Lineages and Structure in Tibetan Buddhist Painting: Principles and Practice of an Ancient Sacred Choreography
David Jackson, University of Hamburg
Abstract: Though compositional structure – which here means specifically the placement of divine figures – is an essential aspect of Tibetan painting, this theme has rarely been discussed or described by scholars. The conventions for depicting lineages of teachers in particular must be carefully taken into account when documenting thang ka that contain lineages with inscriptions. The historian should carry out, if possible: (1) decipherment of inscriptions, recording names; (2) historical identification of individual masters, furnishing dates if known; (3A) identification of the lineage, and (3B) listing its members in chronological order (i.e., following the sequence of lineal descent); (4) diagramming the position of all figures, following the numbering of step three. The present article classifies and describes the lineage structures found in the vast majority of paintings with lineages. Understanding lineage structure through these four steps allows the historian to identify the religious teacher and approximate generation of the patron who commissioned the painting, essential steps toward restoring the painting to its lost historical context.
Introduction
Although to the uninitiated, Tibetan Buddhist paintings may seem to be a chaotic and inexhaustibly variable universe, in fact their iconography is limited, orderly, and, above all, hierarchic. To fathom this art, one of the first steps is to recognize the hierarchic arrangements in which its sacred figures have been placed. For understanding the main conventions of precedence and hierarchy, moreover, one must learn to interpret in detail the depictions of guru lineages. Besides their intrinsic religious, iconographic, and aesthetic interest, depictions of lama lineages can furnish some of the few reliable historical clues for dating a Tibetan painting, which is already reason enough to study them. Yet despite their importance for a sound understanding of Tibetan art, the basic conventions of lineage portrayal – [page 2] “hierophantic choreography” – and other compositional elements in tangka paintings have rarely been discussed or described in detail.
Lineage structures are not self-evident. Several linguistic or historical hurdles must be cleared if one wants to document them in a satisfactory way:
Correct decipherment of inscriptions recording names
Correct historical identification of individual masters, furnishing dates if known
(A) Correct identification of the lineage, and (B) listing its members in chronological order (i.e., following the sequence of lineal descent)
Diagramming the position of all figures, following the numbering of step 3
The first Tibetologist to study in any detail tangka depicting lineage gurus was G. Tucci, who in his scholarly tour de force Tibetan Painted Scrolls1 described three tangka that each portrayed as main figures four lineage masters of the Ngorpa subschool of Sakyapa Path with Its Fruit (lamdré) instructions. Tucci succeeded in (1) deciphering the inscriptions and (3A) identifying the main lineage. He also (3B) correctly ordered the main figures within each tangka, though not as a continuous series within the main lineage.2
In the five decades that have followed, most catalogs of Tibetan artworks did not reach the level of Tucci’s work in their analyses of inscribed lineages, though in the 1970s a few scholars began to perform at least step 1 of the documentation. Anne Chayet in two entries of a major exhibition catalog3 documented the names of two lineages. For painting no. 122, she presented the names of lineage masters in their correct order (step 3B). Though she did not attempt steps 2, 3A or 4, she demonstrated implicitly an understanding of structure.4
Another book of the 1970s to furnish names from inscriptions was a sales catalog of paintings from Ngor Monastery published from Paris in 1978 by the Galerie Robert Burawoy.5 This book, of unusually large format and price, documented the names of lineage masters in several paintings, presenting them in white letters on [page 3] transparent pages overlaying the color plates. Otherwise the catalog avoided numbers for plates and pages, and it did not sequentially list, date or otherwise identify the lineage masters.6
In several catalogs of the 1980s and 1990s, collaborators transcribed some of the inscriptions bearing the names of masters.7 But they listed and diagramed the names of lineage masters in an ad hoc order, not following the sequence of the lineage. The catalog of Essen and Thingo 1989 deserves praise for presenting all available inscriptions, but even its lists and diagrams were not in conformity with the order of the lineages portrayed.
Since the early or mid 1990s, several other scholars noticed the potential usefulness of lineage analysis for dating.8 In recent major catalogs the documentation of some entries is also becoming better.9 To encourage this trend I would like in the present article to share some of the internal rules and outer expressions of structure that I have encountered in my own research.10
[1] G. Tucci, Tibetan Painted Scrolls (Rome: Libreria dello Stato, 1949).
[2] See G. Tucci, Painted Scrolls, 369-70, nos. 25-27. The three paintings were evidently the first, fourth, and fifth paintings in a set that originally consisted of eight paintings. The paintings’ minor figures were not randomly selected masters as Tucci guessed, but rather ten or eleven adepts in each painting from the eighty-four siddhas: 8 x 10.5 = 84.
[3] Gilles Béguin, ed., Dieux et démons d’Himâlaya: Art du Bouddhisme lamaique (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1977), nos. 109 and 122.
[4] In her later book on Tibetan art and archeology, Anne Chayet (Art et Archéologie du Tibet [[[Wikipedia:Paris|Paris]]: Picard Éditeur, 1994], 189), when discussing prospects for future research on Tibetan art, mentioned the analysis of lineages as a problem calling for further investigation, sketching two typical compositional types, one earlier and one later. See also David Jackson, “Apropos a Recent Tibetan Art Catalogue,” review of Wisdom and Compassion, by Marylin M. Rhie and R.A.F. Thurman, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens 37 (1993): 109-30, which was not yet available to Chayet.
[5] Galerie Robert Burawoy, Peintures du monastère de Ngor (Libourne: Arts graphiques d’Aquitaine, 1978).
[6] The origin of this, the second of two anonymous sales catalogs of Tibetan paintings by the Burawoy gallery in the 1970s, is unclear to me, but someone in France with competence in Tibetan must have helped the gallery owner, whose main expertise is with Japanese weapons and armor.
[7] See for instance Pratapaditya Pal, Art of Tibet: A Catalogue of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Collection, rev. ed. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), with H. Richardson’s documentation of inscriptions in an appendix; G.-W. Essen and T. T. Thingo, Die Götter des Himalaya: Buddhistische Kunst Tibets; Die Sammlung Gerd-Wolfgang Essen, 2 vols. (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1989); Pratapaditya Pal, Art of the Himalayas: Treasures from Nepal and Tibet (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1991), with documentation of inscriptions by H. Stoddard; Hugo Kreijger, Tibetan Painting: The Jucker Collection (London: Serindia Publications, 2001), with documentation of inscriptions by P. Verhagen.
[8] For instance, H. Stoddard’s footnote in Pal, Art of the Himalayas, appendix; J. C. Singer, “Painting in Central Tibet, ca. 950–1400,” Artibus Asiae 54, no. 1/2 (1994): 87–136; J. C. Singer, “Taklung Painting,” in Tibetan Art: Towards a Definition of Style, ed. J. Singer and P. Denwood (London: Laurence King, 1997), 52–67; and Kimiaki Tanaka, “The Usefulness of Buddhist Iconography in Analysing Style in Tibetan Art,” Tibet Journal 21-22 (1996): 6-9.
[9] Pal et al. 2003; and John C. Huntington and Dina Bangdel, The Circle of Bliss: Buddhist Meditational Art (Columbus: Columbus Museum of Art; Chicago: Serindia Publications, 2003). See also the painstaking documentation of three lineage tangka by C. Luczanits, “Art-Historical Aspects of Dating Tibetan Art,” in Dating Tibetan Art: Essays on the Possibilities and Impossibilities of Chronology from the Lempertz Symposium, Cologne, 2001, ed. I. Kreide-Damani (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2003), 25-57.
[10] See, for instance, David Jackson, “A Painting of Sa-skya-pa Masters from an Old Ngor-pa Series of Lam ’bras Thangkas,” Berliner Indologische Studien 2 (1986): 181-91; David Jackson, “The Identification of Individual Masters in Paintings of Sa-skya-pa Lineages,” in Indo-Tibetan Studies: Papers in Honour and Appreciation of Professor David Snellgrove’s Contribution to Indo-Tibetan Studies, ed. T. Skorupski (Tring, U.K.: Institute of Buddhist Studies, 1990), 129-44; Jackson, “Apropos,” 109-30; David Jackson, A History of Tibetan Painting: The Great Painters and Their Traditions, Beiträge zur Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte Asiens 15 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1996); David Jackson, “Lama Yeshe Jamyang of Nyurla, Ladakh: The Last Painter of the ’Bri gung Tradition,” in art issue (ed. E. Lo Bue), Tibet Journal 27 (2002): 153-76; and David Jackson, “The Dating of Tibetan Paintings is Perfectly Possible – Though Not Always Perfectly Exact,” in Dating Tibetan Art: Essays on the Possibilities and Impossibilities of Chronology from the Lempertz Symposium, Cologne, 2001, ed. I. Kreide-Damani (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2003), 91-112. An earlier version of this paper appeared as “Tibetische Thang kas deuten, Teil 1: Die Hierarchie der Anordnung,” Tibet und Buddhismus 50, no. 3 (1999): 22-27; and “Tibetische Thang kas deuten, Teil 2: Übertragungslinien und Anordnung,” Tibet und Buddhismus 50, no. 4 (1999): 16-21.
Previous Research on Principles of Composition
Like lineage analysis, the general principles according to which Buddhas and other sacred figures are placed in a Tibetan painting have received relatively little attention until now. Again we owe the first steps to G. Tucci, who in Tibetan Painted Scrolls devoted chapter thirteen to “The Plan of the Tankas,” where he described many key iconographic and decorative elements.11 He had little to say about composition; besides that, the tangka followed a similar general plan, with many shared compositional “characters,” and the main figure (tsowo) dominated the central space, representing the essence of the painting.
K. M. Gerasimova in her 1978 article “Compositional Structure in Tibetan Iconography” stressed the role of the iconometry of individual figures, but she underestimated the complexity of other elements of structure in iconic (or “representational”) paintings:
The construction of individual figures and decorative-ornamental combinations on a flat surface actually exhausted the entire problem of the organization of space in the representational icon. Its compositional formula consisted in the quantitative establishment of the centre and a symmetrical grouping of the secondary components according to a principle of simple transfer.12
Gerasimova13 described much more complexity in the structures of biographical or narrative paintings. In reality, even for the usual iconic depictions of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, the subject of composition is more complicated than admitted by either Tucci or Gerasimova. But not hopelessly so.
[11] See G. Tucci, Painted Scrolls, 300ff. Tucci also mentions some basic principles in his chapter on the symbolic meanings of colors and lines, 287-88.
[12] See K. M. Gerasimova, “Compositional Structure in Tibetan Iconography,” Tibet Journal 3, no. 1 (1978): 47.
[13] Gerasimova, “Compositional Structure,” 48f.
