What it is
The third great field is the science of making, śilpavidyā. The Tibetan tradition divides it in three. The arts of the body are what the hand makes: painting, sculpture, architecture, casting, carving, weaving, the cutting of a chuba. The arts of speech are what the voice makes: song, instrumental music, recitation and storytelling. The arts of the mind are the disciplines of learning themselves. This is why music sits here rather than under performance, and why a dranyen player and a thangka painter are, to the tradition, practitioners of the same field.
Where it comes from
Tibetan painting has its schools. Menri, founded by Menla Döndrup in the fifteenth century, set the classical standard and wrote it down as a system of proportion. Khyenri, from his contemporary Khyentse Chenmo, is richer in ornament and movement. Karma Gadri, from the sixteenth century, opened the composition to landscape and air in a manner learned from Chinese painting. All of them work to the iconometric grid, the ཐིག་ཚད་, which fixes the proportions of every figure in units of finger-widths, so that a Buddha painted in Kham and one painted in Ladakh have the same face. The pigments are ground minerals, lapis, malachite, cinnabar, orpiment, on cloth sized with chalk and glue, with gold laid last.
Sculpture works in clay, in cast bronze by the lost-wax method, and in hammered repoussé. Calligraphy has its own scripts and its own tools, the bamboo pen and the writing board. Woodblock printing reached its height at the Derge printing house, founded in 1729, whose store of well over two hundred thousand carved blocks is still printed from by hand. Architecture runs from the farmhouse to Samye and the Potala. Dress is a craft too: the chuba, the pangden apron, brocade, felt and sheepskin, each region’s cut its own.
Among the arts of speech, the dranyen lute, the piwang fiddle, the lingbu flute and the yangchen dulcimer accompany the song forms of Lhasa, nangma and toeshey, and the folk songs of every valley. The monasteries have their own orchestra of long horns, oboes, cymbals and drums, and a chant notation, the dbyangs yig, that draws the rise and fall of a melody as a curving line: one of the oldest systems of musical notation in the world.
What is at stake
These are apprenticeship arts. A painter learns the grid from a master’s hand over years; a musician learns a song by ear from someone who learned it by ear. Where the masters are few and the apprentices fewer, a craft can end in a single generation without anyone deciding to end it. Some already have. What is written down and drawn can be relearned; what lives only in a workshop cannot.
On Genla
Arts holds painting, sculpture, calligraphy, music, dress and textiles, architecture, and printing. Music opens into the instruments, the song forms, the chant notation, and the dranyen itself, with its history, how it is played, and the notation writer that lets a song be written down.