Abounding Visions of Eminent Lives

During the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the Nartang printing house began issuing a series of block print portraits of the Panchen Lama rebirth lineage (fig. 1). Painstakingly carved in relief on large wooden blocks, then inked and applied to paper or cloth, the xylographic thangka designs enabled the creation of portrait copies and adaptations in painting or other media. The use of woodblock printing technology to make Buddhist texts and images had begun much earlier, with Tibetan-language texts printed by the mid-twelfth century in Khara-Khoto.1 Among Tibetans, the practice of recognizing the rebirth lineage (trungrab) or chain of incarnations (kutreng) of an eminent lama was nothing new either. Dating to the twelfth century, it was roughly as old as the practice of identifying reincarnating lamas, or tulkus, itself.2 Yet it was not until the golden age of woodblock printing in Tibet in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that rebirth lineage portraits appear to have been adapted into serial xylographic designs, thereby tapping the potential for proliferation, iteration, and authoritative ordering that the technology affords. The Nartang series of Panchen Lama portraits thus abounded in current and older senses of “abounding,” by prevailing widely through circulated copies, bearing a plenitude of magnificent lives and qualities, and setting limits on how those lives were represented.

Iterating through Rebirth and Portraiture

As one of the most eminent and powerful tulkus of the Geluk monastic order, the Panchen Lama was a prime subject for a rebirth lineage portrait series. The Panchens are considered emanations of Buddha Amitabha; their lineage has been widely regarded as second in importance only to the Dalai Lamas, and their sphere of authority has extended from Tsang region to the Qing imperial court and beyond. The Fourth Panchen Lama, Lobzang Chokyi Gyeltsen (1570–1662), was recognized at an early age as the rebirth of the accomplished scholar Wensapa Lobzang Dondrub.3 After achieving scholarly fame, he served as abbot of Tashilhunpo Monastery, tutored the Fourth and Fifth Dalai Lamas, and was the first in his rebirth lineage to receive the title of Panchen (“greatly learned one”). The Nartang portrait of the Fourth Panchen emphasizes his scholarly accomplishments (fig. 2): he wears a pandita’s hat, his right hand performing the gesture (mudra) of explication and his left cradling a book. It also attests to key figures in his life, such as his root teacher (lama) Khedrub Chenpo Sanggye Yeshe at his upper left, along with three deities—white Chakrasamvara, Begtse Chen, and Vaishravana—who are praised in the verse inscription below, together with the Panchen himself. The bodhisattva Maitreya, whom the Panchen reportedly encountered in a vision, floats in a sphere just above his line of sight.

A painted copy in the Rubin Museum collection retains the block print’s figures and design details while skillfully executing line, pattern, color, and shading for a vivid and legible effect (fig. 3). Other copies demonstrate that the Nartang designs were accepted as authoritative visual representations of the Panchen’s lives and their social networks. In some cases, painters applied color directly to the xylographic design printed onto the prepared cotton ground of a thangka; in others a combination of tracing, stenciling, and pouncing techniques may have been employed in order to preserve the xylograph print.4

While spiritually advanced tulkus were considered capable of emanating in myriad forms, rebirth lineages highlighted and fixed their most noteworthy past lives. A lineage could emphasize aspects of the tulku’s personality, physical appearance, abilities, and fields of activity, as well as networks and relations with human and nonhuman beings.5 The first eleven members of the Panchen rebirth lineage portrayed in the Nartang series appear to have been set during the Fourth Panchen’s lifetime.6 Like other rebirth lineages, his is traced back to the time and place of Buddha Shakyamuni, with the arhat Subhuti as the Panchen’s earliest named preincarnation (fig. 4). Other preincarnations include Manjushriyashas, a mythical Kalki king of Shambhala (fig. 5); Bhaviveka, a distinguished Indic Madhyamika philosopher (fig. 6); Go Lotsawa Khukpa Lhetse (ca. eleventh century), a Tibetan translator and disciple of Atisha (fig. 7); and Sakya Pandita, the eminent monastic scholar whose relations with the Mongol prince Köten (Godan, fl. 1235–1247) set the precedent for preceptor-almsgiver (choyon) relations (fig. 8). By appearing in the Panchen’s rebirth lineage, such figures resonate with elements for which the Fourth and other Panchens are renowned, including intellectual brilliance, relations with Mongols and other Buddhist patrons outside Tibet, and a predicted future rebirth as a millenarian king of Shambhala who will restore the buddhas’ teachings.

Serial Modeling and Proliferation

A golden thangka (sertang) portraying the Fourth Panchen as its main subject surrounded by smaller portraits of his ten preincarnations is attributed by handwritten inscription to Choying Gyatso (act. seventeenth century) (fig. 9), a master painter who carried out many artistic commissions on behalf of the Fourth Panchen. According to a later source, Choying Gyatso also designed a series of portraits of the Fourth Panchen’s chain of incarnations; these likely served as models for the Nartang xylographic designs (see all portraits at bottom of this page).7 His virtuosic work is marked by energetic and variegated displays that feature emotionally expressive and dynamically postured figures. The Nartang designs of the first eleven Panchen lineage members evince these interests, rendering most of the main portrait subjects in a three-quarters pose facing the thangka placed in the center (fig. 10). Even Sakya Pandita (fig. 11) and Yungton Dorje Pel (fig. 12), who face the viewer directly, strike dramatically animated poses.8

The initial set of Nartang designs most likely concluded with a stiffer en face portrait of the Fifth Panchen placed in the central position for mounted display, with the others radiating outward in an alternating right and left pattern. The set was sponsored by his students, as the inscription notes, and may have been carved either before or after his death in 1737.9 The next iteration of the Nartang series was produced after the Sixth Panchen’s death in Beijing in 1780, borrowing elements of Qing imperial court portraits made during his visit to design his en face portrait, and adding a portrait of the Fifth Panchen in three-quarter pose that could be shifted to the outer edge of the arrangement (fig. 13).10 The process was repeated once more with the Seventh Panchen Tenpai Nyima in about 1853.

Infinitely reproducible and extendable, the Nartang Panchen series proliferated through copies and adaptations, perpetuating traditions and creating opportunities for media adaptation, display, and diplomatic and karmic relations. Many copies are painted in the Tsangri style, one of the regionally based successors of the new Menri painting tradition that Choying Gyatso founded. The Rubin thangka is a fine example (fig. 2), featuring sinuous pink clouds and distinctively shaded white clouds against a mostly dark blue sky.11 The Sixth Panchen sent a painted set to the Qing court in 1770, which was adapted into different media, including multiple sets of engravings (moke) that outfitted the walls of various sites in Beijing and Rehe (present-day Chengde).12 Another unusual adaptation of the Nartang Panchen lineage portraits in about 1780 utilized the painting and poetry format of classical Chinese album leaves. In concert with two other albums portraying rebirth lineages of the Third Changkya Rolpai Dorje (1717–1786) and the Qianlong emperor (1711–1799), the Panchen album worked to recall, articulate, and strengthen karmic affinities among these three prominent figures of Inner Asia and China and their wider networks.13 In 1934 a Chinese Republican government representative gave a set of scrolls based on the Nartang designs, woven at a silk factory in Hangzhou, to the Ninth Panchen during one of his visits to China. This set was displayed at the controversial 1995 enthronement of Gyeltsen Norbu as the Eleventh Panchen at Tashilhunpo, alongside a photographic head shot of the Tenth Panchen.14

The Panchen series was but one of numerous important projects issued by the Nartang printing house in the eighteenth century. In 1742 an edition of the Tibetan Buddhist canon was completed there, followed in 1747 by xylographic sets of the Wish-Fulfilling Vine of Bodhisattva Legends (Bodhisattvavadanakalpalata) of Kshemendra in thirty-one thangkas, the life of Tsongkhapa in fifteen thangkas, and the sixteen arhats in seven thangkas. These large-scale projects were sponsored by the family of Miwang Polhane Sonam Tobgye, who ruled central and western Tibet from 1728 to 1750.15 As their visual authority has only been enhanced through prodigious reproduction, circulation, and adaptation, the appeal of such woodblock prints has endured for patrons, makers, and users who wish to claim or partake in the authority, charisma, and technical and aesthetic mastery these works embody.