When master painter Kinzang Chojay called me, he sounded like an Olympic sprinter who had just won his first gold medal: enthused, excited, and ecstatic. “I’ve completed painting all of Padmasambhava’s stories!” he said. He had been working on one hundred and seventeen scenes of Guru Rinpoche’s life for a while now, and the last time I’d seen him in November last year, he was still not done. His project was a meticulous one, with each major episode in the life of Guru Rinpoche painted onto an ambitious continuous visual narrative. It was to be the main artistic frieze at Yonphula University in eastern Bhutan, itself a new institution under Yonphula Monastery.
Chojay had told me how he read each story from the Kathang Serthreng—the famous “White Lotus” biography of Padmasambhava—and then painted it with his team, scene by scene, like turning pages of a sacred book into the walls that people would one day walk past. His mural cycle is not just an astonishing feat of artistic endurance. The completed painting of Chojay’s Kathang Serthreng quietly marks a new chapter in a story that spans continents and many centuries. This is the story of how Buddhists have used pictures to tell the lives of their most revered figures, including the Lotus-Born Master brought Vajrayana Buddhism to the Himalayas.
Buddhist wall painting: A time-honored tradition
Cave paintings have been a staple of Buddhist art since ancient times, the earliest days when Buddhist teachings were committed to visual representation. The two best examples are India and China.
Around 470 CE, anonymous artisans working under the patronage of a Vakataka feudatory carved and painted Cave 17 at Ajanta in western India. I recently visited this exquisite sanctuary in April. Its long walls hold the richest surviving collection of Jataka murals: these are beloved, cosmic stories of the Buddha’s previous lives, when he was (re)born variously as a prince, an elephant, a deer, a monkey, and more. One of the most celebrated is the Vessantara Jataka, in which Prince Vessantara gives away his kingdom’s wish-fulfilling elephant, his children, and finally his wife, all in the name of perfect generosity. You can see how intricate the painters’ techniques are, from the surviving vivid colors to the lifelike expressions and immersive landscapes to make these moral dramas feel real for pilgrims.
A century later, between 557–581, the Northern Zhou builders of Mogao Cave 428 at Dunhuang created the largest central-pillar cave at the site. On its eastern wall, a mural reveals the Mahasattva Jataka in three horizontal registers, snaking an elegant and easy-to-follow path across pillar. Prince Mahasattva, the Buddha in a previous life, encounters a starving tigress about to devour her own cubs. He cuts his neck, leaps from a cliff, and offers his body so she might live. The Dunhuang painters borrowed the narrative tools of Chinese scroll painting (deploying undulating mountain landscapes and small human figures, with trees and pavilions framing each episode) to compress the story into a single visual sweep.
Both Ajanta and Dunhuang used art to teach moral and spiritual virtue. The stories are about sacrifice, compassion, and the long accumulation of merit across countless lifetimes. They focus entirely on the human experience, bringing a familiar world of kings, hunters, animals, and family to visitors. Although they celebrate past lives of the Buddha, the life of Padmasambhava is in many ways even more mystical.
Tantric representations of the divine
Chojay’s mural at Yonphula University is quite different. The first scene opens not in a palace or a forest, but at Lake Dhanakosha in Oddiyana, where an eight-year-old child appears spontaneously inside a multi-colored lotus, surrounded by dakinis offering praise. The narrative then moves through Padmasambhava’s training in India, his journey to Tibet to subdue local spirits and build Samye Monastery, his three visits to Bhutan—including the iconic flight on a tigress to Paro Taktsang—and his concealment of terma treasures across the Himalayan landscape.
I met the great Nyingma master Yonphula Rinpoche in August. When I asked him about Chojay’s work, he said: “The 117 scenes depict Padmasambhava in real life as well as in other spiritual realms.” Whereas Ajanta and Dunhuang portray the Buddha’s enlightenment within the horizon of human history (birth, renunciation, turning the Dharma Wheel, Parinirvana), the Padmasambhava cycle takes narrative tropes from Shakyamuni’s story and expands on them. Chojay’s mural includes scenes of Padmasambhava traveling to dakini Pure Lands to receive tantric transmissions, manifesting as wrathful deities like his eighth emanation Dorje Drollö, communicating with nagas, local deities, and non-human beings, and finally departing for Zangdok Palri, the Copper-Colored Mountain. Like many Pure Lands, Zangdok Palri is not an earthly mountain, but a realm beyond ordinary perception.
These dual dimensions of “human biography combined with manifestation of transcendent realms” are what make Chojay’s 117 Acts unprecedented in Buddhist visual culture.
As Yonphula Rinpoche explained, Padmasambhava was chosen as the sole subject because he is revered as the Second Buddha in Vajrayana Buddhism. Furthermore, his life is inseparable from Bhutan’s spiritual identity. The commission came directly from His Majesty the Fifth King, with Rinpoche overseeing the entire project. The choice of subject is deeply connected to Rinpoche’s own Nyingma lineage, the Dudjom Tersar tradition, in which Dudjom Rinpoche himself was regarded as a living emanation of Guru Rinpoche.
A royal mural
There couldn’t have been a better painter to take up this task than Chojay. He trained at Bhutan’s National Institute for Zorig Chusum from 2002 to 2007, and later served Her Royal Highness the Queen Mother and His Holiness the Je Khenpo. When Yonphula Rinpoche personally invited him to take on the mural, Kinzang understood the weight of the assignment.
“From my understanding,” Chojay told me, “His Majesty’s vision is to educate the younger generation that learning Buddhism is not only about becoming a monk. It is mainly about developing human values, wisdom, and spiritual understanding, and applying these teachings in life.”
That vision shapes how the mural works as a teaching tool. Most traditional Bhutanese temples show only the Eight Manifestations of Guru Rinpoche, a set of iconic forms summarizing key moments. Or the art might feature isolated famous episodes, like Padmasambhava’s flight to Taktsang on the tigress. A full, 117-scene sequential biography is exceptionally rare in Bhutanese art, and no standard curriculum at the country’s art institutes teaches such a cycle. In this sense, Chojay’s mural is a bespoke commission and artistic innovation, and not based on any template.
Chojay’s style is unmistakably Bhutanese, with bold black outlines, fixed iconometric proportions, mineral pigments with symbolic meaning. However, within those strict rules, Chojay says that he wanted to “pull the viewer into the story.” He softened the figures just enough to keep the narrative emotionally accessible without violating narrative accuracy. The result is a mural that functions simultaneously as ritual object, historical record, and storybook for a generation that may never read a Tibetan namtar (a traditional Tibetan Buddhist spiritual biography or hagiography meaning “complete liberation).
Ajanta and Dunhuang document the historical Shakyamuni, and other sambhoghakaya Buddhas. Kinzang’s 117 scenes reveal Padmasambhava’s story, in which the Lotus-Born Master is born from a lotus, travels to a snow-capped land of mountains that subdues gods and demons, and hides teachings in natural landscapes and the mind-stream for future generations, before finally ascending to a Pure Land absent on any map. And somewhere on a university campus in eastern Bhutan, a painter who served queens and abbots has brought that story on to a single continuous surface.
Related features from BDG
Decrypting the Sky: Yonphula Rinpoche, a Modern-day Lotus-Born Master
From Monk to Vajrayana Dharma Artist: The Transformation of Zhang Daqian at Dunhuang
Painting the Transcendent: An Interview with Bhutanese Thangka Artist Kinzang Chojay
