The spiritual quest of the Buddha in the Dungkar cave temple – Indian sources and Western Tibetan image-making. Part 1: the narrative cycle from Tuṣita heaven up to the Enlightenment

Abstract

The case study identifies and analyses the detailed depiction of the story of the life of the Buddha up to the Enlightenment in the early Western Trans-Himalayan Buddhist temple of Dungkar. It examines the relation between image and text, asseses the art-historical context, and explores the narrative modes. Comparative investigations based on multi-sited and multi-disciplinary research in historical Western Tibet (Tsamda/Ngari, Spiti, and Ladakh) show that the designers of the visual programmes at each of these sites developed different solutions of cycles based on textual sources and also visual models have been used in various ways.