Establishing an Iconography: The Case of Early Tibetan Representations of the Medicine Buddhas

Taking the depictions of the Medicine Buddhas in the iconographic programme of a fourteenth century Sūtra Collection at Namgyal Monastery, Upper Mustang, as a point of departure, this study surveys roughly contemporaneous representations of the same theme to assess the importance of iconographic conventions at that time. It concludes, that the depictions of the Medicine Buddhas indicate considerable iconographic freedom that may be characteristic for Tibetan Buddhist art of the fourteenth century in general, at least in areas that can be considered peripheral. This flexibility stands in contrast—and may well have been a contributing factor—to the contemporaneous efforts to systematise the Buddhist teachings in encyclopaedic works of art and literature. The study, further, demonstrates how an iconographic convention may have been established when the canonical sources do not provide enough detail, as well as the relative importance of such conventions within the Tibetan Buddhist context