Awards

In the field of Buddhist art history, research on Tibetan Buddhist art is still in its early stages and deserves more scholarly investment. This is especially true for those isolated monuments situated in the remote borderlands of the Tibetan Plateau, which bears witness to the once prosperous trans-Himalayan networks and showcase the outcomes of dynamic cultural exchanges. The present research will focus on one such case, the three-storied Jampa Lhakhang in Lo Manthang, Mustang, a Tibetan enclave in the Nepalese Himalayas. This monument was built in the 1440s and serves as the primary religious monument for the newly-founded Mustang Kingdom in the western Himalayas of that time. Systematic and comprehensive scholarly work on this subject is still lacking. This study aims to bridge this research gap by investigating the murals for their historical context, iconography, iconology, and artistic styles. It will also conduct a comparative analysis between this monastery and other sites in Tibet to provide a comprehensive illustration of the context of this monument.

This dissertation aims to shed light on how the idioms of Tibetan Buddhism and their visualized images, were adopted in a remote temple to speak to its contemporary religiopolitical context. Patronized in the middle 15th century, the construction of Jampa Lhakahang, a royal-patronized monastery of Tibetan Buddhism affiliated with the Sa-skya Ngor school of Tibetan Buddhism, reflects the surging of Mustang Kingdom in the broader Tibetan political sphere. The painted murals perceived in this monument display a large variety of themes, especially corpuses of mandala programs. They have long been considered a visual manifestation of various Buddhist teachings and transmission histories of Buddhism. These images form a systematic and canonical doctrinal hierarchical arrangement from Mahayana sutras to different levels of esoterism. Through iconographic and iconological study, this dissertation will comprehensively analyse the survival imagery of Jampa Lhakhang, and explore the interconnection between the religious images and their development as visual manifestations within the historical religiopolitical context of Tibet. The artistic patronages of Jampa Lhakhang reflect a pivotal part of a sophisticated state-built program promoted by the local dignitaries. By cultivating an encyclopaedic monument and introducing a whole Buddhist pantheon, the 15th century designers of this monument show their imagination of an emerging Buddhist kingdom within an uncertain and competed environment. The patronage of this temple and its art represents a reuse of a pattern involving repeated manipulation, yet its content reflects the avant-grade religious idioms. The represented encyclopaedic pantheon functions in shaping the memory and forming the collective identity through the visual construction of religious history, hidden symbolic idioms of the esoterism, and adopted artistic styles. Moreover, these murals establish an intangible connection with orthodox Tibetan religion and past Buddhist states, serving to communicate to its contemporary public. This aids in contextualizing the authority of the Mustang Kingdom within the historical memory and 15th-century religiopolitical sphere of the Snow Land.