Not every figure central to Vajrayana Buddhism is treated the same way by institutions that hold restricted or empowerment bound material closely. Padmasambhava sits in a specific, deliberate category: a documented historical figure whose life, iconography and role in Nyingma's founding narrative are treated as open subject matter, distinct from the sadhana practices tied to certain tantric deities that some traditions keep bound to formal initiation.
That distinction matters for how a painting like this one should be read. This record describes what the thangka depicts, who commissioned devotional images like it, where it is now held, and what the iconographic details mean within Nyingma's own account of its history. It does not describe, and is not a substitute for, any empowerment bound practice a living Nyingma lineage might associate with visualizing this figure in formal ritual. A museum object and a living devotional practice can concern the same figure while remaining two entirely different things to document.
The Rubin Museum, where this particular painting is held, functions as one of the major Western repositories of exactly this kind of material, holding representations of Padmasambhava across several of his traditionally recognized manifestations. That a major museum collection and a living, practicing Buddhist lineage can both have a legitimate relationship to the same image, one cataloguing it, the other venerating it, is itself a small illustration of how a single religious figure can occupy more than one kind of institutional life at once.