Great Tibetan Patron and Designer of Buddhist Art in Kham

Situ Panchen (1700–1774) was both a hierarch of the Karma Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism and an important patron and artist, credited with reviving the court style of the Karmapas known as the Encampment style (Gardri), which quickly became popular in his native Kham region in southeastern Tibet. This style is characterized by figures based on Indian aesthetic models of proportion placed in open, airy, blue-green landscapes largely inspired by Chinese court painting.

As Situ worked directly with artists, the painters of this work would have known him well enough to create an accurate likeness. The physical appearance of Situ Panchen in this painting (fig. 2), as a venerable gray-haired master with sunken features, tends to support a dating to the 1760s. The long-life goddess White Tara above, with whom Situ had a special connection, was also included as a wish for the aged Situ Panchen’s continued longevity.

Situ sits on an elaborately carved Chinese-inspired throne, wearing the badge of his office, a notched red hat emblazoned with three jewels. Behind Situ lies an open landscape with a minimally pigmented light-blue sky, featuring a flowing river, and two distant cloud-wreathed peaks, suggesting receding space. Above, a dragon emerges from the clouds. Craggy cliffs festooned with pine trees evoke the landscape of Situ’s home in Derge.

Situ Panchen and the Revival of the Encampment Style

While the Encampment style was founded in the court of the Ninth Karmapa in the sixteenth century in central Tibet, most of what we know of this painting tradition belongs to its eighteenth-century revival fostered by Situ Panchen in eastern Tibet. Even more important to the history of Tibetan art than Situ Panchen’s role as a painter is his role as a patron and designer of paintings, many of which continue to be copied to this day. Situ’s tradition is one of the best documented of the major Tibetan painting traditions, in part because of the extensive writings that he left, including his autobiography and diaries, rare windows into his artistic intentions that detail the paintings he designed and commissioned, the names of the artists he worked with, and his iconographic and artistic sources.1 

The Life of Situ Panchen

Situ Panchen was born in Derge, a small but culturally significant kingdom at the heart of the southeastern Tibetan region of Kham. Situ was born during a particularly volatile period in Tibet’s history. Several generations of inter-sectarian warfare had left his Karma Kagyu tradition in shambles, and in central Tibet the Ganden Podrang government was suppressing Karma Kagyu monasteries. However, some areas of eastern Tibet, like Derge, lay beyond the reach of central Tibetan rule and remained relatively open to other religious traditions and artistic developments.

In 1732 the two top hierarchs of the Karma Kagyu tradition suddenly died, and Situ Panchen was thrust at the age of thirty-three into the role of de facto regent of his tradition. Situ proved to be a brilliant polymath and charismatic leader, influential in many areas of cultural and institutional life in eighteenth-century Tibet. He made major contributions to the fields of painting, religion, literature, and medicine.2 

A watershed in Situ’s religious, artistic, and political career took place in 1729 with the founding of his new monastic seat, Pelpung Monastery, in his birthplace of Derge, which became the artistic hub for the revival of the Encampment style. In 1726, as part of his request for permission to build this new monastery, he offered a set of paintings of the Eight Great Tantric Adepts (mahasiddhas) to the Derge ruler Tenpa Tsering (1678–1738) (fig. 3). It is the first set that Situ is recorded to have painted and in many ways marks the beginning of his public life as an artistic and religious leader.

Situ the Artist

Situ first learned iconographic proportions at age fifteen and soon thereafter was shown old Indian cast-metal figures by a temple steward, who introduced him to the traditional stylistic classifications of Buddhist metal sculpture. The steward pointed out different types of metal and characteristic shapes as he referenced one of the classic manuals on the evaluation of objects. Situ was thus initiated at a very young age into a Tibetan tradition of connoisseurship. From that time on he was able to evaluate the styles and quality of sacred objects, took pains to investigate the paintings and statues he came upon, and collected art.3 Situ could paint in at least two different styles—Menri and the Encampment style—and was a keen observer of early masterpieces and different styles of painting.

Sets: Situ’s Greatest Legacy

Painting sets often depict iconographic themes far too complicated to fit into a single work. Some of Situ Panchen’s most important and prominent artistic legacies are the multi-painting sets that he designed, many of which are still copied to this day. Indeed, most of Situ’s compositions are known to us through these later copies. Among these only six were mentioned in Situ Panchen’s autobiography as his own commissions:

1. Eight Great Tantric Adepts (mahasiddhas), painted in 1726 (fig. 3);4
2. The Previous Lives of Buddha Shakyamuni (jatakas), sketched in 1726 (fig. 4); 5
3. The Six Ornaments and Two Excellent Ones (eight greatest scholastic authorities of Indian Buddhism), painted in 1730 (fig. 5);6
4. Eight Great Bodhisattvas (based on a sixteenth-century model), commissioned in 1732 (fig. 6);7
5. Kshemendra’s Wish-Granting Vine Series of One Hundred and Eight Morality Tales (Avadanas), designed in 17338 (fig. 7);
6. Twenty-Seven Tantric Deities, designed and commissioned in 17509 (fig. 8).

Situ would often set up workshops of painters he had trained, such as for the Morality Tales set (fig. 7), the compositions of which he sketched himself, and he personally directed the entire process, from the initial coloring to the finishing details. In an inscription Situ composed for a final painting portraying himself as patron (fig. 9), he outlines his all-encompassing artistic vision:

I have followed the Chinese masters in color, in mood expressed, and form, and I have depicted lands, dress, palaces, and so forth as [I have] actually seen in India. Even though all the discriminating skill of Mentang—[both] New and Old—and the Khyen [ri] tradition followers, Jeugangpa and the Encampment (Gardri) masters are present here, I have made [these paintings] different in a hundred thousand [particulars of] style.10

His mention of things he had “actually seen in India” refers to his first pilgrimage to Nepal in 1723.11

Situ’s designs became important templates for art production at Pelpung Monastery, and more widely in eastern Tibet, having a major impact on other local painting traditions.12 Situ’s compositions have some distinctive features (fig. 7), including the unusually diminutive rendering of figures in open, airy landscapes, contrasted with miniaturist treatments of trees, buildings, palaces, and courtyards depicted in precise detail, with every leaf and brick delineated. This is a clever visual strategy to draw the eye into each vignette. Landscapes are especially distinctive due to the layering of blue and green pigment in dots with the tip of a dry brush. This technique builds up the landscape, from blank canvas to deep color, giving paintings the airy, yet intensely bright quality for which the style became famous.

Related Pelpung Monastery Sets

Six other main sets of paintings have been identified as coming from Situ’s monastic seat, Pelpung, using other written sources or on the basis of stylistic similarities with those sets identified in Situ’s biographies.13 The portrait of Situ Panchen under consideration belongs to one such well-known set (fig. 1), featuring masters of the combined lineages of the Mahamudra and Six Dharmas of Naropa, the two main teachings of the Karma Kagyu tradition. Later generations would commission paintings to bring the set up to date by adding their own gurus.

Though oral tradition by such well-informed Karma Kagyu masters as Thrangu Rinpoche (b. 1933) and Tenga Rinpoche (1932–2012) links Situ Panchen to this set, and even maintains that it was designed by him, it is not documented in Situ’s autobiographies. The modern Pelpung historian Karma Gyeltsen clarifies its origins, stating that while the set does indeed date to the time of Situ, Situ was not the patron. Its actual patron was Situ’s nephew and disciple, Won Sampel, who acted as Situ’s treasurer.14 The main painter of this set was one of Situ’s chief artistic disciples in his later years, Karsho Karma Tashi, as indicated by his tiny self-portrait (fig. 10), identified by inscription, in the foreground of the final painting (fig. 11).15 Karma Tashi was from Karsho, one of the significant centers of painting in northwestern Kham, near Karma Monastery, Situ’s previous seat before he founded Pelpung.16

Late in his life, Situ reminisced that through the paintings that he designed and commissioned, the artistic traditions of his native Kham were beginning to shine again.17