图像构建——早期西藏药师佛的个案研究

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

本文以尼泊尔上部穆斯塘地区南杰寺收藏的14世纪经书插图中的药师佛图像为出发点,调查了同时期相同题材的表现,以此来考察当时图像传统的重要性。简而言之,药师佛的描绘表明,14世纪藏传佛教艺术的一个普遍特征是相当程度的图像自由,至少在那些边缘地区如是。这种灵活性与同时期艺术和文献著作中对佛法的系统化努力形成鲜明对比,或许也是一种贡献。不仅如此,本研究还展示了当经典没有提供足够的细节时,如何建立一种图像传统,以及藏传佛教语境中这种传统的相对重要性。

Taking the depictions of the Medicine Buddhas in the iconographic program 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 systematize the Buddhist teachings in encyclopedic 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.