Graphic Governance: The Thirteenth Dalai Lama’s Vinaya Murals and his Projects of State Protection

By 1920, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso (1876-1933), had survived an assassination plot, two foreign invasions, and prolonged exile. During the decades following his final return to Tibet in 1913, he sought to modernize and secure his territory through various reforms, from changing the government’s structure to improving the outdated military. Thubten Gyatso is remembered primarily for these efforts, as well as his political maneuvers between Chinese and European powers during the conflicts that led to his exiles. What has been largely overlooked, however, is how the Dalai Lama strived to safeguard his domain through temple renovation and monastic reform, drawing on models of Buddhist kingship and Tibetan traditions of state protection. While these were fairly standard technologies of governance across the Buddhist world, Thubten Gyatso remarkably brought these two methods together in a single project. Central to his political undertaking was the purification of the monastic community, which he sought to accomplish by creating an illustrated commentary on the monastic code that was transformed into murals at two geomantically important sites: Ramoche and the Potala. In this paper, I consider the illustrated text and its murals within the circumstances of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama’s reign and the content of the historical record, contextualize them within his program of renovation and reform activities, and consider how the murals might have functioned more so as power objects than didactic diagrams.

The relative stability of the 1920s was particularly conducive to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama’s extensive program of temple-building and renovation, through which he sought to firmly establish himself as a Tibetan ruler and a Buddhist monarch, harnessing the symbolic prestige of the imperial kings and the ritual power of Buddhist kingship to both assert and protect his position—and his state. These many projects are recorded in his official biography and several are documented at length in three catalogues he wrote. The twelfth chapter of Thubten Gyatso’s biography, for example, is dedicated to these many beneficial activities. Drawing on the tropes of Buddhist kingship, the biographer hints at the Dalai Lama’s motivations: by restoring ritual efficacy and structural integrity (physically for buildings and institutionally for the monastic community) to the centers of Tibetan religious life, practice, and knowledge, the dharma is preserved, all people are satisfied, and a “Golden Age” of peace and stability arises in Tibet. It is clear that these traditional instruments of the Buddhist state remained not only relevant, but also critical to the role of the Dalai Lama, even as he sought to introduce a new modernity in Tibet.

In The New Pearl Necklace, the catalogue recording the founding and renovation history of the Ramoche temple, the Dalai Lama attributes its twentieth-century rehabilitation directly to institutional purification. The monastic community that was responsible for maintaining the rituals and buildings of the Ramoche had not fulfilled their obligations for years. With financial and spiritual misconduct of monastic leaders being the main cause for Ramoche’s renovation, it is not surprising to find the following listed among the many new and renewed murals: “Inside the assembly hall, on the left of the main door…new drawings of the vinaya are arranged with inscriptions and verses of good wishes.” This mural seems to be not only a part of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama’s extensive program of temple renovation, but also an instrument of his project of purifying the saṅgha, generally across Tibet and specifically at Ramoche. 

The colophon of Moonlight Vanquishing the Darkness of Transgression, the illustrated commentary on the monastic code composed by Thubten Gyatso around the same time as his Ramoche renovation and upon which its vinaya mural is based, gives further context to this project. First, the Dalai Lama is unambiguous about the purpose of the “newly occurring, unprecedented drawings,” which are faithfully replicated in the mural: “By the power of [these drawings], may pure vinaya-holders, whose lives are in accordance with the law, become widespread throughout the entire world.” The Dalai Lama explains the Ramoche renovation, the illustrated vinaya commentary, and the various reforms to purify the monastic community were intended to be integrally connected to one another for achieving his larger goals: political stability. The Ramoche’s vinaya mural, furthermore, represents an important instance where these conventional methods for bringing security to the state come together in a single powerful image at one of Tibet’s holiest sites, which had become an egregious example of monastic neglect and corruption. 

While the printed Moonlight Vanquishing—an illustrated guidebook to the “immediate necessities” of monastic life—could potentially function as a reform tool on the ground, only the mural within the geomantic Ramoche and its subsequent iteration at the Potala, could multiply the potency of the joint purification-renovation project. The power was not as much in its didactic function, but in its presence. That the mural was used was not as important as whether the images were there. The statement in the colophon cited above can therefore be interpreted not as a statement of intention for the didactic function of the pictures or the potential for these pictures to have the desired effect, but as an asseveration of truth (satyavacana). In Moonlight Vanquishing, the power of this efficacious invocation proclaiming the purificatory magic of the images is rooted in the authority of the Dalai Lama and the truth inherent in his statement of the illustrations’ potency. The mural is thus less a visual transmitter of teachings and more a visual instrument of foretelling its manifestation.

Thub bstan rgya mtsho. “Nye mkhoʼi dbyibs tshad phyag len mthong rgyun ltar dpe ris su bkod pa nyes ltung mun pa ʼjoms paʼi zla ʼod (dzi).” In gSung ʼbum thub bstan rgya mtsho, Volume 5 (ca). New Delhi: International Academy of Indian Culture, 1981–1982), 783–800. [BDRC

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----------. “Ra mo che gtsug lag khang rten dang brten par bcas pa nyams gsos bgyis paʼi dkar 

chag (mi).” In gSung ʼbum thub bstan rgya mtsho, Vol. 5 (ca) (International Academy of Indian Culture, 1981–1982), 691–708. [BDRC bdr:MW29228_B00483] <http://purl.bdrc.io/resource/MW29228_B00483&gt;