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Polishing the Past: The Style of a Seventeenth-CenturyTibetan Mural Rob Linrothe, Skidmore College This paper focuses on an early seventeenth century mural on the third floor of the main building (tsuglagkhang) of the Tagten Phuntsokling created under the direction of the great historian, antiquarian and Indophile, Jonang Taranatha (1575-1634). A discussion of the biography of this erudite and controversial patron frames a sustained look at a single mural. The heart of the paper is an examination of an exquisitely painted Avalokitesvara that survived the destruction of many other works of art during the 1950’s and 1960’s in Central Tibet. A concentrated gaze at the mural reveals a conscious revivalism on the part of the artist and patron, even as the painting incorporates newer features of figure painting and landscape. The precise iconographic forms are traced to a late 13th or early 14th century Newari painting from a nearby site. Yet an analysis of the lines, forms, and colors reveals more than selfconscious indulgence in learned antiquarianism. Awareness of many of the major trends of contemporary painting – including Chinese landscape settings – are demonstrated but largely eschewed for an appeal to a sophisticated and charming sensuousness. Finally, and paradoxically, the manipulation of forms free from the constraints of anatomical verisimilitude reveals an aesthetic orientation in keeping with the view of the Tibetan Buddhist academic philosophy propounded by the Jonang school known as zhentong, or “extrinsic emptiness.” (It was this unorthodox view which was used to justify an attempt to eradicate the Jonang lineage and philosophy after Taranatha by the 5th Dalai Lama.) The purified form-projections of a bodhisattva are seen as radiating an indwelling enlightened absolute-essence unhampered by ephemeral and transient effects of conditional existence. These three values – antiquarianism, sensuousness, and extrinsic emptiness – are derived from the visual qualities of the mural, though they also echo in the historical record of the influential patron who directed their creation.