Wrathful Tantric Imagery at the Seat of the Tibetan State Oracle

Nechung Monastery lies on the outskirts of Lhasa (fig. 2), halfway up to the sprawling monastery of Drepung that dominates the face of Gepel Utse Mountain. While not as large as Drepung or the other major monasteries of the Geluk tradition,1 Nechung is home to a unique and evocative collection of murals portraying wrathful figures that cover the walls of its courtyard and assembly hall. The content of these paintings includes numerous fierce protector deities and wrathful tantric tutelary divinities. While all Tibetan monasteries have their assortment of murals and paintings, Nechung’s stand out for the extensiveness of their graphic and fierce images, as well as their gruesome nature and connection to the Nechung Oracle.

These expansive murals ultimately center on a Tibetan Buddhist protector deity named Pehar, who has an important place in Tibetan mythic history overall, but who came to be housed at Nechung, where he and his various forms have taken oracular possession of a human medium for almost five hundred years. This famous medium, known as the Nechung Oracle, has had a close connection to the lineage of the Dalai Lamas since the turn of the sixteenth century. Under the auspices of the Great Fifth Dalai Lama (1617–1682), the Nechung Oracle became the main state oracle of Tibet and has since been consistently providing clairvoyant advice to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government up to the present day.

Mythology and the Nechung Oracle

Nechung represents a confluence of rich mythologies and important institutions, both of which are embodied in the vast imagery of its murals. As the monastery’s central protector of the Buddhist teachings, Pehar (fig. 1) has a rich pedigree that traces back to Tibet’s first Buddhist monastery of Samye, and further still into the legendary past. Elements of this mythos can be found in ritual manuals, biographies, and histories that span the major Buddhist sectarian traditions. Fittingly, however, a summary of the deity’s past can be found at Nechung itself, where a late seventeenth-century monastic record is inscribed on the southern wall of the complex’s courtyard.2

In brief, many eons ago Pehar had been a religious king who took on monastic vows with his equally devout friend and minister. Unfortunately, the king misunderstood the teachings while the minister excelled, and this resulted in the king regressing in his vows. Out of envy and anger over his former friend’s progress, the king proceeded to torment the minister in different animal forms over several lifetimes, until the wrathful being was finally subdued by the great tantric deity Vajrapani. After more lifetimes spent in Buddhist Hell, the king’s spirit eventually arrived at a meditation center in Mongolia, near modern-day Lake Kokonor (Qinghai), where he acted as the local deity. He was then captured by the army of the Tibetan king Tri Songdetsen (742–ca. 800) and brought back to central Tibet. The great tantric master Padmasambhava tamed and named the spirit Pehar and entrusted him with guarding Samye Monastery’s treasures. Eventually Pehar migrated to Tsel, a region southeast of Lhasa, and became a protector deity for the Tselpa Kagyu hierarchs. In the sixteenth century, Pehar made his way to the vicinity of Drepung Monastery, where an abbot there predicted the deity’s arrival and built for him a “small abode”—the literal meaning of nechung.3

Once established at Nechung, Pehar began to periodically possess a monk of the monastery every generation to provide clairvoyant advice to the Dalai Lama and Tibetan officials. Oracular possession is one of numerous forms of divination and prognostication found in Tibetan culture, which also include astrology, geomancy, interpreting dreams, reading omens or signs, using dice or dough balls, counting rosary beads, interpreting the pulse for health concerns, and so on.4 When a human oracle falls into a trance state, the particular possessing deity or related divine emissaries take over, causing the oracle to hiss and dance wildly before making strained and often cryptic prophetic proclamations. In preparation for such intense ceremonies, the oracle is dressed in special attire and wears a ritual mirror (fig. 3) over his chest while monks chant and play various instruments to assist the deity’s descent into the human vessel (fig. 4). Sometimes an oracle brandishes the weapons associated with the deity during these ritual exercises, such as the oracle of Nechung wielding Pehar’s sword (fig. 5 at 1:45), bow, and arrow (fig. 1).

Numerous oracles in Tibetan history have served patrons on village, monastic, and government levels. While there have been several state oracles—oracles that exclusively serve the Dalai Lama, his ministers, government officials, or powerful members of the aristocracy—the Nechung Oracle has been the highest and most important of these since the seventeenth century. During such divinatory consultations, the Nechung Oracle offers insight into concerns over the Dalai Lama’s well-being or next rebirth, any domestic conflicts, war and other foreign policy issues, and important matters of state overall.5 While the oracle now resides outside Tibet and the institution of Nechung has been reestablished in Dharamsala, India, such ritual services are still performed today for the Dalai Lama and members of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile. It is in the oracle and his activities that Pehar’s robust mythos and Nechung’s prophetic significance intersect.

Murals and Tantric Power

The late seventeenth century was the watershed moment for Nechung, because the monastery was extensively renovated and expanded under the auspices of the Fifth Dalai Lama and his regents, particularly his final regent, Sanggye Gyatso (1653–1705). It was at this time that the monastery structure reached its current extent, the Nechung Oracle was established as the main state oracle, and Nechung became intimately linked to the Dalai Lama’s burgeoning government. The monastic record inscribed in its courtyard was also composed by the Great Fifth and Sanggye Gyatso, and it further provides descriptions of the murals the latter had commissioned, which match those still visible today.6 While the images have been repainted and touched up over the centuries—most recently in the 1990s7—the figures and configurations date to the turn of the eighteenth century. For this reason, the exact artists are unknown, but the visual architectonics of the Nechung murals reveal a great deal about the tantric power represented within the monastery.

Upon entering Nechung’s western gate, the visitor is immediately greeted by images of two large wrathful door guardians—the Red and Black Butchers (fig. 6)—before arriving inside the open and expansive courtyard. Along every wall of the courtyard are vividly detailed and extensive murals of Pehar’s retinue (fig. 7), an amazing assortment of fierce spirits of all sizes and colors riding various animals, brandishing weapons, and wearing armor or draped in human and animal skins (fig. 8).8 Paintings of human skins in different states of putrefaction cover the top register of the walls, as if hanging from the rafters. Along the lower register circling the courtyard, the red waves of a painted ocean of blood churn around decapitated heads, decaying skulls, and other dismembered body parts. This frightening scene surrounds viewers as they make their way toward the main entrance of the monastery’s assembly hall, where more hanging human skins are painted on the central doors. Such wrathful imagery along doors, beams, and other architectural features is typical of protector chapels at Tibetan monasteries.

After the pandemonium of the courtyard, Nechung’s tantric cosmology becomes more evident inside the assembly hall (fig. 9). The movement from the front entrance to the back of the hall where the rear shrine rooms are found reflects the movement from the mundane to the transcendent through the murals that cover the walls of this interior space. On the walls abutting the main doors, two murals depict past Nechung Oracles in trance states. One portrays the oracle Lobzang Lekjor, who was installed as the medium of Nechung in 1690 when the monastery’s major renovations were nearly complete;9 the other image is of Shakya Yarpel (fig. 2), who acted as the Nechung Oracle from 1856­ to 1900.10 These figures embody the mundane world most overtly, as human beings possessed by protector deities.

Moving further into the hall, on both the east and west walls, one first encounters the Five King Spirits—Pehar with the four protectors that emanate from him (fig. 1)—before advancing to the higher enlightened tantric divinities of the Eight Sadhana Teaching Deities (fig. 10). Finally, near the back of the assembly hall before the rear shrine entrances, representing the height of tantric power and control, one finds on walls opposite one another murals of Padmasambhava and Hayagriva (figs. 11 and 12)—the very tutelary deity that the tantric master embodied to tame Pehar in the eighth century.

These murals thus display a spectrum of mundane and transcendent power that moves along the north-south axis of the assembly hall.11 Devotees who circumambulate the space clockwise along the walls move from the historic worldly entrance to the heightened mythic and timeless arena at the back, before returning once again to the front doors and the temporal present. In the central rear chapel at the back of the assembly hall, amid statues of the Five King Spirits and various goddesses, there now stands a life-size statue of the Nechung Oracle in trance, specifically Shakya Yarpel. In premodern Tibet, however, this space was where the oracle’s throne was located and where he would fall into trance during special occasions and annual ceremonies. Nechung is Pehar’s palace, and it places the deity at its center—represented by the oracle. The visitor must pass through the encampment of the deity’s ferocious entourage, which fills the courtyard, before propitiating his emanations in the assembly hall and approaching his oracle in the central chapel beyond. Powerful tantric divinities, headed by Padmasambhava and Hayagriva, watch over the whole miraculous encounter, illustrating the rich dynamism of the murals that permeate Nechung Monastery and fill it with a unique cosmic drama.