© WeChat: iqhwang WeChat: 40476, member of the WeMedia Alliance
About Thar Monastery butter flowers
The Butter Lantern Festival began during the Yongle period of the Ming Dynasty and was founded by Tsongkhapa, the founder of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism. As the birthplace of Tsongkhapa, the butter flower lantern festival held at Qinghai Taal Monastery over the years has been the largest in Scale, and the upper and lower flower gardens of Thar Monastery will compete with the butter flowers on the Lantern Festival every year. Ghee flowers are mainly made of ghee, a daily Tibetan food, and the monks convey Buddhist principles to the faithful by fabricating various Buddha statues, characters, birds and animals, flowers, plants and trees, and combining them into Buddhist scripture stories. Due to its bright colors, unique craftsmanship and exquisite shape, ghee flowers were included in the first batch of national intangible cultural heritage list in China in 2006.
Ghee flower making process
Process Introduction
The making of Tal Monastery butter flowers has a complete set of institutional and scientific procedures. There are two institutions specializing in making butter flowers in the temple, one is called "Jiezong Zengza" and the other is called "Gongmeng Zengza", commonly known as "Upper Flower Garden" and "Lower Flower Garden", and the two flower gardens compete with each other. There are about twenty art monks in each courtyard, and these art monks are generally admitted to the hospital at the age of fifteen or sixteen and devote themselves to art for life. The upper and lower flower gardens are presided over by the director (called "palm ruler") to decide on the theme, composition, production division and other matters of the butter flower of that year. The art of butter flowers inherits the characteristics of Tibetan Buddhist art of "refinement", "complexity" and "ingenuity", and its design and production have been passed down from master to apprentice since ancient times, and are generally carefully made in a closed environment.
Due to the mutual secrecy and blockade of news in the theme and production process of the two flower gardens, each has formed a certain independent genre for a long time, and they have developed in competition, showing their respective achievements with a new look and new skills every year. At present, the main inheritors of the tal monastery ghee flower making skills are Tashi Nyima, Luozang Dragon Ball, Gazang Gyatso, Gayang Shere, Zhihua Ruozi and so on.
The production cycle of ghee flowers is long and complex, lasting three months from preparation (October of the Tibetan calendar) to official exhibition (fifteenth day of the first month). In order to make the ghee smooth and delicate and easy to operate, the ghee is first immersed in ice water and repeatedly scrubbed, kneaded, removed impurities, increased toughness, and kneaded into a paste for later use. Before shaping, the oil sculpture monks must first bathe and make vows and perform religious ceremonies. After the ceremony, the palm ruler lama and other art monks together selected the theme of butter flowers, and then designed the abdominal draft, carefully conceived, planned, and laid out, and then assigned to the masters who were good at characters, animals, flowers, and architecture to lead their disciples to start working separately in the cool room where the temperature was below zero.
Production process
The first is to carefully tie the basic skeleton according to the content of the proposed theme, and tie the "skeleton" of different forms with soft leather bundles, hemp ropes, bamboo poles and sticks, that is, the basic model shaped. The second is to shape the form, the first raw material for shaping is to use the old ghee flowers removed last year and mixed with wheatgrass ash, smashed with a stick into a harder and elastic black shaping sludge, with this black sludge on the skeleton shaped into different shapes, the plastic method is similar to face plastic or clay sculpture. After the basic shape is done, it must be modified by the palm ruler lama on the posture, size size, and proportion of the overall structure of each other, and the final shape is considered after approval. The second raw material is to knead various mineral pigments in the creamy ghee processed into a paste, blend into colorful oil plastic raw materials, carefully painted on the prepared shape, cover the eyebrows, plastic flower dots, and some special places should also be decorated with gold and silver, embellished with smudge. Finally, according to the overall requirements of the design, the shaped butter flowers are installed one by one with iron wire, that is, fixed in several large wooden boards or special pots, high and low, the pieces are suspended, and the shapes of different sizes are shaped, as large as several meters of pavilions, bodhisattvas, and small as three or five centimeters of flowers, birds, insects and fish, becoming a complete three-dimensional picture with a complete layout, vivid and vivid.
The finished ghee flower picture should be inclined forward by about 20 degrees, one is to facilitate the viewer to look up slightly to view the panorama, and the other is to be afraid of the ghee flower melting from top to bottom, and the melting liquid above makes the shape below the flower. Generally speaking, the prepared butter flowers are reshaped every one or two years due to the influence of temperature.
Because the melting point of the ghee flower is very low, 15 degrees will be deformed, about 25 degrees will melt, in order to prevent the effect of body temperature on the ghee flower, the monks must soak their hands in the bone-chilling snow water before kneading, in order to prevent the hand temperature from warming, you must soak the ice water from time to time, grasp the ice cubes, so that the fingers remain cold. As a result, every monk suffers from varying degrees of arthropathy and even disability. It is difficult to do without devotion to the Buddha and dedication to religious art. Year after year, in the dark flower room, the cold fingertips of the lamas and monks flow with the warm colors that belong to spring and dreams, and in their hearts, the butter flower is a talking flower, telling the earthly longing and the colorful world of Tibetan Buddha, telling the beauty, telling the yearning.
Although the name of the butter flower is "flower", but its theme is diverse, rich in content, mainly with the gods and Buddhas, wenchen warriors, birds and animals, flowers, birds, fish and insects, mountain trees, flower bonsai, pavilions and pavilions, etc. composed of various storylines, complicated and simple, large layout of scattered perspective, local focus perspective, and clever use of the three-dimensional sense of three-dimensional space, forming a complete three-dimensional picture.
Because it is not limited by time and space, butter flower sculptures are especially good at expressing complex plots with large scenes, inheriting the Buddhist mural method of "different times and places", and in a limited space, dozens of storylines can be crisscrossed and interspersed in the form of comic strips on one screen, looking complex but not chaotic, and integrated, such as the large butter flower "The Story of the Life of Shakyamuni". The famous butter flower masterpiece "Princess Wencheng", which was made in the 1980s, is mainly composed of nearly 300 characters and geographical backgrounds such as Chang'an, Sun Moon Mountain, Jiangheyuan, Lhasa, etc., which are harmoniously decorated with strange flowers and grasses, and the historical scenes of harmony and friendship between the Han and Tibetan ethnic groups are vividly reproduced, which is very spectacular.
Two legends about ghee flowers
In 1409, when Tsongkhapa first initiated the Great Prayer Festival at the Jokhang Monastery in Lhasa, he organized butter flowers that produced large three-dimensional figures to be enshrined in front of the Buddha. Since then, ghee flowers have been introduced to Tsongkhapa's birthplace, Thar Monastery, where they have become accustomed. It is said that this master, who was born in Tsongkhapa, where Thar Monastery is located, dreamed that thorns turned into bright lights, weeds turned into flowers, and thousands of pearls between the bright lights and flowers shone with splendor and magnificence. After he woke up, he organized the monks to recreate the dream with a butter sculpture and enshrined it in front of the Buddha on the fifteenth night. Therefore, before the 1950s, ghee flowers had to be burned before dawn on the night after the exhibition to show the end of the short-lived flowers.
Every year, in the months before the Spring Festival, ghee flower artists use pure white ghee and knead various colored stone mineral dyes to shape them into various Buddha statues, characters, flowers, trees, birds, and beasts, and some also form religious stories, heavenly life on earth, and myths. On the fifteenth day of the first month of each year, the moon rises and the lanterns first bloom, and the Taal Temple ushers in the annual Lantern Festival of Butter, where people make flowers, enjoy flowers, and pray for auspicious peace, which has never stopped for hundreds of years.
According to another legend, in 641, Princess Wencheng entered Tibet, brought a statue of Shakyamuni 12 years old and enshrined it at the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, and the Tibetan people made flowers out of ghee to offer to the Buddha to show their reverence. In the process of development, the way of shaping ghee flowers, the variety of flowers, the content themes and the craftsmanship skills are constantly changing.
The ghee flower was first produced in Tibetan Buddhism and is a small decal on food offerings. According to the traditional Buddhist customs of India, the tribute to the Buddha and the Bodhisattva has six colors, namely flowers, incense, holy water, tile incense, fruit and Buddha lamp, but at that time, there were no flowers in the cold grass, so they had to use ghee to make flowers to offer to the Buddha, thus forming an artistic tradition.
Introduction to the Ghee Flowers of the 2017 Tibetan Calendar Year of the Turkey at Thar Monastery
Qinghai network has something to say
As a symbol of Qinghai's identity, the butter flower was included in the first batch of national intangible cultural heritage list in China in 2006. As a unique folk custom of Qinghai, it is the pride of each of us Qinghai people! So, the next time someone asks you what's so beautiful about the butter flower lamp, please throw this text to him! Turn it up!