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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.