Life of the Buddha Mural, Puntsok Ling Monastery

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.

A hallway painted floor to near ceiling with a single continuous story, running for nearly two hundred and seventy seven linear feet, sounds like a modern museum installation. At Puntsok Ling Monastery in central Tibet, that description fits a mural finished roughly four hundred years ago, spread across fifteen panels along the external ambulatory of the monastery's second floor.

The scale is not decoration for its own sake. An ambulatory is a walking path, built into the architecture of a monastery specifically so that monks could circle a sacred space in meditation or ritual practice. Stretching the Buddha's life across a hundred and twenty five chapters along that exact route turns a devotional walk into something closer to reading a very long book one step at a time, each panel a passage a monk would pass slowly rather than glimpse all at once.

The mural's commissioner, the Jonang scholar Taranatha, built his design around that architecture on purpose, tracing the Buddha's story from his descent from Tushita Heaven through his death, by way of his teachings, his travels and his encounters with gods, demons, merchants and ordinary people across northern India. Photographed in place in 2011 by the art historians who later published the fullest account of it, the mural still does today what it was built to do in the seventeenth century, turning a walk down a hallway into an education in exactly the story the monastery's own most famous resident thought mattered most to tell.