To Be Disciplined Into Artisans: Training at a Tibetan Monastic Woodblock Printing House (19th century)

In 1894, Lobzang Gyatso (Tib: བློ་བཟང་རྒྱ་མཚོ་) (b.1849-d.1904), the religious hierarch of Taktsang Lhamo Kirti Monastery on Sino-Tibetan borderlands, authored a code of conduct for the monastery’s woodblock printing house. In “Parkö Gi Chayik,” translated here as “The Constitution related to Printing and Carving,” he delineated the requisite standards and behavior expected of artisans and managers. Chayiks belong to an indigenous genre of disciplinary texts that were used for operation of monasteries. Discipline manifests in the source through standards on artisanal skill training, such as how many letter shapes a carver ought to master before they pass their apprenticeship. Discipline is also enforced through a culture of reward and punishment, where artisans were ranked according to the quality of their output. Good performance was compensated with prizes whereas inability to finish work on time or causing damage to raw materials resulted in withholding of wages.

While disciplinary standards for skill training are common across artisanal workshops in various cultural and regional contexts, where the standards do differ is in the expectation that artisans were to uphold a certain moral discipline rooted in Buddhist virtues. For instance, they were encouraged to not develop attachment to the blocks they carved. Here, discipline (Tib: ཚུལ་ཁྲིམས་) (Sanskrit: Śīlapāramitā) was understood as a spiritual practice to tame one’s mind on the path of spiritual progress. By delving into this dual secular and religious conception of discipline in the monastic context, this paper sheds light on the cultural meaning of artisanal work at a Buddhist printing house.