Most monastery murals were commissioned by a patron and executed to a design handed down by tradition, with little room for one person's particular reading of the material. The Life of the Buddha Mural at Puntsok Ling worked differently, because the person who commissioned it and the person who wrote the book it illustrates were the same man.
Taranatha, the Jonang tradition's most celebrated scholar, had already written The Sun of Faith, his own account of the Buddha's life drawn from classical Indian Buddhist sources, before he had the mural painted across the ambulatory of his own monastic seat sometime between about 1615 and 1630. Rather than handing his text to painters and stepping back, he designed the mural's program himself, choosing which of the Buddha's hundred and twenty five recorded episodes to picture and in what order a monk walking the ambulatory would encounter them.
That double authorship shows in what the mural chooses to emphasize. Taranatha's design leaned toward the Buddha's ordinary, human encounters, his conversations with merchants and common people as much as his miracles and his confrontations with demons, rather than presenting him only as an already perfected, distant figure. A viewer walking the fifteen painted panels was not simply admiring devotional art. They were being led, physically, step by step, through the specific reading of the Buddha's life that the tradition's own foremost scholar had already put into words.