Mount Wutai by Wen-shing Chou

Author:Wen-shing Chou
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

FIG. 4.23. Details of fig. 4.2.

Neither Tsongkhapa nor Khedrup had been to Mount Wutai in his lifetime, and the revelatory episodes depicted here would have taken place in Amdo and Central Tibet, where the two were respectively. However, as discussed in chapter 3, Tsongkhapa’s presence at Mount Wutai has already been established in Rölpé Dorjé’s namtar, or semisecret biography, as a way to affirm and legitimate Rölpé Dorjé and Tuken’s presence. The genre, medium, and audience of a namtar are all distinctly different from that of a popular pilgrimage map. What was transmitted and claimed to be secret knowledge in Tuken’s text is now visualized with such iconographic clarity and specificity that any viewer versed in the visual language of Tibetan Buddhism would recognize the Mañjuśrī-Tsongkhapa-Khedrup transmission chain atop the five terraces.

Tsongkhapa’s visions of Mañjuśrī and Khedrup’s visions of Tsongkhapa became popular subjects of depiction in paintings and sculptures within the Gelukpa tradition in Tibet and Mongolia since the eighteenth century. That these two sets of revelatory visions became iconic imagery only centuries after their time demonstrates that hagiographies of the early Gelukpa masters played an instrumental role in this process of legitimization. The visionary episodes were frequently depicted either as a set of five individual paintings (figs. fig. 4.24 and fig. 4.25, two surviving examples from the original set of five) or all within a single composition (fig. 4.26). They affirm the chain of transmission of teachings from Mañjuśrī and the role of visionary episodes within this tradition.56 These paintings define the subject (one who appears) as much as they do the object (receiver) of the apparition. In fact, the episode of Khedrup receiving a vision of Tsongkhapa riding on a white elephant became the definitive representation of Khedrup in the preincarnation lineage (trungrap) paintings of the Paṇchen Lamas, as discussed in chapter 3 (fig. 4.27). Portrayed in the semiprofile view that became known in earlier depictions of this apparition, with the characteristic posture of someone receiving a vision — kneeling with a golden offering in hand — Khedrup’s enlarged figure in the trungrap version now towers over the diminutive apparition of Tsongkhapa (at the upper left) and the protective deities Yamāntaka (top right) and Mahākāla (bottom left). Dressed in a radiant, gold-embroidered red robe, Khedrup replaces Tsongkhapa’s emanation as the principal figure of the composition. This composition most likely originates from the Nartang woodblock set in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, and has become the standard way of representing Khedrup in Paṇchen Lama’s lineage paintings, and remains so today. Through their pictorial representation and the subsequent incorporation into other aggregate compositions of iconographic images, these episodes were extracted from the linear narrative of the original texts to assert an independent identity of their own — as authentic and truthful representations of Khedrup, Tsongkhapa, and Mañjuśrī.

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