Recognizing Rebkong’s Regional Painting Contributions

This mural on the porch of the Jampa Lhakhang (Maitreya Shrine) of Sengge Shong Mago Monastery, Ganden Puntsok Ling, is among a handful of large-scale, pre-1950 paintings to survive in place and in good condition in Amdo Rebkong.1 The shuttering of Buddhist institutions, the disruption of the social system that supported them, and the widespread destruction of Buddhist visual culture in the Rebkong area began with the Chinese takeover in the early 1950s. It intensified with the suppression of the late 1950s and culminated with the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s.2 Along with five other paintings on the porch done at the same time, around 1935, this mural is a datable benchmark documenting the development of both twentieth-century and contemporary Rebkong art. On the one hand, the murals bear witness to the highly prized modes of painting associated with Amdo artists who worked in central Tibetan centers such as Lhasa and Shigatse in the first half of the twentieth century, the so-called first modern Tibetan artists, such as Gendun Chopel (1903–1951) and Jampa Tseten (“Amdo Jampa,” 1911–2002).3 On the other hand, it is possible to see continuities between these paintings and the resurgent, distinctively Rebkong Buddhist art after the 1980s, which has become well known and commercially successful in such metropolitan areas as Shanghai, Beijing, and Taipei. 

The mural is painted on cloth and then mounted and framed by painted wooden boards with dense gold patterning, supported by new colorful dragon-medallion panels below. Elaborately carved and gilded pillars support a roof over the porch. As with most Himalayan porch-entrances to shrines, the Jampa Lhakhang mural depicts the guardian generals of the four directions (lokapalas) in pairs on either side of the door­­­way. At the right end is a lovely depiction of the protectress Lakshmi Pal Lhamo surrounded by a large number of local mountain gods and with Tseringma of the Five Long-Life Sisters directly below her. At the other end of the vestibule is the mural portraying the Shambhala Kings. 

Shambhala is a hidden Buddhist Pure Land somewhere in the north and ruled by a succession of bodhisattva-kings.4 As articulated in the Tibetan literature surrounding the late Indian tantra, the Kalachakra, at some future date a millenarian army will emerge to confront the forces of darkness that oppose Buddhism and establish a new age of enlightenment. The mural depicts the Seven Dharma Kings (Rigden) of Shambhala and the Twenty-five Vidyadhara (knowledge-holder; also known as Kalki) Kings.5 The large king at the center of the composition is Yashas or Manjushrikirti (Jampel Drakpa) who is also recognized as the second preincarnation of the Panchen Lama.6 Wearing a crisply folded white turban like those in images of the early Tibetan emperors of the seventh through the ninth century, Manjushrikirti holds a book in his left hand, and in his right the stem of a pink lotus bearing a vertical sword with a blue blade and flaming tip. These attributes reinforce his connection to his namesake, the bodhisattva Manjushri. The other thirty-one kings surrounding Yashas are identified by gold inscriptions on the light azure background (fig. 2). The second-largest king, directly below Yashas, is another emanation of Manjushri, the warrior Rudrachakra (Drakpo Khorlo Chen), who holds a spear and a sword. He is the twenty-fifth Vidyadhara who will lead the final battle against the forces of darkness. 

In 2002, with a learned and devout local monk, Gendun Akhu Pelzang,7 we explored many of the prominent monasteries in the area, among them Sengge Shong Mago. We learned that during preceding decades the Jampa Lhakhang had been turned into a granary for the village by its Chinese overseers. Although the sculpture and paintings inside the shrine were destroyed, the porch murals, with their high quality and subtle shades of the pigments, had somehow survived. We were able to locate an elderly monk who as an apprentice painter at age sixteen had assisted two master painters in their thirties in creating the murals in about 1935. The eighty-three-year-old monk, Nyingben, recalled that one artist was named Kunga Shawo, and the other, the monk Kelzang. Kunga Shawo painted the four lokapalas and the Shambhala Kings on the porch, which would leave Kelzang as primarily responsible for the Lakshmi mural.8 

These paintings establish a relatively rare datable point in the evolution of Rebkong painting in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Between 1950 and 1980, local Buddhist painting was curtailed and its development suspended. In the late 1980s and 1990s, when painting of Buddhist subject matter resumed as part of the general relaxing of restrictions on religious practice, it was fueled by pent-up demand to replace or refurbish dozens of shrines and monasteries in the region damaged or destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. A few artists who like Nyingben were trained in the 1930s and 1940s transmitted the earlier mode of painting to the younger generation; the older artists included Nyingben, Shawo Tsering, Jyamsho, and others.9 Many of the particular characteristics represented in the 1930s painting are visible in the revival style, demonstrating the fidelity of many recent painters to former painting practices. 

Contemporary continuities from the foundational inheritance as well as further developments can be illustrated by comparing details from lokapala compositions on both the porch of the Jampa Lhakang in Lower Sengge Shong and in a shrine at the largest monastery of Rebkong, the Rongwo Gonchen Monastery (figs. 3 and 4). The latter shrine was dedicated to Kelden Gyatso (1607–1677), the first in the Rongwo Drubchen Tulku lineage, and was completed around 2006 by painters familiar with the 1935 Jampa Lhakhang paintings; indeed, the murals were created by painters from Sengge Shong Village. In a detail from the circa 1935 Virupaksha Lokapala of Sengge Shong (fig. 3), blue-green rock formations with sharply cusped outlines edged in gold feature two cave-like cavities. In one, a tiny recluse sits in meditation, and in the other (at the bottom), two diminutive white rabbits frolic. A pair of colorful birds perch on the rocks above the meditator and call to each other. Ducks, fish, and coral trees emerge from the dark blue foamy lake. 

Nearly identical forms appear in the Vaishravana Lokapala of circa 2006 at the Kelden Gyatso Shrine (fig. 4), though with more insistence, detail, and density. The biggest difference is accounted for by the colors. Interviews with older painters in Rebkong made it clear that previously they used stone-ground pigments, which allow lighter, subtler, and softer hues. Post-1980, all the Rebkong painters embraced standardized, prefabricated, industrial paints with harsher but brighter colors. In both the pre-1950 paintings and the twenty-first-century murals, there is a willingness to incorporate extreme differences of scale, from the gigantic to the minuscule, and to seed all areas of the surface with elaborate detail work and surprising elements that reward close looking. The elaborate textile and serpent patterns of the nagini at the right edge of the Virupaksha Lokapala mural are examples of the latter, and the huge hibiscus flowers on the right edge, larger than the cave’s mahasiddha with his ritual drum (damaru) in the 2006 painting, illustrate the former. 

Another tendency incipient in the 1930s paintings but more highly developed among contemporary painters is what can be called selective naturalism.10 In the 1990s a young artist named Dondrub Gyatso painted a mural of Buddha Nageshvara Raja inside the Sengge Shong Mago Jampa Lhakhang, a detail of which is included here (fig. 5). While the buddhas in the corners of the detail are in a traditional mode, the altar table is in one-point perspective, the vases and other objects on the table cast shadows, and the two lions on the throne are in an aggressively “plastic” mode (in the senses both of fully moldable and of a synthetic polymer material), with glinting highlights accentuating the illusory roundness of their forms. The lessons of artists such as Gendun Chopel and Jampa Tseten, famous for incorporating photographic effects and selective aspects of Western painting traditions, increasingly make their appearance in contemporary Rebkong painting.11 It is no surprise that both of these renowned artists, who worked in central Tibet as well as India, are celebrated native sons of Amdo.