a spirit waiting to enter the new baby. Then there are the stages of the baby: first a fish, then a tortoise in its shell and, at the kicking stage, a wild boar! There are calendars to consult in order to conceive on an auspicious date, and a sad Iittlepicture of what Romio calls "the baby's shadow" slipping away from the mother's body, denoting a miscarriage.
Romio's own baby - a little girl - was born 18 months ago, to his wife, Sophie Shaw-Smith. They met in Kathmandhu - where Romio comes from - and fell in love. The only problem was that Romio's parents had already arranged a marriage for him.
Separation and anguish followed, but in the nick of time - and with only 15 days to go before the wedding - Romio fled Nepal and came to Ireland to marry Sophie. Now the two have made their home in Dublin, where Sophie too works as an artist.
Time is precious to Romio. There isn't enough of it here in Ireland - always someone to see, somewhere to go, while his sponsor, Gordon Campbell, taps his watch and moves him on - which is why he went back to Kathmandhu to work. There, time has different values. "The paintings took 180 years to do," he says, meaning that apart from himself, he had a team of 45 apprentices working on them over a period of four years. Nor does he measure his time by the clock: "I meditate on the paintings before I start, maybe for one or two full moons. Maybe eight."
He's not even sure how old he is and really, when you've been talking in terms of full moons it suddenly doesn't seem terribly important to press him on this one. He was born into a Hindu family in Nepal, where his grandfather was a tax collector who used to tell people not to worry if they couldn't pay. In Kathmandhu, he was sent to a Catholic Mission School and brought up a Catholic, though at the age of five he was told by Buddhist monks that he was the reincarnation of an 11th-century Tibetan monk who painted sacred pictures.
"As a Catholic," says Romio, "I didn't believe this but when I asked the Dalai Lama about it, he asked me who had taught me to paint. Well, no one taught me. I taught myself. So...
His paint he makes himself, grinding to powder the many coloured stones which he collects in the mountains of Nepal: lapis lazuli for blue, cinnamon for red, shells for white. Though an individual painting may measure four feet by two, some of the tiny figures within it - birds, animals, people - while complete in every detail are no bigger than a thumbnail. And where gold has been used, it is later burnished with agate so that the whole painting glows with life.
The show will be worth a visit not only to see the paintings but also to see Romio: he will be present each day, resplendent in his princely attire while he burnishes one of his paintings - and invites people to join in.
The whole focus of this exhibition, in fact, is the healing power not only of the plants depicted in the paintings but in the capacity of the mind to heal the body: "Looking at these thangkas will awake the healer within the person," he says. "Most of the time, the mind is flying - here, there, never still. But when you look in detail at the paintings, the mind is at rest and that's when it "can heal." He will also be giving a talk each day about the paintings.
And as if to give a blessing to his show, there will be an unplanned but serendipitous coming together of events next week when a group of Black Hat Gyume Buddhist monks, including musicians and singers, in Dublin to give a display of their art, will dance at the opening of Romio's show.