Painted Books for Plaster Walls: Visual Words in the Fourteenth-century Murals at the Tibetan Buddhist Temple of Shalu

This dissertation is a study of some of the mural paintings on the walls of the Tibetan Buddhist temple of Shalu, arguing that these murals mediated and displayed books and book collections as both products and concepts. Elaborate mural paintings made after a major renovation of the temple in the early fourteenth century included long Tibetan inscriptions, displaying sometimes large passages of Tibetan sacred texts as part of their communicative pictorial program. By variously projecting books onto the walls, the temple’s abbot, Butön Rinchen Drup (Bu ston rin chen ‘grub, 1290-1364) placed new textual collections, inherently scholastic and elite projects, assertively into a more public domain. Rendering these books also as images was a way to assert and share the temple’s religious work. The painted images reference texts as sources of authenticity and also bring the ideas and organizations of book collections into visibility. During his time at Shalu, Butön oversaw the work of collecting, editing and organizing the early Tibetan canons, providing edited compilations of both the Kagyur (bka’ ‘gyur; words of the Buddha) and the first version of an edited Tengyur (bstan ‘gyur), among numerous other textual translations and editions. His deep personal investment and dedication to book collecting projects created the interest and desire to use the walls of Shalu as large canvases to express the power and potential of books and their organizational structures. I argue that the abbot and other monks at Shalu must have worked closely with designers and artists who painted these wall spaces in new ways that aimed at using wall images to project and argue for the power and efficacy of books. These murals also then permitted a different relationship to books and to reading than was otherwise possible. At Shalu, murals became an important venue in the fourteenth century through which to negotiate and ultimately to extend the possibilities of the book.Ph.D