122 lojda, klimburg-salter and strinu
The artistic decoration of the main temple of the Tabo monastery is the old-
est completely surviving painted programme in the Western Himalaya. This
programme dates from the founding phase (c. 996) of the monastery and pro-
vides valuable insight into the heterogeneous culture of the region in the late
tenth century (fig. 4.1).
2 The Paintings of the Tabo Entry Hall (Tib. sgo khang)
The artistic programme of the founding phase of Tabo displays a specific style
that can be defined as the Tibetan Himalayan Style.1 According to the pres-
ent hypothesis, this style may have originated in the Tibetan milieu in Central
Asia, where the earliest example of this style has been identified in a series
of paintings on silk found in cave 17 in Dunhuang (fig. 4.2).2 In the Western
Himalayan borderlands evidence for this early Tibetan style can be found
mainly in the form of stone engravings and carvings dating from the ninth
until the eleventh century.3 The murals of the founding phase still preserved
today in the entry hall (Tib. sgo khang) of the Tabo main temple are painted
in a partially more elaborate Tibetan Himalayan Style than that found in
the stone engravings. As we shall demonstrate, two styles can be identified in the
entry hall—the majority of the paintings are painted in a simple linear style
with associations with the art of Central Asia, but there are some paintings
and the sculptures in the cella with features anticipating the new Kashmiri
1 For a general discussion of early Tibetan styles see Rhie, Marylin M., “Tibetan Painting Styles,
Sources, and Schools,” in Worlds of Transformation, Tibetan Art of Wisdom and Compassion,
ed. Marylin M. Rhie and Robert A. Thurman (New York: Tibet House, 1999), 45–74 and Kossak
Steven M., and Jane C. Singer, Sacred Visions: Early Paintings from Central Tibet (New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998). For the first definition and analysis of the Tibetan
Himalayan Style, see Klimburg-Salter, Deborah, “The Tibetan Himalayan Style. The Art of
the Western Domains, 8th–11th Centuries,” in Cultural Flows across the Western Himalaya.
Proceedings of the Conference in Shimla, ed. Patrick Mc Allister, Cristina Anna Scherrer-
Schaub, and Helmut Krasser (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2015), 443–492.
2 The caves are in Gansu province, district Mogao of Dunhuang, in present-day China.
First noted in Deborah Klimburg-Salter, The Silk Route and the Diamond Path. Esoteric
Buddhist Art on the Trans-Himalayan Trade Routes (Los Angeles: UCLA Art Council, 1982),
118 in the context of a discussion of the Tabo cella sculptures. This publication established
a basis for the further study of trade and pilgrimage networks and their relevance to artistic
production. Klimburg-Salter has recently discussed this style in greater detail (see ftn. 1).
3 Denwood, Philip, “The Tibetans in the Western Himalayas and Karakoram, Seventh Eleventh
Centuries: Rock Art and Inscriptions,” Journal of Inner Asian Art and Archaeology 2 (2007).