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Project Overview

The challenge of studying visual art, literature, and their institutional contexts in a synthetic fashion is

acute throughout the humanities today. The Life of the Buddha (LOTB) project is based on a detailed

series of murals produced at the famed Tibetan Buddhist monastery of Jonang, together with an extended

literary narrative by the monasterys founder Trantha (1575-1634). These murals date from the first

decades of the 17th century and are among only a handful of fully preserved narrative paintings in Central

Tibet. They are also among the few murals in Tibet explicitly linked to an extant collection of narrative,

poetic, ritual, and technical painting literature about the Buddha. Practically nothing has been written

about the Jonang murals, and no complete visual documentation has ever been attempted.

LOTB presents and analyzes in a synthetic fashion the first complete photographic documentation

of the monumental murals depicting the Buddha narrative at Jonang, their related literature, and their

architectural and historical contexts. LOTB will also offer scholarly and learning communities the first

collaborative tool to research and engage image, text, architecture, and history as an integrated and

meaning-rich whole by focusing on the most important pre-modern mural renderings of the Buddhas life

remaining in Tibet. The projects impact for the humanities and the study of Buddhism will thus be

twofold: the largest study to date on visual and textual Buddha narratives in Tibet, and a new digital tool

for synthetic teaching and research of Buddhist images and texts in context.

Intellectual Significance

LOTB will be the first full-scale study of the life of the Buddha in a Tibetan setting. Scholars of Buddhist

traditions in other regions of Asia have explored the synergies between Buddhist temple murals, narrative

literature, and the architectural setting and ritual practices of the institutions that helped produce them.

Such work has focused on, for example, sites at Ajanta in India, Dunhuang in China, and Borobudur in

Indonesia. The unique Tibetan archive of visual and literary materials extant for Jonang will allow us to

explore issues such as the planning and design of visual narratives, the relationships between written and

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painted life stories, the economies of artistic production in a monastic setting, and forms of institutionally

sponsored ritual consecration and worship.

Buddhism in Tibet is frequently said to have formed around the activities of charismatic teachers,

great founding figures such as Padmasambhava (8th c.) and Milarepa (11th c.), or more historical

luminaries. While there is a great deal of truth in this, in its most extreme form this claim led to the

appellation Lamaism, suggesting that Tibets Buddhist traditions focused only on the Tibetan lama or

"master," and were divorced from the founding figure of the Buddha altogether. Such a characterization

is, of course, at odds with Tibets cultural history, where the life of Buddha kyamuni formed a

persistent theme in narrative texts, ritual practices, and the visual arts. This generalized image of Tibetan

religion as Buddhism without the Buddha has resulted in gross ignorance of the rich stories of the

Buddha in Tibetan art and literature. In documenting Tibets most significant corpus of literary, ritual, and

visual materials depicting the life of kyamuni Buddha, this project will re-foreground the central

importance of the Buddha within the Tibetan cultural world. This in turn will encourage scholars within

the field to reassess the continuities between Buddhism in Tibet and other major Buddhist cultures

throughout Asia, past and present.

Significance of Site and Sources

The emphasis on kyamuni Buddha at Jonang was the result of competition among major monasteries in

Central Tibet, where religious leaders had recourse to a number of mythoi around which to construct a

symbolically rich institution. The Buddhist bodhisattvas, or celestial beings, such as Avalokiteshvara or

Maitreya, were already in use by other leading figures in Central Tibet (Avalokitevara by the Dalai

Lamas; Maitreya at Tashilhunpo Monastery). The choice of the historical Buddha, an underutilized yet

undeniably authoritative figure in Central Tibet, as the guiding mythos thus made good strategic sense

regionally. On the local level, the life of the Buddha could be employed as a model for emulation in the

education of the monastic population of Jonang, with textual resources available for the relatively small

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group of highly literate monks and visual resources available for the general monastic population and lay

visitors.

The literary source for the visual narrative, commonly referred to as the Hundred Acts of the

Buddha (Ston pa Shkyai dbang poi mdzad pa brgya pa), is one of the most extensive Tibetan

compositions portraying the deeds of the Buddha, and also contains detailed information about the

authors sources and literary aims. A related text, the Painting Manual for the Hundred Acts of the

Buddha (mdzad pa brgya pai bris yig) presents a frame-by-frame discussion of the iconography,

composition, and symbolism in Jonangs narrative murals. A further work, the Guide to Jonang

Monastery (Dga ldan phun tshogs gling gyi gnas bshad) together with other related texts, maps out a

plan of the murals architectural setting within the monastic complex including the assembly hall and

upper gallery, and presents a catalogue of religious objects, statues, and other materials in situ at the time

of their construction (See bibliography for further related works). Tranthas massive autobiography

provides further information about the historical, political and economic contexts in which these materials

were produced. To date, no critical studies of this literature have been published.

Two major mural cycles dedicated to the Buddha are extant at Jonang Monastery: (1) the main

shrine room and assembly hall, which houses images of the Buddha teaching the texts associated with

Jonangs doctrinal traditions, select scenes from the life of Buddha, as well as illustrations of other

narratives. These murals are approximately 10 feet in height and 150 feet in length, including

approximately 40 individual panels; and (2) the upper gallery, which houses a complete life story of the

Buddha. This continuous mural is approximately 5 feet in height and runs along three walls for over 300

feet (See Figure 1-PANEL A). Both sets of murals are clearly described in the literary sources written by

Trantha and his immediate successors. The lower gallery consists primarily of iconic formal renderings

of the Buddha statically seated on thrones and surrounded by varied retinues of attendant figures. For this

reason, these images have not previously been identified as part of a narrative presentation. Our

preliminary investigation, however, has determined that many of them represent the Buddha teaching

religious discourses closely associated with Jonang Monasterys founding. Others represent episodes

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from Buddhas past and final lives, mythic buddhas from the past, buddhas abiding within celestial

realms, and scenes from famous canonical Buddhist texts. The upper gallery is perhaps the more famous

of the two, known among scholars of Tibet for its dynamic portrayal of narrative events through the

juxtaposition of active human figures, diverse images of landscape and architectural settings, and

judicious inscriptions that bind Trantha's longer literary renderings to the visual narrative. (See Figure

2-NARRATIVE MURALS) This gallery contains a visual representation of each of the one hundred acts

of the Buddha as described in Trantha's account. Each scene, moreover, may consist of anywhere from

one to ten individual human or divine figures, so that the mural has a whole contains hundreds of human

figures in a dizzying array of vibrant poses. The reasons for the two distinct styles of narrative depiction

in the murals of Jonangs upper and lower galleries require further investigation.

This project will focus on the upper gallery murals to document Tibets most significant literary

and visual materials depicting the life of kyamuni Buddha, and thereby re-foreground the central

importance of the Buddha within the Tibetan cultural world. In particular, it examines how images and

texts concerning kyamuni served as a broad organizing principle for Tranthas monastic seat at

Jonang in Western Tibet. Tranthas narrative was innovative; he utilized little-known elements from

vinaya literature rather than standard Mahyna stras used by almost every other Tibetan writer.

Jonangs is the only extant mural in Tibet drawn from vinaya sources. Tranthas emphasis on

kyamuni as a central organizing principle formed a Buddha Program: a total cultural program

consisting of a large body of Tranthas writings and religious artwork. It was, in part we suggest, this

Buddha Program that afforded Jonang Monastery an institutional cachet that worked in two directions,

one looking south to India, reflecting Tranthas well-known Indophilia, the other looking east to the

central Tibetan region of , reflecting the periods political turmoil.

Project Outcome I: A New Digital Tool for Research and Learning

After working together for several years on documenting and analyzing the Buddha narrative corpus at

Jonang, we now feel it is essential to develop collaborative tools that are significantly more powerful.

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Extensive reconnaissance within and without Buddhist studies reveals that there are simply no tools to

synthetically research and present image, text, and context as a whole. We therefore intend to facilitate

the creation of a new digital tool for researching Buddhist materials. Yet the stakes in developing such

tools transcend our particular needs, for such challenges pervade the humanities. In developing such tools

we therefore also seek to put Buddhist studies at the forefront of the humanities by utilizing this rich

combination of visual and literary materials about the Buddhist traditions central narrative as a crucible

for creating tools of value for humanists who work with text and image.

To that end, we have begun to work with designers, programmers, and digital humanists to plan a

new tool, which we are calling TRIPTYCH (A Multimodal Interface for Text Recognition, Image

Parsing, and Translation, for InterdisciplinarY Collaboration in the Humanities). This tool will use the

rich example of narrative mural art in Tibet to enable scholars to find relational pathways between our

three interrelated foci: image, text, and context. TRIPTYCH aims to foster truly collaborative and

interdisciplinary research on the literature and visual culture of Buddhist traditions. Prior to the advent of

digital scholarship scholars were unable to examine the relationships between texts and images on a large

scale, save and share their discoveries with others, or find meaningful ways to visualize and publish the

results for a range of users and disciplines. TRIPTYCH builds upon the Mirador Viewer developed by

Stanford and Yale with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (http://ydc2.yale.edu/canvas-

viewermirador). We envision a multimodal interface that addresses a pervasive set of challenges: (1) How

do we design an interface that examines relationships on a large scale between material artifacts and

images, foreign language texts and translations, and scholarly documentation? (2) How do we make

digital research tools accessible and useful for undergraduate research? (3) As researchers in a specific

discipline, how do we analyze and share our discoveries in meaningful ways? (4) How do we make it

extensible to other disciplines?

Upon successful completion project will result in an unprecedented multimodal interface for

interactive visualization including representation at various scales, markup of text-image relationships,

tagging and annotation, and qualitative and quantitative data analysis. As an extension of the Mirador

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Viewer tool, TRIPTYCH will support research and results presentation on the narrative, topical, and

thematic aspects of the visual/textual narrative corpus as a whole. The interface will allow, for the first

time, comparative analysis across visual narrative (Jonang murals), textual narrative (Hundred Acts), and

the guidelines for visual narrative construction (Painting Manual).

Through TRIPTYCH, researchers will be able to navigate chronologically or non-linearly through

the visual narrative according to the divisions of a literary work, and select foci to zoom and center a

particular panel region (in the LOTB, foci represent the Hundred Acts upon which the mural is based). In

the LOTB project murals, hundreds of topics and themes appear through the juxtaposition of active

human figures, diverse landscape and architectural settings, and textual inscriptions that bind Trantha's

longer literary renderings to the visual narrative. Through the use of controlled vocabulary search

functions (based on standard systems of visual analysis such as Getty Vocabularies), users will be able to

identify visual elements on both macro and micro scales (individual figures, locations, narrative vignettes)

and create collections of those elements to understand their narrative and thematic relationships. The

ability to share insights, questions, and even debates seamlessly across two distinctive media, visual and

textual, will allow researchers in distinct fields such as philology, history, art history, architectural

history, and others to address a common object of interest, the life of the Buddha, in synthetic fashion.

Project Outcome II: Traditional Scholarly Publications

To date there has been no published scholarship on either the narrative murals at Jonang or Tranthas

literary rendition of the Buddha narrative. Therefore, in addition to disseminating LOTB via the digital

platform of TRIPTYCH and Mirador for collaborative research and teaching, we plan to publish our

findings in a series of articles in leading journals such as Journal of the International Association of

Buddhist Studies, History of Religions, and Numen. We also plan a full-length monograph containing

large format images of the monumental narrative and four chapters: (1) a history of Jonang Monastery

and the figure of Trantha; (2) a description and analysis of the murals; (3) a history of the design and

production of the murals; (4) a study and selected translations of the Hundred Acts of the Buddha and

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related works by Trantha. We expect the manuscript will be suitable for submission to Yale University

Press, Serindia Publications, or University of Washington Press.

Progress Made to Date

Work completed to date includes the following: (1) preparation of digital photographs for entire mural

set; (2) creation of digital database for complete image set using Portfolio asset management tool; (3)

ingestion of metadata: identifying narrative topics, figures, literary references; (4) processing of images

for Panels A, B, and O (featuring the Buddhas birth, early life, enlightenment and death); (5) stitching

images of Panels A, B, and O into full sized mural panels; (6) creation of narrative maps of Panels A and

B; (7) complete transcription of Tibetan inscriptions; (8) complete translation of Tibetan inscriptions; (9)

preparation of English translations of first 25 chapters and final 4 chapters of the Hundred Acts (covering

the Buddhas birth, early life, enlightenment, and death); (10) preparation of electronic text of the

Hundred Acts and the Painting Manual, (11) preparation of concordances for Acts in the Hundred Acts

and Painting Manual.

4. Research Plan

Period Research on the Buddha Narrative at Jonang (conducting primary research

and managing graduate student content development)

Digital Tool and Digital Asset Development (managing)

Summer 2015 Analysis of visual narrative Jonang site documentation in

Tibet Draft chapter one for print

publication: a history of Jonang Monastery and the figure of Trantha

In-person field data consolidation and project planning

Plan and finalize the interface architecture, design elements, and wireframes for TRIPTYCH

Plan tool features including faceted search, collaboration tools, shareable history and tours, user-created content

Image processing of mural photographs

Fall 2015 Creation of Jonang site plans Develop the interface architecture,

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based upon Summer site documentation

Complete chapter on Jonang history and site for print publication

Analysis of visual narrative cont.

Create metadata connecting image and text (using Portfolio digital asset management system)

Edit electronic text of Tibetan-language, Tibetan-script editions of literary materials

design elements, and wireframes for TRIPTYCH

Develop tool features including faceted search, collaboration tools, shareable history and tours, user-created content

Image processing of mural photographs, continued

Asset management, image and text markup with metadata

Winter 2016 Translation of the Hundred Acts literary corpus

Literary analysis of structure and sources of the Jonang Buddha narrative

Analysis of visual narrative cont.

Draft chapter two for print publication: a description and analysis of the murals

Create metadata connecting image and text (using Portfolio digital asset management system), continued

Edit electronic text of Tibetan-language, Tibetan-script editions of literary materials, continued

Deliver and review alpha software Tool testing and review Image processing of mural

photographs, continued Asset management, image and text

markup with metadata, continued

Spring 2016 Translation of the Hundred Acts literary corpus cont.

Literary analysis of structure and sources of the Jonang Buddha narrative cont.

Draft chapter three: a history of the design and production of the murals

User interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design and implementation

Summer 2016 Complete translations Draft chapter four: (4) a study

and selected translations of the Hundred Acts of the Buddha and related works by Trantha.

Complete literary/visual analyses

Deliver and review beta software Tool testing User interface (UI) and user

experience (UX) design review

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Complete metadata for image/text

Fall 2016 Complete draft of book titled The Life of the Buddha at Jonang: Literature and Art in Place.

Final testing of TRIPTYCH viewer, rollout to scholarly community