Pictures to Live By: Uncovering an Iconography of the Tibetan Buddhist Monastic Code

Abstract

By 1920, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso (1876-1933), had survived an assassination plot, two foreign invasions, and prolonged exile. During the decades following his return, he sought to modernize and secure Tibet through various reforms, from changing the government’s structure to improving the outdated military. Thubten Gyatso is remembered in Tibetan history, within both indigenous and Western sources, primarily for these efforts, as well as his political maneuvers between Chinese and European powers during the conflicts that led to his exiles and many of his failures. What has been largely overlooked, however, is how the Dalai Lama strived to safeguard his domain through temple renovation and institutional reform, drawing on models of Buddhist kingship and Tibetan traditions of state protection. Central to this political undertaking was the purification of the monastic community, which, I argue, he sought to accomplish by creating accessible, pictorial exegeses of the monastic code in a printed text that was transformed into murals at geomantically important sites. With this project, I offer a corrective to the prevailing image of Thubten Gyatso as an outlier among Dalai Lamas and Buddhist rulers, instead highlighting his religious actions in a period of political crisis. His artistic instruments of state protection had a secondary, perhaps unintended consequence, however; from a singular work of timely political importance, the Dalai Lama’s illustrated text generated a series of artworks that together constitute a unique iconographic system for depicting monastic life.

The focus of this dissertation is this heretofore unexamined text, entitled Moonlight Vanquishing the Darkness of Transgression, and the murals it inspired, both within and beyond Tibet and the reign of Thubten Gyatso. Composed around 1920, this illustrated text records his commentary on the Buddhist monastic code (vinaya) as the murals instantiate his visual interpretations in important sacred spaces. Part One contextualizes the composition of Moonlight Vanquishing and the creation of its first related murals within the turbulent reign of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. I look at how this text and its murals functioned as a critical nexus, where the purification of the monastic community and the renovation of temples potently combined. Part Two examines Moonlight Vanquishing as a visual commentary on the monastic code, considering how the Dalai Lama challenges traditional genres by incorporating canonical texts and hands-on knowledge into drawings that perform as scriptural annotations. I demonstrate how this pictorial commentary passes scholarly muster, while serving to make the often obscure, yet foundational rules of the vinaya more comprehensible to the monastic masses. Moonlight Vanquishing ultimately prioritizes images over text to make the Dalai Lama’s interpretations of the monastic code more accessible and thus the purification of the entire monastic community more feasible. This is achieved not only by the content of the images, but also by the generic style in which they are rendered and the public spaces in which they are displayed. Part Three presents Moonlight Vanquishing as an instrument of visual transmission, analyzing it both as an instructional manual for monks and an artist’s guidebook for murals.