This paper focuses on images of the musical ensemble found in the White Hall murals at Tholing Monastery within the historic Guge Kingdom, Tibet. It undertakes the task of identifying instruments based on morphological observation and historical records for the first time, while also examining the Tibetan Buddhist veneration of deities and philosophies concerning life and death reflected in the compositional details, layout, and spatial positioning of the mural. 

The instrument images discovered in this music ensemble include Tibetan horn, Madal Drum, Shankha, and others, which align with descriptions of instruments commonly used during later dissemination periods documented in the Treatise on Music and demonstrate intensive, interconnected cultural interactions with India, Nepal, and neighboring regions. The instruments there parallel those found at Lkhang Marpo in Tsparang, the capital of Guge, yet they also incorporate the ritualistic performance of shankha-blowing alongside more ornately decorated percussion instruments.

Furthermore, within the Shmashana (the charnel ground sacred to practice), imagery depicting musicians beneath the primary musical ensemble similarly appears, exemplifying how Tibetan Buddhist tantrism perpetuated the Indian Buddhist philosophical practice of asubhabhavana (visualization of the impure). Music here signifies the resounding of Buddhist dharma being cultivated in this space. Furthermore, the sky burial scenes rendered within the charnel ground imagery embody the Tibetan philosophical conception of death as an offering of the corporeal form to nature—a sacrificial logic paralleled by the music itself, which similarly functions as an offering to both deities and the natural world within these austere and forbidding scenes.

Finally, the entire musical ensemble bears a profound connection with Saraswati, the Melodious Goddess. All musicians and dancers follow the guidance of the banner held at the forefront of the procession, directing their veneration toward this goddess whose melodious power subdues all phenomena in the mundane realm. Furthermore, according to the accounts of the Gelug master Tsongkhapa, Saraswati also presides over the laws of causal determinism, which obviously resonates with the mural's thematic imagery of life-and-death cycles, thereby intimating the supreme divine power of Tibetan Buddhism.