During his exiles from Lhasa in the 1910s, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama visited the holy places of Wutai Shan in China and Bodh Gaya in India. After his return, he commissioned paintings of these two places in cosmological mural programs of his palaces. While conforming to earlier iconographic traditions, these paintings employed empirical modes of representation unprecedented in Tibetan Buddhist paintings, revealing a close connection to the Dalai Lama's prior travels. This essay traces how these “modernized” renditions were incorporated into an existing pictorial template, and examines the deft rearticulation of a Buddhist cosmology in light of the Dalai Lama's own encounter with the shifting geopolitical terrains of the early twentieth century. I show that painting served as a powerful medium through which the Dalai Lama asserted his spiritual sovereignty and temporal authority over modernity's work of boundary making. The study elucidates a sphere of agency and creativity in the court of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama that has evaded historical inquiries to date.
目次
THE MURAL PROGRAM AT THE EASTERN SUNLIGHT HALL IN THE POTALA 421 THE MURAL PROGRAM AT THE KELSANG DEKYI PALACE AT NORBU LINGK 423 COSMOLOGICAL SCHEMES 423 A PANORAMIC VISION 424 EMPIRICAL INTRUSIONS 425 AN EYEWITNESS REPRESENTATION OF WUTAI SHAN 428 TIMELINESS AND TIMELESSNESS 430 TOWARD NEW TEMPORALITIES 433 AN ACCIDENTAL PILGRIM 433 COLLIDING WORLDS AT WUTAI SHAN 435 PICTORIAL BIOGRAPHY 438 USE OF BIOGRAPHICAL SOURCES 441 MAPPING A MORE PERFECT WORLD 441 Acknowledgments 442 List of References 442
