Taranatha’s Vision of Shakyamuni’s Quest

Visualizing the Story of the Buddha

The story of the Buddha’s life has been told and retold countless times throughout the history of Buddhism and across Asia. The story presents both a gripping tale of personal transformation and a dazzling vision of ultimate meaning in a vast cosmos of gods, demons, and humans. The tale of the prince who left home to discover the meaning of life, became enlightened, and spent the remainder of his life teaching others the contemplative and ethical ways of thinking is the founding narrative of Buddhism and a deep source of inspiration for Buddhists grappling with what it means to live a good life.

In Tibet, the Buddha’s life was a popular topic for writers; dozens of versions exist throughout Tibet’s rich literary history, from encyclopedic chronicles of the Buddha’s every deed to brief stories meant for novice monks and nuns. The story was also a popular topic for large mural paintings that adorn Tibet’s temples and monasteries. While many narrative murals depicting the Buddha’s deeds feature his previous lives, some focus on his final life as Buddha Shakyamuni, the founder of Buddhism in our current era of life on earth. One of the most striking examples of the narrative of Buddha Shakyamuni to be found in Tibet is the monumental mural at a key institution of the Jonang tradition, Puntsok Ling Monastery.

The Mural Scene

This image shows a small detail depicting a prominent scene from the Buddha’s life prior to his enlightenment: his renunciation of royal trappings and escape from the family palace. The complex arrangement presents several stages of narrative within a single visual field. Shakyamuni appears in courtly jewelry and clothing, indicating that he is not yet awakened as the Buddha, but rather still a young prince, a buddha-to-be, enmeshed in the mundane social world of palace life. In the upper left and right, the prince journeys beyond the palace walls, where he experiences, for the first time, the hard facts of human existence. In the upper right, he encounters an aging person, thereby discovering that, one day, he too will age. In the upper left he sees a corpse wrapped in a white cloth, according to traditional Tibetan custom, and carried on the back of an undertaker. He realizes, for the first time, that he too will die. These constitute two of the so-called “four sights” (together with a sick person and a wandering mendicant) that bring about an existential crisis in the young prince. The boy’s father worries these grim realities of human life will prevent the prince from taking his rightful place as king, and so attempts to distract him with women and song. In the palace’s large central room, the prince enjoys the music and dance of his harem, all staged by the king. But palace amusements are no longer of interest to the buddha-to-be. Instead, he decides to escape by night in search of liberation from suffering. The image signals his escape through the repetition of a single ladder. To the right sits a horizontal ladder, so heavy, the story tells us, that even five hundred men (represented here by only five) could not lift it. To the left stands the ladder now miraculously raised vertically by a single yaksha, an earthly spirit conspiring with the gods to ensure the prince’s escape. The prince descends the ladder and joins his horse Kanthaka and charioteer Chandaka, who stand near the palace gate on the lower right. Then, as depicted in the upper right of the detail, all three ride away from the palace with the horse born on the shoulders of the gods, so as not to wake the palace guards with the sounds of hoofbeats. Kanthaka later returns, only to die just outside the palace walls, his heart broken by the prince’s departure.

The Context of Puntsok Ling Monastery: Synthesizing Text and Image

The seventeenth-century Tibetan luminary Taranatha (1575–1634) planned and commissioned this monumental life of the Buddha mural for his seat at Puntsok Ling Monastery in the Tsang region of central Tibet (fig. 2). The work presents the Buddha’s life on a grand scale, at a level of detail and complexity rarely matched. The mural is roughly 5 1/2 feet (1.7 meters) in height and runs nearly 277 linear feet (84.5 meters), divided into fifteen panels separated by doors or windows. In total, the visual narrative covers some 1,450 square feet (135 square meters) of painted surface (fig. 3). The murals extend along four walls of an external ambulatory space on the monastery’s second floor. The resulting space allows the viewer to walk through the Buddha’s deeds from beginning to end, while simultaneously being surrounded by the sum total of his life (fig. 4).

The designs were based largely on Taranatha’s literary rendering of the Buddha’s life entitled The Sun of Faith, which itself draws broadly from the classic Indian texts of Buddhist monastic law known as Vinaya. Tibetan accounts most commonly divide the life story into twelve discernable acts: 1) his descent to earth from Tushita Heaven; 2) his mother Queen Maya’s dream of his impending birth; 3) his birth; 4) his skill in youthful sports; 5) his education as a prince; 6) his life of pleasure in the royal palace; 7) his renunciation of royal status (shown here); 8) ascetic practices; 9) his battle with demons; 10) his enlightenment; 11) his career as a spiritual teacher; and finally 12) his death. The Sun of Faith instead presents the Buddha’s story in 125 chapters that incorporate all twelve acts, but also includes more than one hundred stories of the Buddha teaching, traveling, meeting gods, performing miracles, and overcoming demons in his effort to expand the Buddhist community of monks, nuns, and laypeople throughout northern India (fig. 5). These stories are not commonly illustrated in Tibetan texts or painting, yet constitute a majority of Taranatha’s literary and visual narratives.

Taranatha also composed a painting manual with guidelines for translating his literary narrative into visual images. Painters would have used these guidelines to plan mural vignettes, though it is clear that they took creative license in mapping the layout of scenes. The result is a complex presentation, lacking formal chapter markers, although the artists made creative use of landscape and architectural features to designate breaks between narrative elements (fig. 6). Some stories extend across wide sections of mural space to suggest geographic movement. Viewers would have had to spend time interpreting the images to appreciate the action.

Comparisons and Contrasts

While the Buddha’s life story divided into twelve acts was popular in Tibet, perhaps the most common source for rendering visual depictions of the life is the work known as The Wish-Fulfilling Vine of Bodhisattva Lives (Bodhisattvavadanakalpalata), an eleventh-century composition of Sanskrit verse (translated into Tibetan in the thirteenth century) in 108 chapters and narrating episodes from the Buddha’s previous rebirths as well as selected episodes of his final life on earth as Shakyamuni. These stories were rendered in portable scroll paintings (thangka) and woodblock prints, but are perhaps equally known through their presentation in murals adorning monastery temples and assembly halls. Some examples, such those found at the monasteries of Gongkar Chode, Drepung, and Tashilhunpo, as well as the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, cover hundreds of square meters.

Taranatha also criticized the practice of dividing the Buddha’s life into twelve acts, suggesting it mixed distinct types of Indian Buddhist literature. The first eleven acts come from the Living Out of the Game Sutra (Lalitavistara Sutra), a massive Buddha narrative of the Greater Vehicle tradition (the Mahayana), which does not include the Buddha’s death. Tibetan writers drew an account of the Buddha’s final days, Taranatha claims, from the Vinaya, which Tibetans consider to be from the so-called Lesser Vehicle tradition (the Hinayana). Taranatha rejects the mixing of these two traditions. For him, the Greater Vehicle emphasizes the miraculous and cosmic aspects of the Buddha’s life, while the Lesser Vehicle version emphasizes the social, the ethical, and the earthbound details of the story. For him, the Buddha’s life in the vinaya forms the most useful version of the story; it provides what ordinary people who might view the mural are able to comprehend. It is for this reason that he spends so much time telling stories of the Buddha’s travels among the people of India. His encounters with farmers, merchants, beggars, kings, and queens are what give the Buddha a human quality. In the mural, the Buddha walks among humans, and though he may transcend human foibles, in Taranatha’s vision the Buddha traverses the world among its inhabitants. In this way, Taranatha’s mural of the Buddha’s life contrasts with the portraiture and statues that depict the Buddha solely as an enlightened figure, sitting high above and far removed from the activities of his disciples and devotees.

If there are doctrinal and pedagogical differences between the Buddha of the Vinaya-inspired narrative painting and the Buddha of more static, iconic presentations, these differences translate into the visual language of the narrative mural. The Buddha’s encounters with manifold humans, gods, and demons occur in diverse landscapes and entail many types of action, from sailing the seas to scaling mountains, from talking with queens in palaces to meeting merchants on the road. Each of these uses a visual logic that would have taken time and attention for viewers to make the most of. Repetition, as we have seen in the case of the ladder, encourages the reader to move back and forth between spaces on the mural to work out the temporal flow of the story. The density of the many narratives, coming one right after the other, stacked vertically or winding back and forth among other episodes, holds the potential to arrest the viewer with its constant motion, the sustained activity that made the Buddhist teachings flourish. Here the Buddha is not sitting in meditation, he is in the world, talking with people, on the move. The viewer, too, must be in motion to follow the story; one must walk one hundred meters to get the whole story, to fully immerse oneself in the life of the Buddha.