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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kapstein, Matthew.
Tibetan Buddhism : a very short introduction / Matthew T. Kapstein.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-973512-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Buddhism—Tibet Region. I. Title.
BQ7604.K37 2013
294.3’923—dc23 2013006676

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
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Matthew T. Kapstein
Tibetan Buddhism
A Very Short Introduction
Tibetan Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction
Contents

List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
Languages and pronunciation
Map: Tibet and Neighboring Regions
1 The world of gods, demons, and men
2 Sources of Tibetan religious traditions
3 The growth of the orders and schools
4 Spiritual exercise and the path of the bodhisattva
5 Philosophical developments and disputes
6 Enlightenment in this very body
7 When this life ends
8 Tibetan Buddhism today
References and further reading
Index
List of illustrations

1 Senior monk explaining mo to young novice

2 Monk and layman performing sang, Lamjura Pass, Nepal

3 Padmasambhava with Mandaravā and Yeshé Tsogyel, Yarlung Sheldrak

4 Monastery of Tiksé in Ladakh

5 Assembly of monks
6 Monks practicing debate, Ganden monastery

7 Stūpa of Gyantsé

8 Lay priest (ngakpa), Nyingmapa tantric college, Amdo

9 Dancers at a performance of cham, ritual masked dance, Tramdruk temple
10 Tibetan monk and Chinese photographer, Samyé Monastery
All photographs © Matthew T. Kapstein
Acknowledgments

The need for a concise introduction to Tibetan Buddhism has been felt for some
time. I am grateful to Cynthia Read, my editor at Oxford University Press, for
encouraging me to write one. Thanks, too, to Professor Bryan Cuevas (Florida
State University) and one anonymous reader for their thoughtful comments on
an earlier draft of the book, which were most helpful to me in preparing this
version. I am also indebted to Charlotte Steinhardt and Joellyn Ausanka at OUP
for their editoral interventions, facilitating and smoothing the passage from
manuscript to published work.
Languages and pronunciation

As is inevitable in writing about Tibetan Buddhism, the present work introduces

many names and terms in Sanskrit and Tibetan, languages that are not familiar to
many readers. Sanskrit, the ancient Indian language of learning, is written
phonetically according to the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration.
For Tibetan, I use the simplified system of the Tibetan and Himalayan Library,
modified on some occasions to better accord with Tibetan pronunciation. Space
does not permit the inclusion of exact transcriptions according to Tibetan
spelling conventions, but readers requiring these may consult the Tibetan
spelling list at the conclusion of my The Tibetans (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).
Here are some basic points for those who are new to these languages:

• In both Sanskrit and Tibetan, the vowels a, i, u, e, and o are pronounced

roughly as in Italian. The use of the macron (ā etc.) indicates lengthening of the
vowel, not a change of quality. Sanskrit includes two diphthongs—ai (like ie in
pie) and au (like ow in now)—while Tibetan adds the two vowels ö and ü, both
as in German. Sanskrit ṃ indicates nasalization of the preceding vowel, similar
to the final n in French words such as bon.
• In both Sanskrit and Tibetan, h following a consonant is a sign of aspiration
(breathiness): ph is a breathy p, not an f, and similarly th is a breathy t, not the
th of English think or this. Dots underneath consonants in Sanskrit words
indicate that the tongue is pointed to the roof of the mouth when they are
uttered. S with either an accent (ś) or a dot (ṣ) is pronounced roughly sh. In
Tibetan, z and zh sound to us more like s and sh, but with an accompanying
low tone. Ng resembles the final sound in song, though English speakers find it
hard to pronounce at the beginning of a word, as it often is in Tibetan.
Chapter 1
The world of gods, demons, and men

One early spring day in the mid-1970s, at the residence of a Tibetan lama in the
remote mountains of Nepal, I was invited to take tea and to converse with my
learned host on the challenging topic of the nature of consciousness in Buddhist
philosophy. As we pondered a difficult passage from an eighth-century Indian
text, asserting that the mind cannot be an object to itself, we were abruptly
interrupted by the lama’s servant. He whispered to the teacher that a local couple
had arrived with urgent business; could he please usher them in? Consent was
granted and the couple, peasants who had some herds that they tended in the
pastures above the monastery, entered, pallid and visibly quaking with fear. The
night before a demon had entered their cattle shed, kicking up sparks and
crackling, and almost provoked a stampede. What evil deed had they committed
to become the objects of such demonic fury? And now that the bane was upon
them, how was it to be appeased? Prostrating themselves before the lama, they
begged for his protection and placed a small handful of cash on his table as an
offering, together with a bowl brimming with fresh curds from their cows.
The lama immediately sought to put their minds at ease; seating them, he called
for tea and biscuits to be served. After having them repeat in detail what had
transpired—and by now I thought I recognized within the demonic attack an
occurrence of the strange meteorological phenomenon sometimes called “ball
lightning”—he took up his astrological almanac. Studying it for some minutes,
he rolled the divination dice he always kept close at hand and counted off
numerological combinations on his rosary. After what must have seemed an
eternity to the terrified couple, he leaned forward and addressed them in the
soothing tones of a parent comforting a frightened child: There are no
indications that anything grave has occurred; your livestock will be fine, he
explained, neither you nor your children will be afflicted with demon-borne
sickness or similar ills. Only a passing disturbance of the elements, due to minor
faults of past karma, is at stake. To purify your karma and to pacify these
troubles, you must undertake to practice each day the rite of sang—incense
fumigation dedicated to the spirits of the environment—and to recite Oṃ
maṇipadme hūṃ, the mantra of Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva of compassion,
one thousand times. Do this and your problems will vanish. Above all, do not be
afraid. Keep faith. Adhere to compassion. You and those close to you will surely
soon be free from all that has caused this distress.
The lama then gave them knotted “protection cords,” some consecrated pills, a
sip of perfumed water, and touching each on the crown of the head, recited some
prayers on their behalf. The couple, still nervous but braving hopeful
expressions, took their leave. The lama looked up, smiled gently, and said,
“Where were we? ‘Mind cannot see mind,’ wasn’t it?”

Religion’s two ends

Tibetan Buddhism, as it is presented in the West, is often treated as an erudite
spiritual discipline, a world of subtle philosophy and high-powered techniques of
abstract meditation, dispensing a bounty of insight and compassion to all.
Although this representation has its basis in the image that Tibetan Buddhism
has carefully crafted of itself through the centuries, for Tibetans generally,
including the social and religious elites, avoiding bad karma and demonic
disturbances, and undertaking meritorious rites and purifications were the
fundamental objectives of religious life. Far from seeking to transcend the world
in attainments of mystical contemplation, the day-to-day concerns that motivated
the religious lives of most Tibetans—laymen and clergy alike—were the
problems inherent in maintaining, not transcending, the order of the world by
ensuring that harvests were plentiful, cattle productive, children sound, and
enemies, whether demonic or human, impotent. Religious professionals,
accordingly, were expected to minister to these and similar needs, whatever they
might have to say about recondite topics like the nature of mind. Where the two
ends of Tibetan religion—world-maintenance and world-transcendence—met
was in the ideal of the lama, the spiritually accomplished teacher, often regarded
as a bodhisattva who, in virtue of his superior compassion, learning, and ritual
virtuosity, was both motivated and prepared to act in the service of the world at
large. It goes without saying that not all who were titled lama in fact fulfilled
this lofty ideal, though many surely strove to do so.
The bread-and-butter concerns of the Tibetan Buddhist clergy required that they
The bread-and-butter concerns of the Tibetan Buddhist clergy required that they
devote considerable efforts to realizing the broad range of ritual demands for the
protection, peace, and prosperity of their patrons, and to furnishing them with
divinations and astrological consultations. In encountering Tibetan Buddhism as
it is presented in many works on religious teaching, which tend to emphasize
doctrines and contemplative practices, one rarely finds even oblique references
to these ubiquitous aspects of Tibetan religion as it is lived. Not surprisingly,
there has been a marked discrepancy between descriptions of Tibetan Buddhism
based primarily on doctrinal texts and those derived from anthropological studies
of life in traditional Tibetan and Himalayan communities. This introduction,
though stressing the textual record of history, doctrine, and practice, nevertheless
also attempts to recall pertinent “facts on the ground” as these are known from
observing the actual religious life of Tibet.
Writings on Tibetan religion sometimes distinguish sharply between Buddhism,
originally an Indian religion that came to dominate Tibetan culture from the late
first millennium on, and Bön, described as the ancient, indigenous religion of
Tibet. This characterization is not without its problems, however, and it will be
one of the tasks for the chapters that follow to provide greater precision about
this. For the moment, though, it should be noted that the canonical scriptures of
the Bön religion, in contrast to those of mainstream Tibetan Buddhism, have
much to say about the world-maintaining facets of Tibetan religious life as these
have been in fact practiced. Accordingly, it is worthwhile to attend in brief to
what Bön sources have to say about this. It must be constantly borne in mind that
these matters are no less relevant to Tibetan Buddhism, despite the latter’s
relative theological silence about them. In practice, adherents of both Bön and
Buddhism are equally concerned with maintaining harmony with local spirits
and demons, with avoiding spiritual pollution and acquiring tokens imbued with
blessings of auspicious good fortune, and with rites of passage that begin when a
lama whispers a name into an infant’s ear and conclude with one’s departure at
death.
1. A senior monk explains the results of a divination (mo), calculated on his rosary, to a young novice.

Between gods and demons

“In recognizing appearance to be a divinity (lha), and thus beneficent, or a
demon (dré), and thus harmful, one comes to realize that all of birth and death
are fashioned by divinities and demons (lhadré).” In these words, a twelfth-
century Bön text summarizes the human predicament in its most essential
features. We inhabit a world in which invisible powers, capable of helping or
hurting us, are omnipresent. It is therefore imperative that we recognize these
powers for what they are and learn how best to determine our own course in
relation to them. The same work explains in brief how one deals with malefic
spirits, which are regarded as perfectly analogous to the causes of disease.
Nor are the worldly divinities, in contrast to the implacable demons, considered
as inherently well-disposed to human beings. They are characterized as often
arrogant and vengeful but nevertheless “respectful of Bön and attached to the
Shen [the Bön priesthood].” The relation the latter seek to form with these proud
and powerful beings is therefore one of mastery and coercion, “for just as a
master puts a slave to work, the practitioner, like the master, realizes [the deities]
and their factotums to be like slaves and servants.”
Despite the explicit mention of Bön and its priesthood here, these words may be
applied in mainstream Buddhist contexts as well. Padmasambhava, the famed
Indian master who visited Tibet during the eighth century and is believed to have
played a cardinal role in the implantation there of Buddhism, legendarily
converted many of the “arrogant” Tibetan divinities to Buddhism, coercing them
to act as protectors of the foreign religion. Numbers of later Buddhist masters
then followed his example. We read, for instance, of an eleventh-century adept,
Zurchungpa, who vanquished the lu (nāgas, or serpent-demons) in the vicinity of
his teacher Zurpoché’s temple, forcing them to produce a tribute of chang, the
rich barley ale that was a staple of the Tibetan diet: Zurchungpa intentionally
summoned the sister of the nāga-demon who dwelt on the rock at Yazé
Trakdzong. A thin snake appeared, which Zurchungpa turned into a fair lady by
means of his gaze. At that Zurpoché said, “I want you to make the ale for the
consecration of my temple.”

On dealing with demons and disease

Living beings are subject to many sorts of affliction due to spirits and the
like. One practices in order to remove these afflictions by means of
divination and exorcism. Because beings are subject to many diseases of
fever and chill, etc., one enters the way in order to alleviate those illnesses
by medicine and treatment. When the effects of disease or afflicting spirits
have appeared, one investigates what harm has occurred and what sort of
disease or afflicting spirit is present. You diagnose a disease by examining
pulse and urine, while afflicting spirits are investigated by means of
divination and omens. Without halting the application of medicine and
treatment to the effects of disease, you seek to bring about benefits; and
without halting their application to the effects of afflicting spirits, you seek
to bring about benefits through various divinations and exorcisms. This is
the way of practical action. The view realized here resembles that of a scout
on a mountain pass who spies out all enemies and dangers, and so brings
about their avoidance or removal. Similarly, in this case you realize, with
respect to disease, that it may be treated and cured, and with respect to
afflicting spirits, that they may be impeded and deflected.
from The Commentary of the Four Clever Men

The resulting ale was said to flow without limit.

Though few Tibetans presume to coerce the spirits in this way, to live, so far as
is possible, in harmony with the “gods and demons” is nevertheless the concern
of all. In one village I visited, I learned that several households had recently
experienced a string of misfortunes, giving rise to collective worries in regard to
the well-being of the village as a whole. When the leading lama in the region
was consulted about it, he determined that the particular lu associated with the
village spring was displeased, his shrine having been left to fall into disrepair
and thus desecrated. The shrine of the lu was accordingly cleansed, refurbished,
and consecrated anew, the rites being performed by Buddhist monks from the
lama’s monastery.
In short, without the cooperation of the local spirits, the community cannot hope
to achieve prosperity; without the prosperity of the community, the material
basis for religious achievement is lost; and without achievement in religious
practice and learning, the cooperation of the local spirits cannot be won. This
cycle of interdependence undergirds the religious life of Tibet in all its aspects,
whether in settings denoted as Buddhist or Bön, whether on the level of the
modest village or, in past times, of the Tibetan State under the leadership of the
Dalai Lamas.

A rite of purification
The divine and demonic fauna of Tibet are remarkably diverse and prolific. One
finds, accordingly, an abundant body of techniques—ritual and divinatory—
deployed in the constant struggle required in order to sustain the balance of the
spiritual ecology. Included here are practices as varied as pilgrimage, spirit-
channeling, dramatic dances, and offerings of numerous kinds, and an elaborate
material culture requiring the production of a great panoply of ritual objects
including masks, prayer-flags, votive cakes, colorful thread-crosses, and much
more. As an example of Tibet’s “this worldly” religion, one specific, very
common type of ritual may be considered: sang, or incense fumigation, the
regular practice of which was urged upon the couple whose cattle fell victim to
demonic attack.
2. A monk (right) and a layman perform sang on the Lamjura Pass in eastern Nepal.

Sang, literally “purification,” is a ubiquitous Tibetan custom in which the

fragrant smoke of juniper and other substances is offered to the gods and spirits
pervading the land. The term sang may be etymologically related to another
word, also pronounced sang, which forms part of the Tibetan term for the
Enlightened One, the Buddha: sang-gyé. Here it refers to the Buddha’s
awakening as a sloughing off of the sleep of ignorance that characterizes the
mundane world. Sang as fumigation, analogously, offers a cleansing fragrance to
the spirits, purifying the taints of the environment that they find distasteful. The
custom is almost certainly of indigenous origin in Tibet and adjacent regions,
and is practiced in one form or another by virtually all Tibetans, monks and
laypersons, men and women, rich and poor. One of the great annual festivals,
Dzamling chisang, performed in the early summer on the full-moon day of the
fifth lunar month, is its greatest elaboration, offering, literally, a “general
fumigation (on behalf of all the spirits) of the world.” In settled villages, many
houses will have a special furnace, a sangtab, placed on the roof or in the
courtyard for the regular performance of sang, while at long-term nomadic
encampments such a furnace may be constructed outside the tents. It is an
offering that in its most basic form is barely a ritual at all: one burns a bit of
juniper while reciting a formula such as lha gyel lo, “the gods are victorious!”
and perhaps a few mantras, like the ubiquitous Oṃ maṇipadme hūṃ.

Tibetan understandings of sang cohere closely with beliefs regarding the

character of the local divinities, particularly the mountain gods. These are beings
of great power but also olfactory sensitivity; it is for this reason, for instance,
that there is a widespread cultural ban on grilling or roasting meat, which may
bring about spiritual pollution, or drip. Although the already limited Tibetan
culinary arts thereby suffer for this reason, raw, dried, or boiled meat (as in a
stew or soup) are de rigueur, for the gods frown upon those who offend them
with the stench of burning flesh. Sweet juniper smoke, however, they find
suitable. Moreover, one must offer a particular type of juniper that does not
spark or pop when it burns. Explosions, bright flashes, and sharp sounds disrupt
the dignified tranquility of the divinities no less, as we have seen, than they do
the peace of cattle and men. When they are well pleased, the gods become
propitious, and the human community thrives under the resulting favorable
auspices (trashi). The gods, irascible though they may be, are drawn to virtue
(gewa) and to the merit (sonam) thereby accumulated. They shun evil and
pollution (dik-drip).
The practice of sang, like virtually all that touches upon the cults of the Tibetan
indigenous deities, came within the orbit of tantric Buddhism no later than the
twelfth century and perhaps much earlier. The esoteric ritual scriptures, or
tantras, of Indian Buddhism provided the ritual technology for sublimating and
organizing autochthonous beliefs and practices in regard to all manner of spirits,
divine or demonic, and so quickly pervaded both Buddhist and Bön milieux.
Formalized liturgies for the performance of popular rites such as sang appeared,
in which they were elaborated beyond the simple customs described earlier. Part
of one such liturgy for the performance of sang, composed during the sixteenth
century, reads as follows: In a great vessel of diverse precious gems,

Are sacramental substances, worldly enjoyments,

Consecrated as gnostic ambrosia by three mantra-syllables.
This lively mix, an appealing offering, I dedicate
To the gurus, divinities, goddesses, and protectors …,
To the lords of our earth and the “guests” among the six classes to whom I’m indebted; In
particular, to those who steal life and longevity,
Elemental spirits bringing disease, demons, and obstacles,
And all types of bad dreams, evil signs and omens,
Irrascible spirits and lords of miraculous powers,
Creditors seeking food, abode and wealth,
Lords of pollution and madness, demons of death and their consorts, Vampires and spirits of
plague, demonesses of town and country, As many as there are throughout the expanses of
space.
May my sins and obscurations, accumulated throughout the three times, My [illicit] enjoyment of
the wealth of the saṅgha and of the deceased, Be purified by this fire-offering.
May each particle of each flame, filling space,
Become an inexhaustible mass of good offerings
Pervading all the fields of the Buddhas.
 Pervading all the fields of the Buddhas.
May the gift of this offering in the flames, gnostic light,
Pervade the abodes of the six classes down to the lowest hell….
And may all beings awaken as Buddhas in the heart of enlightenment!

This text addresses Tibetan religious experience on several levels. It seeks to

appease and restore order to the “elemental spirits bringing disease, demons, and
obstacles,” while at the same time conferring gnosis—the realization of the
Buddha’s enlightenment—on all “abodes of the six classes”—gods, anti-gods,
humans, animals, ghosts, and denizens of hell—inhabiting the round of rebirth,
or saṃsāra. In its aspiration for the salvation of all beings, it adheres to the
cardinal values of Mahāyāna Buddhism, while in its use of spell-like mantras to
consecrate the juniper and other substances offered into the flames “as gnostic
ambrosia” for the practice of sang, it adopts the ritual usages of Buddhist Tantra.
It forms a tapestry of sorts, in which the Tibetan world of gods, demons, and
men, the Mahāyāna Buddhist orientation to universal enlightenment, and the
ritual technologies of Tantric esotericism are tightly interwoven. In actual
practice, the varied themes that may be identified here are most often
inseparable, forming for Tibetans a balanced whole, whose several parts, in both
their historical and doctrinal aspects, are indissociable.
Chapter 2
Sources of Tibetan religious traditions

The introduction of Buddhism to Tibet

It is not clear when Tibetans first encountered the Buddhist religion. Tradition
holds that it was in the time of Lha Totori (ca. fourth century CE), a ruler of
Yarlung in southeastern Tibet: Buddhist scriptures and images are related to
have miraculously fallen upon his palace, though others say they were offered by
a wandering Central Asian Buddhist monk. Although these are legends, it is not
implausible that elements of Buddhism arrived during this period of Tibetan
prehistory; Tibet was then surrounded by lands in which Buddhism was a long-
established religious and cultural system: Nepal and India to the south, China to
the east, the Silk Road states to the north, and the pre-Islamic Iranian world to
the west.
Tibetan history begins with the Tsenpo, or emperor, Songtsen Gampo (ca. 617–
49), who militarily and politically unified the Tibetan plateau and began the
conquest of surrounding lands. The Tibetan system of writing, based on Indian
models, was developed at this time. The emperor’s marriage to the Chinese
princess Wencheng (d. 680) is believed to have been accompanied by the
installation in his capital city, Lhasa, of a precious image of Śākyamuni Buddha
brought from China as part of her dowry and said to have been manufactured in
India as a portrait of the Buddha himself. The statue, known as the Jowo
(“Lord”) remains Tibet’s holiest object of pilgrimage. Later accounts relate that
the monarch also married a Nepalese Buddhist princess, Bhṛkuṭī, and that
inspired by his two foreign queens, he and his court embraced the Indian
religion. Indeed, Songtsen Gampo would be eventually regarded as a Tibetan
emanation of the regal bodhisattva of universal compassion, Avalokiteśvara, or
Chenrezi in Tibetan, who was believed to have been entrusted by the Buddha
Śākyamuni with the task of converting Tibet.

Although Songtsen Gampo extended some degree of tolerance to Buddhism, at

least in order to accommodate his foreign brides, it is unlikely that the alien faith
made much progress in Tibet before another half century or more had passed.
Under the king Tri Düsong (d. 704) a temple was founded in the region of Ling,
in far eastern Tibet, perhaps in connection with military campaigns in the
southeastern part of the Tibetan empire against the Buddhist kingdom of
Nanzhao (modern Yunnan). During the reign of Tri Düsong’s successor Tri
Detsuktsen (704–55), there is clear evidence for renewed Buddhist advances in
Central Tibet. Once again, it was a Chinese princess who played an instrumental
role in supporting the faith.
Princess Jincheng arrived in Tibet in 710, two years before her then six-year-old
husband-to-be was granted the title of Tsenpo. She is said to have been much
saddened by the absence of Buddhist funerary rites for deceased nobility and so
introduced the Chinese Buddhist custom of memorializing the dead during seven
weeks of mourning. This practice promoted the belief, later famed in such works
as the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead, that forty-nine days typically
intervene between death and rebirth. The princess also invited Khotanese monks
to Central Tibet, who formed the first community of the saṅgha in that land.
However, following Jincheng’s death in 739, probably due to the plague, there
was a sharp anti-Buddhist reaction and the foreign monks were expelled.
The last years of Tri Detsuktsen’s rule were marked by grave factional conflict
among the nobility, culminating in the monarch’s assassination. When his
thirteen-year-old son was placed on the throne in 755, factions hostile to
Buddhism dominated the court. The young Tsenpo, Tri Songdetsen (742–ca.
802), nevertheless became imperial Tibet’s greatest ruler and an unparallelled
Buddhist benefactor. In his surviving edicts, we are told that early in his reign
Tibet faced severe epidemics afflicting both humans and livestock. When no
viable solution appeared, he rescinded the ban on the practice of Buddhist rites
that had been in force since his father’s dethronement, and matters rapidly
improved. As a result, he adopted Buddhism and undertook to study its teachings
in depth. His conversion took place in 762, when he was twenty.

An emperor’s conversion
 The testimony offered by the edicts and other writings attributed to Tri
Songdetsen suggest that he acquired a keen interest in Buddhist doctrine,
key elements of which he summarizes in these words: “Those who are born
and revolve among the four sorts of birth, from beginningless origins to the
infinite end, become as they are owing to their deeds [lé, Sanskrit karman]
…. The results of one’s deeds ripen upon oneself. One may be born as a
god among the heavenly stages, or as a human on earth, or as an anti-god, a
hungry ghost, an animal, or a subterranean creature of the hells—all born in
these six [realms] have done so owing to their own deeds.
“Transcending the world are those who become Buddhas, and those who
make progress as bodhisattvas, self-awakened ones [Skt. pratyekabuddha],
or pious disciples [Skt. śrāvaka]—all of them have done so owing to the
provisions of merit and gnosis that they themselves have amassed.”
Besides his affirmation of Buddhist teachings of the painful cycle of rebirth
—saṃsāra (khorwa in Tibetan)—and its termination in the realization of a
Buddha’s enlightenment, or nirvāṇa (nyangdé), it is striking that Tri
Songdetsen was also particularly interested in how we may know the truth
of religious claims. For he adds: “If one investigates what is found in the
Dharma [the Buddha’s teaching], some points are immediately evident in
their good or evil consequences, while others that are not immediately
evident may nevertheless be inferred on the basis of those which are, and so
are also fit to be held with certainty.”
Thus, he became familiar with, and sought to introduce his subjects to, the
basics of Indian Buddhist philosophy, which holds that knowledge may
have two valid sources (Skt. pramāṇa): direct perception (Skt. pratyakṣa)
of what is evident to the senses and intellectual intuition, and inference
(Skt. anumāna) of what is “hidden,” that is, not directly evident. In later
times, the investigation of these sources of knowledge would be a focal
point of monastic education.

Tri Songdetsen founded Tibet’s first Buddhist monastery, Samyé (ca. 779) and
invited the Indian teacher Śāntarakṣita to ordain the first officially sanctioned
Tibetan Buddhist monks. Henceforth, the Tibetan Buddhist monastic community
would follow the Vinaya, or monastic code, of the Indian Mūlasarvāstivāda
order to which Śāntarakṣita adhered. The translation of Buddhist canonical
scriptures was also sponsored by the court on a massive scale. The
accomplishments of the Tibetan imperial translation committees, in terms of
both quantity and precision, may be counted among the summits of the art of
translation at any place or time. Tibetan translators, in collaboration with Indian
and Central Asian Buddhist scholars, created a rigorous Sanskrit-Tibetan lexicon
to guide their work, one result being a standardized doctrinal and philosophical
vocabulary in Tibetan. The translators also composed manuals introducing the
newly coined vocabulary together with elements of Buddhist thought. The
creation of a Tibetan canonical literature was continued under Tri Songdetsen’s
successors until the collapse of the dynasty during the mid-ninth century. By that
time, many hundreds of Indian religious and philosophical writings had been
translated. The Tibetan Buddhist canon, organized during the fourteenth century
into the complementary collections of the Kanjur (“translated scriptures”) and
Tanjur (“translated commentaries”), and occupying more than three hundred
large volumes, preserves numerous Indian as well as some Chinese texts now
unavailable elsewhere.
The foundation of Samyé monastery is also said to have involved the
intercession of Padmasambhava, a renowned tantric adept from Oḍḍiyāna in
northwestern India, who was required to quell the hostile spirits and divinities of
Tibet in order to win their allegiance to Buddhism. Whatever his actual role may
have been at the time, Padmasambhava would become the object of considerable
devotion and was eventually deified as the “Precious Guru” (Guru Rinpoché) of
the Tibetan people as a whole. Together, the king Tri Songdetsen, the monk
Śāntarakṣita, and the adept Padmasambhava are revered as the trinity of the
Tibetan conversion. They represent three of the major constituents of the Tibetan
Buddhist world: royal lay patron, ordained monk, and tantric adept.
It is sometimes thought that the adoption of Buddhism by the Tibetan court
pacified the warlike Tibetan people and thus, having emasculated the nation,
brought about the decline and fall of its empire. It is clear, however, that Tibet
continued aggressive policies long after adopting Buddhism as an aspect of
Tibetan imperial ideology. Buddhism provided the empire with the symbolic
means to represent itself as the worldly embodiment of a universal spiritual and
political order, a “cosmocracy” so to speak, in which the Tsenpo was the
Buddha’s earthly representative. This was made tangible through the Tsenpo’s
identification with the cosmic Buddha of Radiant Light, Vairocana, whose icon
was widely reproduced in imperial domains.
was widely reproduced in imperial domains.

3. Padmasambhava, with his Indian and Tibetan consorts Mandaravā and Yeshé Tsogyel, in the
“speaking image” revealed as spiritual treasure (terma) at Yarlung Sheldrak.

Two views of enlightenment

The Buddhist teachings favored by the Tibetan monarchy represented the
traditions of the great northern Indian monastic universities, above all Nālandā,
with which Śāntarakṣita was affiliated. At these establishments, the monastic
code of the Vinaya formed the basis for monastic life among the inmates, both
novices (Skt. śramaṇera, Tib. getsül) and fully ordained monks (Skt. bhikṣu,
Tib. gelong). Laymen and -women were connected with the monastery as
devotees and patrons, and ordained laymen (Skt. upāsaka, Tib. genyen) might
also take up monastic residence in order to further religious pursuits. The vows
of these grades—laymen and -women, novice men and women, monks and nuns
—were known as prātimokṣa, an expression sometimes understood to mean
“individual liberation.” The prātimokṣa vows required abstinence from
intentional killing, theft, falsehood, intoxication, and sexual misconduct,
understood in the case of novices, monks, and nuns to prohibit all sexual
activity. The monastic life of novices was regulated by a small number of
additional vows, while those who were fully ordained had more than two
hundred rules by which they were bound. Though this pattern was maintained in
Tibet, many of the detailed rules of the Vinaya—for instance, the prohibition of
an evening meal following the major meal at midday—came to be quietly
neglected.

A well-motivated aspirant adhering to the prātimokṣa could strive to achieve

learning and insight through study and meditation. Here, the Indian tradition as it
became known in Tibet favored a gradual training, sometimes considered as
comprising “three vehicles.” These were already referred to in the edicts of Tri
Songdetsen and became fundamental for all later formulations of Tibetan
Buddhist doctrine.

A ninth-century translator on Buddhism’s “three

vehicles”
The “three vehicles” were carefully summarized in the treatise Distinctions
of Views (Tawé Khyepar) by Yeshé-dé, a leading translator at Samyé
monastery. He begins with the concept of a “vehicle”:
“‘Vehicle’ is similar to ‘conveyance.’ It is a vehicle because, conveyed by
it, you reach your proper abode, and because, like a bridge, a boat, or a
ship, when you are conveyed by and rely upon it, you traverse the torrent of
saṃsāra.

“You enter the vehicle of the pious disciples [Skt. śrāvaka] through the four
truths: (1) The five bundles [Skt. skandha, i.e., form, sensation, perception,
volitions, and consciousness] … are the ground of various sufferings; so at
first there is the realization of the truth of suffering; (2) Then, when the
cause of suffering is realized to arise from deeds [Skt. karman] and
afflictions [Skt. kleśa], you realize the truth of the origination [of suffering];
(3) Next, abandoning deeds and afflictions, you leave off the five bundles
and understand [the resulting peace] to be true, thus realizing the truth of
cessation (= nirvāṇa); (4) Then, concerning the means to attain cessation,
you understand this to be the sublime path that includes right views, etc.,
and so realize the truth of the path. When corrupted and uncorrupted
[phenomena] are reduced to cause and result, you see that there is no self
 that is agent or enjoyer, and so realize the selflessness [Skt. anātman] of the
individual. Saṃsāra is inexhausible trouble, while nirvāṇa is understood to
be peace and happiness.
“Concerning the vehicle of the self-awakened ones [Skt. pratyekabuddha],
you enter it through the twelve limbs of dependent origination [Skt.
pratītyasamutpāda]. Having seen the evil consequence of saṃsāra to be old
age and death, you examine whence these arise and discover their basis to
be birth. Pursuing the inquiry, you proceed until reaching ignorance,
realizing [each step] as cause and result. When [all experience] is reduced
to dependent origination, you see that there is neither ‘I’ nor ‘mine,’ hence
no individual self. Ignorance may therefore be terminated, and, when it is,
you see [the successive limbs of dependent origination] terminated through
to old age and death…. Turning to purification, you practice such virtues as
the perfections in order to find enlightenment and nirvāṇa for yourself
alone, but without much compassion; because you do not act on behalf of
many sentient beings, this is called the vehicle of the self-awakened ones.
“In the greater vehicle (Mahāyāna), you know that ultimately all entities
are insubstantial and realize that saṃsāra and nirvāṇa are not two, while,
relatively, entities are objectified as apparitional. Thus you are endowed
with discernment as well as great compassion. Neither abandoning saṃsāra
nor appropriating nirvāṇa, you act for the sake of all sentient beings
according to the ten transcendent perfections and so accomplish perfectly
the purposes of self and other. Attaining the ten levels of the bodhisattva,
together with the level of the Buddha, which is the result, this is called the
‘greater vehicle.’”

The teaching of the “three vehicles,” accentuating the supreme status of the
Mahāyāna, provided a framework for subsequent Tibetan elaborations of
Buddhist doctrine. It emphasizes the foundations of classical Indian Buddhism:
(1) the Four Truths of suffering, its cause, its cessation in nirvāṇa, and the path
whereby this is achieved; (2) the selflessness of the person; dependent
origination; and (3) the ultimate identity of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa in the
compassionate vision of the bodhisattva. In Tibet, as in India, the conception of
the Mahāyāna corresponded to a stage of spiritual practice and not, as is
sometimes mistakenly assumed, to a separate order or sect of Buddhism.
According to the Mahāyāna, the bodhisattva was one who strived over countless
lifetimes to achieve the moral perfection and insight that is buddhahood. At the
same time, he or she was an ordained layperson, novice, monk, or nun, and as
such was also grounded in the spiritual training of the “pious disciple,” or
śrāvaka. Only the category of the pratyekabuddha was without a corresponding
practical correlate and remained, to all intents and purposes, merely a theoretical
placeholder.
During the 780s Tri Songdetsen’s armies conquered Dunhuang, a major center
of Chinese Buddhism, where teachers of Chan (from Skt. dhyāna, “meditation”;
Zen in Japanese) introduced Tibetans to the idea that spiritual awakening was
immediately, intuitively present, without striving for innumerable lifetimes as
Indian Buddhism affirmed. One such teacher, the Chinese master Moheyan, was
invited to Central Tibet, where he gained a large following, including members
of the royal family. The popularity of his teaching led to a protracted dispute
between partisans of “sudden” versus “gradual” enlightenment, the former
sometimes associated with a doctrine of a radical breakthrough via mystical
intuition, and the latter with the methodical application of reasoned analysis. The
controversy resurfaced repeatedly in later times owing to its implications
concerning spiritual progress and, indeed, our very nature: Are we essentially
flawed creatures, for whom self-perfection is a distant goal, or are we already
awakened Buddhas? Does the latter position entail a kind of gnosticism,
according to which ignorance and knowledge are all that really matter, and
moral effort merely an illusion?

The confrontation of “sudden” and “gradual” at

Samyé
When master Kamalaśīla asked for his opponent’s position, saying, “What
is the Chinese religious tradition like?” the Chinese responded, “Your
religious tradition, beginning with going for refuge and the cultivation of an
enlightened attitude, is an ascent from below, like a monkey climbing a
tree. Because one will not be awakened as a Buddha by such contrived
 doctrines, it is in this tradition of ours, in which one contemplates the
nonconceptual, that one becomes awakened by realizing the nature of mind.
So this is like the eagle’s alighting from the sky upon the top of a tree; it is
a ‘pure panacea’ because it is a doctrine that thus descends from on high.”
To this the master said, “Your example and its significance are both invalid.
For the eagle alights upon the tree, either spontaneously generated in the
sky with its wings fully grown, or born in its eyrie, where its wings have
gradually matured. Only then does it alight. The first is an impossibility and
the second should be a gradualist example, but is inappropriate as an
example of sudden enlightenment.”
from The Testament of Ba

Traditional sources recount that the first debate over these issues took place at
Samyé during the late-eighth century, and that the disputants were master
Moheyan and Śāntarakṣita’s disciple, the Indian philosopher Kamalaśīla. The
accounts that survive are late and tend to caricature the Chan perspective. The
Samyé debate may have been a draw, but later tradition reviles Moheyan as
representing an irrational doctrine of instant enlightenment and regards
Kamalaśīla’s emphasis upon the gradual cultivation of the moral and intellectual
virtues of a bodhisattva as the enduring paradigm to be emulated by Tibetan
Buddhists. Nevertheless, elements of the Chan teaching remained current in
Tibet, and a Tibetan Chan lineage persisted in far eastern Tibet until at least the
eleventh century.

The fall of the Tibetan empire

Under Tri Songdetsen’s successors, Tri Desongtsen (r. 804–15) and Tri
Relpachen (r. 815–38), Buddhist monasteries and schools flourished with royal
support. In the reign of Üdumtsen (r. 838–42), better known as Lang Darma
(“ox-youth,” or “ox-dharma”), royal sponsorship of the monasteries was reduced
or withdrawn, most likely owing to declining state revenues. Later histories,
however, recount that this monarch was a devotee of the Bön religion who
ruthlessly persecuted Buddhism until his assassination in 842 by the Buddhist
monk Lhalung Pelgyi Dorjé. Although Pelgyi Dorjé was certainly a historical
figure, he became the hero of a colorful legend celebrating the act of regicide he
is supposed to have carried out. Disguised as a black-cloaked Bönpo sorcerer
seeking to bless the ruler, he is said to have approached the king, only to shoot
seeking to bless the ruler, he is said to have approached the king, only to shoot
him with his ceremonial bow and arrow before escaping on a black stallion. His
pursuers, wherever they searched, could not find a Bönpo rider on a black
mount, but saw a Buddhist monk on a white horse. Lhalung Pelgi Dorjé had
tinted its coat with charcoal and was wearing reversible robes. A quick plunge
into a nearby river had been sufficient to return the horse’s color to white while
changing his own garb.
Whatever the truth may have been, the collapse of the Tibetan empire followed
soon after Üdumtsen’s death and the domains of his successors were gradually
reduced to a collection of petty kingdoms. Tibet remained without central
authority for the next four hundred years. Though much of Buddhist institutional
activity was curtailed by the termination of imperial patronage, some traditions
of study and practice survived, and the esoteric traditions of the Tantras appear
to have flourished following the empire’s fall, particularly around tenth-century
Dunhuang. Monastic Buddhism, however, virtually disappeared in Central Tibet
and was preserved among Tibetans primarily in the far east, in the modern
Chinese provinces of Qinghai and Gansu. It was here, during the mid-tenth
century, that a young Bönpo converted and received Buddhist ordination.
Known to posterity as Lachen Gongpa Rapsel, the “great lama whose spirit was
clear,” he (or his disciples) later ordained a number of seekers from Central and
Western Tibet, sparking a monastic revival movement that came to be called the
“later promulgation of the teaching” (tenpa chidar). The consequences of this
will be seen in the following chapter, but first we survey two developments
contemporaneous with the decline of Buddhist monasticism: the emergence of
the Bön religion and, simultaneously, that of a distinctive form of esoteric
Buddhism, later to be known as Nyingmapa, the “ancient tradition.”

The emergence of the Bön religion

Although “Bön” is often used as a designation for the pre-Buddhist Tibetan
religion, the religious life of Tibet prior to the introduction of Buddhism remains
poorly understood. Because the Tibetan system of writing was adopted just as
Buddhism was becoming known, there are few records of early Tibetan religion
in which Buddhist influences are altogether absent. From the existing texts, it is
not even clear that there was a particular term regularly used to designate the
pre-Buddhist Tibetan religion. In the first works in which the word bön is found,
it refers not to a religion but to specific types of priests: the expression durbön,
for instance, names those who were specialists in mortuary rituals (dur).
One early text in which “Bön” unambiguously denotes the pre-Buddhist religion
is, significantly, a description of a debate following Tri Songdetsen’s death. In
this narrative, rival factions of priests dispute whether the late Tsenpo should be
given a Buddhist or a Bön funeral, that is, a funeral according to ancestral
traditions. As we know from Tibetan royal records, the last rites and interment of
the Tsenpo and his kin were important affairs of state requiring long, complex
preparations, including the mummification of the deceased and the construction
of an elaborate mausoleum. The durbön just mentioned were among the
principle officiants of these rites. The attempt by Buddhist monks to assume
authority in this context therefore provoked the ire of hereditary priests who
risked losing ancient prerogatives. The confrontation between Buddhism and
Bön would be one of the enduring themes in later accounts of the reign of Tri
Songdetsen, both Buddhist and Bönpo sources maintaining that the ruler
expelled the Bön priesthood from Central Tibet.
The Bön religion that arose after the Tibetan empire fell, however, was not just
the continuation of archaic beliefs and practices. It preserved much ancient lore,
notably in its mortuary traditions, but was nevertheless a new religion in many
respects, emerging from the confrontation between the older traditions and
Buddhism. Evidence of this may be found in Bön doctrines, institutional forms,
and spiritual disciplines.
Bön, like Buddhism, came to consider itself to be a foreign religion that had
been introduced into Tibet from abroad; again like Buddhism, it held that it was
founded by a Buddha, and that its highest goal was the Buddha’s enlightened
state. In short, the organized Bön religion appeared in many important respects
to be a local form of Buddhism. This was underscored by the nomenclature
adopted by the Bönpo, who spoke not of a contrast between Bön and Buddhism
but between Bön and Chö, the latter term being Tibetan for Sanskrit “Dharma,”
understood as the doctrine, or teaching. Bön was thus a mirror of Buddhism: it
originated not with the Indian Buddha Śākyamuni but with the Buddha Shenrab
Miwo in Inner Asia ages ago. It was introduced to Tibet not from Nepal, China,
and India during the late first millennium but via the western Tibetan kingdom
of Zhangzhung long before. Like its rival, Chö, it created a canon of teachings
embodied in voluminous scriptures, said to have been translated into Tibetan
from the languages of Zhangzhung and elsewhere, and its adherents counted
monastic clergy, tantric adepts, and laypersons.
The creation of the Bönpo scriptural canon encouraged the written redaction of
autochthonous techniques and beliefs. Although Bönpo authors often employed
Buddhist terminology, they also documented many practices traditionally
governing Tibetan interactions with the spirit world in its benign and malignant
aspects. In time, these ancient traditions, which sought not transcendence but
mastery of the divine and demonic forces of the phenomenal world, would
become part and parcel of Tibetan Buddhist thought and practice as well. The
inclination toward holism and a view of the world as the play of divine and
quasi-divine energies that we find within it would be regularly reasserted
throughout the history of Tibetan religious thought. This was especially true of
esoteric (or “tantric”) Buddhism, which emphasized ritual agency and found its
philosophical basis in the Mahāyāna conception of the ultimate identity of
worldly existence (saṃsāra) and transcendent peace (nirvāṇa), eventually
embracing, besides the Indian pantheon, the native gods and demons of Tibet.

Nyingmapa beginnings
Although we have mentioned tantric, or esoteric, Buddhism, we have so far left
this undefined. In its essence, Buddhist tantra is an approach to Mahāyāna
practice and not a separate “school.” The tantras, esoteric scriptures, maintain
that the progress of the bodhisattva, who strives for buddhahood throughout
countless lifetimes, may be hastened through techniques of ritual and yoga
revealed only to specially qualified disciples. These techniques begin with the
initiation of the disciple into a divine realm schematically depicted as a maṇḍala,
in which one is ritually purified, consecrated with divine attributes, and
instructed in visualizing a divinity and reciting its mantra. Though thought to
facilitate rapid progress, the ritual techniques of the tantras were considered to
be possibly dangerous and disruptive. They were Mahāyāna teachings, to be
sure, but in the wrong hands could undermine the Mahāyāna’s insistence on the
step-by-step achievement of moral perfection. Hence, though the Tsenpo Tri
Songdetsen and his successors permitted some tantric practice in Tibet, they
carefully restricted it, lest unqualified persons be misled. This was explicated in
the ninth century by the Tsenpo Tri Desongtsen:

The tantras … are to be kept secret. It is not appropriate to explain and to teach them to the
unqualified. Though it has been permitted to translate and to practice them, there have been those
who have not deciphered what is expounded in them allusively, and seizing upon literal
understanding have practiced perversely…. This being so, hereafter, it is not permitted to translate
haphazardly the tantras of mantra and the mantra-terms except for those … that have been caused
 haphazardly the tantras of mantra and the mantra-terms except for those … that have been caused
to be translated on order from above.

With the fall of the empire the imperial effort to control the dissemination of
tantric Buddhism was undone, and free agency became the rule. Beyond the
small number of tantras translated under royal authority, many additional tantras
were circulated during the ninth and tenth centuries. Those adhering to these
“former translations”—tantras introduced before the eleventh century—came to
be known as Nyingmapa, the “ancients.” Historically, the Nyingmapa asserted
the preeminence of the Indian tantric master Padmasambhava, who was
effectively deified. Other teachers of the eighth and ninth centuries, notably the
Indian sage Vimalamitra and the Tibetan translator Vairocana, were also claimed
as forebears. The teaching of these figures was considered to present the whole
gamut of Buddhist doctrine and practice in nine sequential vehicles (tekpa rimpa
gu), of which the last three, comprising the esoteric instructions of the highest
tantras, represented the distinctive heritage of the Nyingmapa. The pinnacle of
the system was the abstract and visionary approach to contemplation known as
the Supreme Yoga (atiyoga), or Great Perfection (dzokchen), whose authenticity
was often challenged in later times by adherents of the “new translations,” the
post-tenth century translations of tantric texts. From the twelfth century on, the
Nyingmapa came to rely increasingly on new revelations, mostly of texts and
teachings attributed to Padmasambhava, and referred to as “treasures” (terma).
This permitted Nyangrel Nyima Özer (1124–96) and later “treasure-revealers”
(tertön) to elaborate an abundant and influential body of ritual, historical, and
legendary literature. Though widely contested, these contributed greatly to the
formation of Tibetan religious culture.

The nine vehicles of the Nyingmapa and of Bön

The classical Buddhist idea of “three vehicles,” combined with Tibetan
numerology emphasizing the number nine, yielded nine vehicles as known
in varied Nyingmapa and Bönpo traditions. Two prominent versions are
those of Padmasambhava and of the “Southern Treasure” of the Bönpo.
Padmasambhava’s Garland of Views teaches three “dialectical vehicles”
and six “adamantine vehicles” (Skt. vajrayāna). The first are the classical
vehicles of pious disciples, self-awakened ones, and bodhisattvas. The
“adamantine vehicles” are tantric teachings, symbolized by the adamantine
scepter, or vajra (Tib. dorjé), representing perfect clarity and
indestructibility. These form two triads. First are the “exoteric” tantras:
Kriyātantra (tantras of ritual action), Ubhayatantra (tantras partaking of
both [rituals and austerities]), and Yogatantra (tantras stressing the
austerities of yoga). Second are the “esoteric” Yogatantras: Great Yoga
(mahāyoga), emphasizing creative visualization; Subsequent Yoga
(anuyoga), focusing on the mastery of internal energies; and Supreme Yoga
(atiyoga), the Great Perfection (dzokchen), disclosing the mind’s ultimate
nature.
A Bönpo system of nine vehicles was taught in the “Southern Treasure”
revelations beginning in the eleventh century. There are four “causal
vehicles,” four “resultant vehicles,” and one “Great Vehicle.” The first four
are all called Shen, meaning a “priestly way” and emphasizing mundane
rituals: the Shen of Augury, stressing divination and exorcism of troubles
caused by harmful spirits; the Shen of Appearance, elaborating rituals for
negotiating human relations with demons and divinities; the Shen of
Marvels, to coerce particularly savage spirits; and the Shen of Existence,
codifying ancient mortuary rites.
The four “resultant vehicles” correspond to aspects of Buddhist teaching:
the vehicle of laymen teaches moral precepts governing body, speech, and
mind; the vehicle of ascetics, the Bönpo monastic tradition, stresses the
cultivation of compassion; the vehicle of the Alpha Pure resembles the
“exoteric” tantras of Buddhism; and the Primordial Shen is similar to the
Buddhist Mahāyoga and Anuyoga.
Finally, the Great Vehicle is the Great Perfection, teaching the four
qualities of oneness, plainness, openness, and spontaneity.
Although the Nyingmapa system of Padmasambhava and the Bön Southern
Treasure are distinct in their treatment of the lower vehicles, they converge
in their higher ranks, uniting at the apex.
Chapter 3
The growth of the orders and schools

Renewal in West Tibet

In the late tenth century, Tibet entered a new age of economic and political
development. Local lords struggled for supremacy and religious authority was
no less contested than temporal power. Seekers and adventurers looked for
authoritative sources of Buddhist teaching in India and Nepal, traveling in search
of gurus, scriptures, and esoteric lore. These trends were particularly prominent
in western Tibet, where the translator Rinchen Zangpo (958–1055) was
patronized by the devout monarch of the Gugé kingdom, Yeshé-ö (ca. 959–
1036). This figure, who, in an exception to monastic tradition requiring
ordination within an established lineage, ordained himself as a monk, wished to
purify Tibetan Buddhism from what he regarded as corrupt forms of tantrism
that had emerged during the post-imperial period. At the royal monastery of
Toling, one of the religious establishments newly founded in Gugé’s domains, a
translation academy was created, where Indian Buddhist scholars joined Rinchen
Zangpo and his disciples. Tibetan translations, particularly of tantric materials,
produced henceforth became known as the “new translations” (sargyur) in
contradistinction to the “former translations” (ngagyur) of the Nyingmapa,
whose tantric texts some believed to be apocryphal or corrupt.
After the royal monk Yeshé-ö’s death, his successor Jangchub-ö continued his
religious policies and in 1042 invited the Bengali scholar and adept
Dīpaṃkaraśrījñāna, better known as Atiśa, from the great monastic university of
Vikramaśīla in northeastern India to Gugé. After three years in residence there,
during which he composed his famous Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment (Skt.
Bodhipathapradīpa) on Mahāyāna practice, Atiśa traveled to Central Tibet,
augmenting his Tibetan following until his death at Nyetang, near Lhasa, in
1054.

Atiśa appears in Tibetan accounts as an enthusiastic, generous, and saintly

teacher, austere but also good natured, learned but more interested in the quality
of practice than in scholarship per se. His successors, above all those in the
lineage of his lay disciple Dromtön Gyelwé Jungné (1004–64), were known as
Kadampa, “adherents of the scriptures and precepts,” the first distinctively
named Tibetan Buddhist order. Dromtön founded his seat at the monastery of
Radreng (“Reting” in many Western sources), north of Lhasa, in 1057. The
Kadampa are remembered for their concern for moral rigor in the pursuit of the
bodhisattva’s path, sometimes even emphasizing spiritual cultivation to the
exclusion of the pursuit of learning. Nonetheless, Atiśa’s own scholarly
proclivities meant that some successors devoted themselves to study, so that the
Kadampa became equally associated with philosophical education, above all at
Sangpu, founded in 1071 by Atiśa’s pupil Ngok Lekpé Sherap. The latter’s
nephew, Ngok Loden Sherap (1059–1109), who spent years studying in Kashmir
and at Vikramaśīla itself, established a college there, whose traditions of logic
and commentary formed the model for all later Tibetan monastic schools.

Owing to Atiśa’s association with the Gugé kings, who were critical of the moral
excesses attributed to some adherents of the tantras, and owing to certain
cautions expressed in Atiśa’s own writings, the Kadampa are sometimes
regarded as a non-tantric lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. Atiśa himself, however,
was a tantric adept and, despite the concerns expressed by some Tibetan
disciples, he did teach aspects of tantrism in Tibet. His role in the promotion of
the tantric cults of bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara and goddess Tārā was particularly
great, and he was widely associated with the teaching of the Guhyasamājatantra,
the “Esoteric Communion,” one of the foremost Indian tantras. Nevertheless, the
characteristic emphasis of his teaching was on the fundamental Mahāyāna
doctrine of “emptiness imbued with compassion” (Skt. śunyatā karuṇāgarbhā),
his insistence on which permeated all subsequent Tibetan Buddhist traditions.
Atiśa’s Kadampa successors created a remarkable corpus of literature devoted to
this, called “training (or purification) of the mind (lojong),” in which everyday
activities serve as focal points for the cultivation of spiritual love and a keen
sense of the relativity of transient things.

The multiplication of lineages

Eleventh-and twelfth-century Buddhist revival saw intermittent tensions due to
various factors: competing lines of transmission, regional and clan affiliations,
relations between preexisting religious traditions and newly imported Indian
teachings, orientations favoring monastic scholarship versus tantrism and yoga,
and competition for patronage among them. It was in this setting that the guru,
“lama” in Tibetan, became a focal point of religious and political authority.
Though non-Tibetans often use the word lama to refer to Tibetan monks in
general, it is a term that for Tibetans always retains a unique reference to the
religious teacher who guides the spiritual life of the individual and of the
community. One’s lama is the revered authority to whom one owes absolute
faith and loyalty, nothing less.
Despite the reticence of some toward aspects of tantrism, particularly ritualized
sex and violence (whether these were actually practiced or, as was doubtlessly
the usual case, merely symbolized), it was during this same period that efforts to
translate and transmit tantric traditions were renewed. The new tantras reflected
important changes within Indian Buddhist tantrism itself: roughly, a shift to
systems emphasizing internal yoga over external ritual, the new systems being
often transgressive and strongly eroticized in their symbolism and sometimes in
fact. Indian tantric adepts claimed to possess particularly efficacious means to
attain diverse spiritual powers, culminating in the highest enlightenment. The
Tibetan masters following them sought to perpetuate such esoteric knowledge in
Tibet, thereby asserting new sources of power, authority, and prestige.
Even though the age of the new tantric translations begins with Rinchen Zangpo,
one of his junior contemporaries is counted among the first great proponents of
these innovative forms of Indian Buddhist tantrism. Drokmi Śākya Yeshé (ca.
992–1064) was, like most who entered the saṅgha during his time, ordained
within communities stemming from the tenth century monastic revival. After
years of study in Nepal and India, he established his own monastic center and
translation academy at Nyugulung, where he collaborated with the Indian tantric
master Gayādhara. His most renowned contribution was the transmission of a
tantric system called Lamdré (“Path and Fruit”), which came to be the central
esoteric tradition of the Sakyapa order, whose chief monastery was founded by
Könchok Gyelpo (1034–1102) of the aristocratic Khön household in 1071 or
1073. The Lamdré, based on the teachings of the important tantra dedicated to
the divinity Hevajra, embraced both the “causal” teaching of the exoteric
Mahāyāna and the “fruitional” instructions of the tantras. The first was
summarized in terms of “three visions”: the “impure vision” of ordinary beings;
the “pure-and-impure vision” of bodhisattvas who are progressing on the
Mahāyāna path; and the “pure vision” that characterizes the awakening of the
buddhas. The tantras were similarly presented in three major topics, designated
the “three continuums” (the word for “continuum” being, in fact, tantra, or gyü
in Tibetan): (1) the continuum of the ground, the nature of reality in virtue of
which awakening is possible; (2) the continuum of the path, namely, the stages
of tantric practice; and (3) the continuum of the result, or fruit, in which the
buddhahood that is latent in all reality is fully disclosed. The Lamdré has
remained the preeminent system of spiritual instruction in the Sakyapa order
down to the present time.
The Khön family produced a succession of influential masters in the following
generations, especially those called the “five forebears” (Gongma-nga), of whom
the first, Sachen Kunga Nyingpo (1092–1158), Könchok Gyelpo’s son,
contributed to shaping the early Sakya tradition as one of aristocratic patrons of
Buddhism, committed to scholarly refinement while maintaining a specialized
command of the ritual techniques of tantrism. One of Drokmi’s chief successors,
Zhangtön Chöbar, was Sachen’s tutor, nurturing his charge to become the
preeminent exponent of the Lamdré teaching. And two of Sachen’s sons, Sonam
Tsemo (1142–82) and Drakpa Gyeltsen (1147–1216), the second and third of the
“five forebears,” followed their father in remaining laymen and dedicated
themselves exclusively to the family’s religious and ritual tradition, becoming
prolific teachers and authors.
Drokmi’s many students included Marpa Chökyi Lodrö (ca. 1002–81), who was
sent to study translation as a youth when his parents found him impossible to
control. Eventually he rebelled against his teacher’s exactions, for Drokmi’s
tutelage was not cheap, and set out on his own among the celebrated masters of
India. Becoming famed as the leading Tibetan successor of the Indian adepts
Nāropa and Maitripa, he attracted many followers, who, with their successors,
came to be known as Kagyüpa, “adherents of the oral lineage.” Just as Drokmi’s
lineage specialized in the system of the Lamdré, so Marpa’s emphasized the
paired systems of the “Six Teachings of Nāropa” and the Mahāmudrā, or “Great
Seal.” The first comprised the internal yogas of the highest tantras: Inner Heat,
focusing upon the subtle energies of the body; the Body of Apparition,
disclosing the illusory nature of appearances; the Dream, refining techniques of
lucid dreaming (that is, dreaming while conscious that one is dreaming); and
Luminosity, revealing reality to be radiant light. These four were methods for
achieving liberation during this lifetime. The two remaining instructions
concerned liberation at death: powa, the “transference” of consciousness, seeks
to project the consciousness of one in the throes of death directly to a pure realm
in which freedom is quickly gained; and bardo, the “intermediate state” between
death and rebirth, guides one from infernal rebirth toward the achievement of
freedom or felicity during the bewildering postmortem passage.
The second teaching with which Marpa is most often associated, that of the
Mahāmudrā, addresses itself directly to the contemplative realization of the
ultimate reality of mind, considered here as the “seal” stamped upon all possible
modes of experience, both mundane and transcendent. The teaching has
pronounced affinities with that of the Great Perfection tradition of the
Nyingmapa, and later masters in both the Kagyüpa and Nyingmapa orders did
not hesitate to propound an eclectic blend of both systems.
Marpa’s best known disciple was Milarepa (1040–1123), the great Tibetan
mystical poet, whose disciple Gampopa (1079–1153) established the Kagyüpa as
a monastic tradition and sought to harmonize Marpa’s esoteric teachings with
the ethical instructions of the Kadampa, thus “mingling the two streams.”
Several of the Kagyüpa monastic orders that arose among his followers became
major forces in later Tibetan religious and political life. Prominent among them
were the “four senior Kagyü orders,” originating with Gampopa’s direct
disciples. One of them, Pakmodrupa Dorjé Gyelpo (1110–70), in his turn gave
rise to eight “junior” orders, established by his pupils. (“Junior” and “senior”
designate only generational distance from Gampopa, not the relative importance
of these orders.)
Notable among the four “senior” orders was that of the Karmapa, whose first
representative was Düsum Khyenpa (1110–93). The eight “junior” orders
prominently included the Drigungpa, following the brilliant and charismatic
Drigung Kyobpa Jiktensumgön (1143–1217), and the Lingjé Kagyü of Lingjé
Repa Pemadorjé (1128–88). It was a disciple of the latter, Tsangpa Gyaré (1161–
1211), who established the Drukpa Kagyü order, which in the seventeenth
century became the state religion of Bhutan, a nation whose proper name,
Drukyül, the “Dragon Land,” is in fact derived from that of its preeminent
religious order.
Other important tantric lineages also arose during the same period, including
those specializing in the Tantra of the Wheel of Time (Kālacakratantra), whose
intricate system embraces not only yoga and ritual but also astronomical
calculations, astrology, and medicine. The Jonangpa order, which was first
established in western Tibet, was principally devoted to these instructions. In
addition, the Shangpa Kagyü, founded by the enigmatic adept Khyungpo Neljor
(ca. 1050–1140), emphasized techniques of lucid dreaming and teachings
relating to the illusory quality of existence, while the lineage of “Pacification”
(Zhijé), promulgated by the Indian teacher Padampa Sanggyé (“Holy Father
Buddha,” d. 1117), stressed the application of tantric practices to the realization
of the central tenet of Mahāyāna Buddhism, the Perfection of Wisdom (Skt.
Prajñāpāramitā). Padampa’s most celebrated successor was a remarkable
woman, Machik Lapdrön (ca. 1055–1143), whose special teaching, called the
“Object of Severance” (Chöyül), dramatizes the adept’s imagined self-sacrifice
on behalf of all living beings. Its practice is accompanied by liturgies chanted to
hauntingly beautiful melodies, exemplifying the frequent congruence in Tibet
between tantric ritual and performance art. Machik’s special teaching is
preserved today in most orders of Tibetan Buddhism.

Later developments
In 1204, Śākyaśrībhadra, a respected teacher from Kashmir, arrived in Tibet
with a retinue of Indian scholars, inspiring renewed enthusiasm for Indian
learning. Künga Gyeltsen (1182–1251) of Sakya, the fourth of the “five
forebears” and later famed as “Sakya Paṇḍita,” was among the young Tibetans
who devoted themselves to the advancement of Indian intellectual traditions.
Soon thereafter, the Mongol conquests, which had begun with the rise of
Chinggis Khan (1167?–1227) and engulfed much of Asia and Eastern Europe,
encroached upon Tibet. Prophecies appeared presaging a Mongol invasion, and
these were realized in 1239 when the army of Dorta the Black arrived and
ransacked the Kadampa temple of Radreng. The Mongols, however, withdrew
without consolidating their rule in Tibet. In 1244 Sakya Paṇḍita embarked on a
mission to the Mongol ruler, Godan Khan, arriving in 1246 and remaining
among the Mongols until his death. His nephew Pakpa (1235–80), the last of the
“five forebears,” would later become the religious preceptor of Khubilai Khan,
who honored him with the title “National Teacher” (guoshi in Chinese). In 1264
he was granted both religious and secular authority in Tibet, establishing a
Sakyapa hegemony with Mongol backing, which would last for almost a
century.
Members of non-Sakyapa orders also maintained relations with the Mongol
lords, among them the second Karmapa hierarch, Karma Pakshi (1206–83), and
his successor, Karmapa III Rangjung Dorjé (1284–1339). The Karmapas, who
headed one of the prominent Kagyüpa orders, were instrumental in creating
Tibet’s unique form of ecclesiastical succession, in which a child is identified as
the reborn emanation (trülku) and heir of a deceased master. The practice seems
to have been first formalized when the infant Rangjung Dorjé was recognized as
Karma Pakshi’s immediate successor by one of the latter’s foremost disciples,
Orgyenpa (1230–1309). The period of Mongol-Sakyapa hegemony, enriched by
the lavish patronage the Tibetan religious leadership received from the Mongol
khans, also witnessed exceptional achievements in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy
and art. The scholars Chomden Rikrel (1237–1305) and Butön Rinchendrup
(1290–1364) catalogued and codified the massive Tibetan canons of Indian
Buddhist scriptures and commentaries. At the same time, innovative (though
sometimes controversial) philosophical systems were proposed by visionary
teachers such as Dölpopa (1292–1361) of the Jonangpa order, who notably
taught ultimate reality to be characterized as “extrinsic emptiness” (zhentong),
and the Nyingmapa master Longchen Rapjampa (1308–63), a prolific exponent
of the Great Perfection system of contemplation.

Trülku, the institution of the “reincarnated lama”

Following Orgyenpa’s recognition of Rangjung Dorjé as the third Karmapa,
the custom of identifying an infant as the rebirth of a leading hierarch and
educating him to assume his predecessor’s title and functions was widely
adopted by monastic communities. The term for the Buddha’s “body of
emanation,” trülku (Skt. nirmāṇakāya), became the designation for such
identified rebirths, who were considered the emanations of buddhas or
bodhisattvas. The custom permitted the monasteries to wrest a measure of
freedom from the powerful families that were their patrons, for the trülku
might be found among families of any social class and from any region.
 With the rise of the Dalai Lamas, the institution of the trülku had its
greatest success, transforming Tibet into an ecclesiastical state.

Toward 1350, under the leadership of Tai Situ Jangchup Gyeltsen (1302–64) of
the Pakmodrupa, one of the four senior Kagyü orders, Tibet was freed from
Sakyapa-Mongol rule. It was under the ensuing Pakmodrupa regime that Jé
Tsongkhapa Lozang Drakpa (1357–1419) founded the Ganden monastery to the
east of Lhasa (1409), soon to be the main seat of a new order, later known as
Gelukpa, the “adherents of virtue.” Tsongkhapa, a native of Amdo in the
northeast who had come to Central Tibet as a teenager in order study with the
well-known teachers of his day, was greatly revered for his vast learning and
rigorous standards of practice. He became a prolific author, whose innovative
interpretations sometimes challenged received opinion. His best-known work,
the Great Progression of the Path (Lamrim chenmo), offers a massive and
beautifully composed exposition of Atiśa’s much admired Lamp on the Path of
Enlightenment. A cultural innovator as well, Tsongkhapa established, also in
1409, the Great Prayer Festival marking the Tibetan New Year (usually in
February) in Lhasa. The festival reasserted the centrality of Lhasa and its
principal shrine, the seventh-century Jokhang Temple housing the ancient image
of the Buddha said to have been brought to Tibet by the princess Wencheng, and
was accompanied by pageantry recalling the epoch of Songtsen Gampo.
Nevertheless, despite his great learning and sanctity, relations between his
disciples and representatives of the older orders grew increasingly contentious
following his death. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries witnessed intensive
doctrinal debate and political confrontation between the Gelukpa and their
Sakyapa and Kagyüpa rivals.

Eight lineages, four orders

The major teaching traditions of Tibetan Buddhism are sometimes considered to form eight distinct
lines of transmission, or lineages, passed down from master to disciple:

1. The Nyingma, or “Ancient Translation Tradition,” derived from the teachings of Padmasambhava,
Vimalamitra, and other eighth-century figures.
2. The Kadam, or “Tradition of Transmitted Precepts and Instructions,” is traced to Atiśa and his
Tibetan disciples, notably Dromtön.
3. Lamdré, the “Path with its Fruit,” stems from the precepts of the Indian adept Virūpa, introduced
into Tibet by the translator Drokmi.
 4. The Marpa Kagyü, or “Oral Succession of Marpa,” originates with the instructions of the Indian
masters Tilopa, Nāropa, and Maitrīpa as transmitted to Marpa Chökyi Lodrö.
5. The Shangpa Kagyü, the “Oral Succession of Shangs Valley,” is traced to Khyungpo Neljor,
whose foremost teacher was the ḍākinī Niguma, said to have been the sister or wife of Nāropa.
6. The closely related teachings of Zhijé, “Pacification,” and Chöyül, “Object of Severance,”
originated respectively with the Indian yogin Padampa Sanggyé and his Tibetan disciple, the
yoginī Machik Lapdrön.
7. Dorjé neljor, the “Yoga of Indestructible Reality,” is the system of yoga of the Kālacakra Tantra,
as transmitted by the translator Gyijo Dawé Özer and others during the eleventh century.
8. Dorjé-sum-gyi nyendrup, the “Service and Attainment of the Three Adamant Realities,” is a rare
tradition derived from the goddess Vajrayoginī, as received by the Tibetan adept Orgyenpa in
northwestern India.

The first four correspond to the major monastic orders: Nyingmapa,

Gelukpa (which superseded the older Kadampa order), Sakyapa, and
Kagyüpa. The Jonangpa order, surviving today in parts of Amdo, bases its
teachings on the seventh lineage, that of the Kālacakra Tantra, and regards
itself as a fifth monastic order, though this was not recognized under the
traditional Tibetan government.
Although the four orders are thus closely related with major lineages, the
two categories often intersect. Teachings originating in any of the eight
lineages may in fact be transmitted in any of the four or five orders. Minor
traditions exist, too, which do not fit clearly into these categories.

The connection between Tibetan Buddhism and imperial China forged under
China’s Mongol rulers did not come to an end after the Yuan dynasty fell in
1368. The close relationship between the Ming emperor Yongle (r. 1403–24)
and the fifth Karmapa Dezhinshekpa (1384–1415) exemplifies this, and the
Ming dynasty is often regarded as a period of Karmapa dominance in Sino-
Tibetan affairs. Nonetheless, the Ming emperors refrained from favoring any
single Tibetan school. Tsongkhapa’s disciple, Jamchen Chöjé (1352–1435), who
would establish Sera Monastery near Lhasa in 1419, among others, also received
imperial honors at the Chinese court. Although formal ties between China’s
rulers and Tibetan religious leaders continued under the Ming, it is important to
note that China exercised no political authority in Tibet at this time, and that,
besides trade, Sino-Tibetan relations during this period remained largely
ceremonial and symbolic.
Tsongkhapa’s successors established new monasteries throughout Tibet,
Tsongkhapa’s successors established new monasteries throughout Tibet,
gathering the support of leading princes and powerful families. Gendün-drup
(1391–1474), for instance, founded the Trashi Lhünpo monastery in Tsang. He
and his successor, Gendün Gyatso (1476–1542), were primarily remembered for
their scholarly and spiritual attainments, and under their guidance Trashi Lhünpo
became one of the preeminent Gelukpa centers, the base for the order’s
expansion in western Tibet. Their success would have significant political
repercussions during the following centuries, when the rulers of Tsang came to
favor the Gelukpa’s rivals, the Karmapas, above all. Gendün Gyatso, in all
events, left Trashi Lhünpo early in his teaching career, taking up a new position
at Drepung monastery, which had been founded by Tsongkhapa’s disciple
Jamyang Chöjé in 1416 on the outskirts of Lhasa.
By the sixteenth century, major powers in Central Tibet were allied with the
Gelukpa, while the kings of Tsang supported the Kagyüpa, Jonangpa and other
orders. Gendün Gyatso’s successor, Sonam Gyatso (1543–88), embarked on
missionary work among the Mongols, and, on winning the allegiance of the
Tümed chieftain Altan Khan (1578), received the Mongolian title Dalai Lama
(“oceanic guru”). Because this title was bestowed posthumously on his
predecessors, he became the third in the line. The connection he forged with the
Mongols encouraged the renewed interest of the Mongolian leadership in
Tibetan affairs and, after his passing, his successor, the fourth Dalai Lama
Yönten Gyatso (1589–1617), was recognized among the Mongol aristocracy. In
1642 Gushri Khan of the Khoshud tribe conquered all of Tibet, establishing the
fifth Dalai Lama Ngawang Gyatso (1617–82) as titular ruler of the reunified
realm. The kingdom of Tsang was suppressed, together with the religious
traditions it had favored, above all the Jonangpa, who were banned from all but a
few Tibetan territories outside the sphere of the Dalai Lama’s control. The
government of the “Great Fifth,” as he became known to posterity, adopted a
policy of mass monasticism in all parts of the country and new Gelukpa
establishments were founded everywhere, while many centers of the older orders
and of the Bön religion were now required to embrace the Gelukpa tradition as
well.
4. The fifteenth-century monastery of Tiksé in Ladakh illustrates the rapid spread of the Gelukpa
order in far western Tibet. Its fortress-like architecture, dominating a hilltop, is typical of many
Tibetan administrative and religious establishments, notably the Potala in Lhasa.

The Tibetan political system, in the form in which it was developed by the fifth
Dalai Lama and his successors, valorized the ideal of an equilibrium between the
religious and secular branches of government (chösi nyiden), though in fact the
ecclesiastical offices came to dominate Tibetan administration. The Great Fifth’s
regime, known after the name of his residence at Drepung Monastery as the
Ganden Podrang (“Tuṣita Palace”), marked its presence in Lhasa with the
construction of the soaring Potala Palace atop “Red Hill” (Marpori) in the
southern quarter of the town. The fifth Dalai Lama also elevated the status of his
tutor, the learned lama Lozang Chögyen (1567–1662), who was granted the title
of Panchen Lama. He was regarded as either first or fourth in the line depending
on whether his supposed predecessors were counted, beginning with
Tsongkhapa’s illustrious disciple Khedrup-jé (1385–1438). The seat of the
Panchen Lamas was established at Trashi Lhünpo, where their authority
sometimes rivaled that of the Dalai Lamas themselves.
The fifth Dalai Lama visited the court in Beijing soon after the inception of the
Qing dynasty (1644–1911) under China’s Manchu conquerors. During the
decades that followed, Tibet increasingly emerged as a focal point of
competition between Manchus and Mongols in their rivalry for hegemony in
Central Asia. The controversial sixth Dalai Lama, Tsangyang Gyatso (1683–
1706), a libertine who preferred wine and women to the life of a monk, was
forcibly removed from office by Tibet’s Mongol overlord Lhazang Khan and
died under mysterious circumstances while en route to the Chinese capital. In
1717 the Zunghar Mongols invaded Tibet, bringing renewed civil war and
1717 the Zunghar Mongols invaded Tibet, bringing renewed civil war and
intersectarian violence. During the 1720s the Manchus, campaigning against the
Zunghars and Tibetan factions allied with them, sought to consolidate their rule
over large parts of the eastern Tibetan provinces of Amdo and Kham. Leading
Gelukpa hierarchs from Amdo, such as the Qianlong emperor’s teacher
Changkya Rölpé Dorjé (1717–86), came to play important roles in the religious
affairs of the Manchu empire.
The intermittent struggles in Central Tibet throughout the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries helped to transform Tibet’s religious geography more
generally. For centuries Central Tibet had been the clear center of gravity in
Tibetan spiritual life, but masters of eastern Tibetan origin, and sometimes
others as well, now began to focus their efforts increasingly in far eastern Kham
and Amdo. This had many causes and consequences. A case in point may be
seen in the career of the Tenth Karmapa, Chöying Dorjé (1605–74), an artist of
considerable genius. Crowned during his youth as “king of Tibet” by the rulers
of Tsang, he was forced into exile with the ascent of the fifth Dalai Lama and
passed much of his life in the far southeast of Tibet, in what is today Yunnan,
where he was honored by the rulers of the Naxi Kingdom based in Lijiang.
In Kham, moreover, with the support of the rulers of the Dergé principality,
eastern Tibetan Karmapa and Sakyapa masters contributed to the creation of
Tibet’s greatest publishing house, the Dergé Printery, whose eighteenth-century
edition of the Tibetan Buddhist canon is considered to be among the greatest
achievements of traditional Tibetan printing. During this period, too, several of
the Gelukpa monasteries of eastern Tibet, such as Kumbum, near Tsongkhapa’s
birthplace not far from the city of Xining (Qinghai Province), and Labrang
Trashi-khyil, founded by Jamyang Zhepa (1648–1721) in southern Gansu, also
began to achieve prominence in arts and learning. Scholars associated with these
latter centers were often not ethnic Tibetans, and they frequently enjoyed the
patronage of the Manchu court, which regarded Tibetan Buddhism as supplying
a common cultural milieu for the peoples of Inner Asia.
Nineteenth-century Kham became home to a dynamic movement often
characterized as “eclectic” or “nonpartisan” (rimé), which sought to defuse the
intense sectarianism that had plagued Tibetan Buddhism. The encyclopedic
writings of Jamyang Khyentsé Wangpo (1810–92) and Jamgön Kongtrül (1813–
99) became virtually a new canon for the adherents of this tolerant trend. One of
their disciples, Mipam Namgyel (1846–1912) also elaborated a revised
scholastic curriculum emphasizing the doctrinal standpoint of the Nyingmapa
order. Though the thirteenth Dalai Lama (1876–1933) was sympathetic to the
broad orientations of these teachers, the Gelukpa hierarchy was generally more
reserved. Indeed, one of the Dalai Lama’s own tutors, Pabongkhapa Dechen
Nyingpo (1878–1941), on the basis of his visions of the spirit Dorjé Shukden,
became harshly critical of the other schools of Tibetan Buddhism and the Bön
religion, provoking violent confrontations on several occasions. Sectarian
tensions continued endemically throughout the twentieth century in Tibet and,
after 1959, in exile as well.
Chapter 4
Spiritual exercise and the path of the
bodhisattva

By the early second millennium, Buddhist teachings concerning the painful

round of rebirth (saṃsāra) and the virtuous or evil deeds (karman) that
condition rebirth within it, together with conceptions of the beatitude realized by
those who, as Buddhas and bodhisattvas moved by compassion and wisdom,
surpass mundane existence, had become widespread in Tibetan culture overall.
Nevertheless, few Tibetans traditionally, even counting those who were monks
or nuns, were beneficiaries of formal religious education beyond a rudimentary
level. Their knowledge of merit and demerit, of the purification to be achieved
and blessings to be gained through activities of worship and pilgrimage, of the
necessity of maintaining devoted respect for the lamas and the divinities—this
and much more was imbued by partaking of the daily life of the communities to
which they belonged. In practices such as pilgrimage and the cults of widely
worshipped divinities, such as Avalokiteśvara, the “Buddhist basics” were
systematically reinforced. This may be seen in an elegy of worship performed at
a pilgrimage site near the Nepal-Tibet border, which reads in part:

All those who offer flowers here will obtain the perfect liberty and endowment of human birth.
All those who offer incense will attain pure moral discipline.
All those who offer butter-lamps will be freed from the darkness of unknowing.

Perhaps only a few Tibetans read such texts, but affirmations such as these
formed part of common oral tradition.

Ordering time and space

Tibetan Buddhism, like other religions, structures society and the individual
agent through the order it imposes upon space and time. This principle operates
agent through the order it imposes upon space and time. This principle operates
in the intimacy of the family home, with its domestic shrine and the regular
cycle of religious activities in which household members engage, and on a
national level in connection with Tibet’s sacred geography and the major events
marking its ritual calendar. Between these extremes, the spatial ordering of
monastery, temple, and town, and the temporal ordering of observances within
them exemplify Buddhism’s role in forming Tibetan experiences and
orientations.
In Tibetan societies, the deference of social inferior to superior, junior to senior,
mundane to sacred, spiritually immature to spiritually advanced, and so forth is
very strongly marked. A comportment of modesty and humility must be adopted
when one enters a temple, greats a monk or, especially, a lama, and when one
attends to the arrangement of the household shrine. Images of the buddhas and
living teachers alike are honored with prostrations, and holy persons, places, and
structures (such as temples and stūpas) are kept to one’s right, so that, instead of
seeking the shortest route between two points, one must adhere to a pattern of
clockwise circumambulation. (In the case of the Bön religion, though,
circumambulation is practiced in the opposite, counterclockwise direction.)
Deference is additionally marked by donations and offerings, including incense
and lamps (or butter to aliment them), flowers and foodstuff, cash and valuables,
as well as the ubiquitous ceremonial scarves called khatak. The latter are classed
by materials (gauze, linen, silk), design (plain or embroidered), size and color
(usually white). To offer a khatak that fails to correspond to the status of the
recipient may in certain contexts be regarded as a severe breach of manners.
The monastery or temple will typically contain a courtyard leading to the
principle shrine, which is often placed within an assembly hall. It is here that the
monks (or, in some cases, lay practitioners) gather as required by the regular
ritual cycle, or for services necessitated by special circumstances (for instance,
for funerals). In a village temple or before a household shrine, there may be
room for only a few to assemble, while in larger monasteries the congregation
may number several thousand, seated in strict accordance with rank and ritual
order. Some of these protocols are based on stipulations found in the Vinaya, but
above all on established customs within Tibetan monastic communities, as
specified within the monastic charters (chayik).
5. At this assembly, the ranking trülku, wearing the pointed “paṇḍita” hat, sits in the center, the
ritual master, wearing the “lotus” hat, to his left. The remaining monks, all attired similarly, are
seated in order of rank.

Spatial order is complemented by the rhythms punctuating day, month, and year.
At dawn, after rising, one tends to the arrangement of the altar, replenishing the
seven bowls of water that symbolize offerings of drinking water, bathing water,
flowers, incense, lamps, perfumes, and nourishment, the gifts appropriate for an
honored guest according to Indian Buddhist traditions. A compassionate offering
of consecrated water may then be dedicated to the yidak (Skt. preta), the
“hungry ghosts” who are incapable of absorbing other nutrition. When the
morning tea is served, whether in a lay home, a monk’s personal residence, or in
the assembly, a prayer service must first be offered. Even those without formal
religious training usually know the basic formulas recited before tea or meals:

The supreme teacher is the precious Buddha;

The supreme protector is the precious Dharma;
The supreme guide is the precious Saṅgha—
I offer worship to these Three Refuge-granting Jewels!

At dusk, a service is dedicated to the “lords” (gönpo), the wrathful protective

divinities. As the day draws to an end, the altar is cleansed, the water bowls
emptied, and one prepares for sleep with prayers.
The monthly cycle, which follows the lunar calendar, places particular emphasis
on the new and full moon days, which are considered favorable times for rites of
purification, sometimes accompanied by a partial fast. For practitioners of tantric
ritual, the tenth day of the month is the feast day of the Guru, while the twenty-
fifth is consecrated to the ḍākinī, the goddess embodying enlightened wisdom.

The year, too, is punctuated by regular observances, beginning with the

festivities of the new year (losar) and concluding with offerings to the protective
divinities to purge the year’s accumulated evils and sins. In between, dates held
sacred throughout Tibet include the full moon of the fourth month (Saga in
Tibetan, Vesakh in Pali), which is the day of the Buddha’s enlightenment and
final passing; the “general fumigation of the world” (dzamling chisang) in the
fifth month; and the twenty-second of the ninth month, commemorating the
Buddha’s descent to the island of Laṅkā following his visit to his deceased
mother in the heavens. Many festivals and holidays relate to specific locations,
temples, or religious orders. Examples include the twenty-seventh of the twelfth
month, when the blessing of the sacred ceremonial dagger (purba) of Sera
monastery is publicly granted, or the fourteenth of the eleventh month, observed
in the Sakyapa order as the death anniversary of Sakya Paṇḍita.

Many important pilgrimages and festivals, moreover, may be determined by the

twelve-year animal cycle of Chinese origin. Thus, the sacred mountain of west
Tibet, Kailash (Tib. Gang Rinpoché), is a focal point for pilgrimage in the horse
year, and the Pure Crystal Mountain of Tsari, in southeastern Tibet, in the
monkey year. The great teaching of the “tranference of consciousness” (powa) at
Drigung monastery is also conferred in the monkey year.
The general patterns described here were mostly well established early in the
early second millennium, when the major orders were formed. Then, as now, the
teachings and practices of Tibetan Buddhists did not occur on a neutral, empty
stage but unfolded in a domain of structured space and time, in which body,
speech, and mind must conform with principles of hierarchy, deference, and
personal modesty. It is upon these foundations that the elaborate educational,
ritual, and contemplative constructions of the tradition were raised.

The message of the Kadampa

Tradition recalls the period following the collapse of the Tibetan empire as a
dark age, when Buddhism was suppressed, and learning and letters were no
more. Translation activity and the scholarship associated with it were severely
reduced until the end of tenth century, when the West Tibetan kingdom of Gugé
began to patronize Buddhist art and learning once again. Henceforth, conditions
favoring doctrinal and philosophical investigations reemerged.
Paradigmatic of this revival was the long, influential sojourn of the Bengali
scholar and saint Atiśa, first in Gugé (1042–45) and then in Central Tibet until
his death in 1054. Atiśa sought to emphasize above all the ethical grounding of
Mahāyāna Buddhism, and his teachings became the basis for subsequent Tibetan
education concerning the Mahāyāna path. Atiśa’s essential framework for
instruction here was a moral theory that recognized three grades of aspirant, as
defined in his widely read Lamp on the Path of Enlightenment
(Bodhipathapradīpa):

Whoever by whatever means strives for his own sake

Only for saṃsāra’s pleasures—that one is the lesser person.
Turning his back to worldly pleasure, and shunning sinful deeds,
The soul who strives for his own peace is called the middling person.
One who, owing to the pain of his own existence, wholeheartedly seeks to end
All the pain of others—that is the superior person.

As we are all, to whatever extent, self-interested, we inevitably partake of the

character of “lesser” and “middling” persons, to whom the fundamental
teachings on the impermanence and suffering of the world in general are
addressed. However, Atiśa’s overriding concern was to encourage the practice of
“superior persons,” beginning with the cultivation of the “enlightened spirit”
(bodhicitta) of the bodhisattva:

Regarding all sentient beings,

And beginning with a loving mind,
You consider creatures without exception,
Like those born in the three lower destinies [of hells, ghosts, and animals],
And those pained by death and transference [to a new birth].
Then you generate the enlightened spirit
With an irreversible vow,
Desiring to liberate suffering beings
From pain and the causes of pain.
Atiśa’s approach to the gradual path of the Mahāyāna, beginning with aspiration
for enlightenment and culminating in the realization of emptiness, inspired all
Tibetan Buddhist traditions. Particularly influential elaborations include The
Jewel Ornament of Liberation by the founder of the Kagyü monastic orders,
Gampopa, and The Great Progression of the Path, the masterwork of Jé
Tsongkhapa. The key teachings contained in these works are sometimes
summarized as the “four reversals of attitude” (lodok namzhi):

1. to reverse clinging to the pleasures of this life, one contemplates this

“precious human birth” and its impermanence, the inevitability of death;
2. to reverse clinging to the idea of favorable rebirth as an appropriate goal, one
contemplates the ubiquitous suffering of saṃsāra and the causal operations of
karma, the positive and negative deeds driving rebirth;
3. to reverse striving for personal liberation as one’s aim, one cultivates, with
loving kindness and compassion, the enlightened spirit (jangchup-sem, Skt.
bodhicitta) so as to achieve enlightenment for all beings;
4. to reverse clinging to ephemeral things as ultimately real, one contemplates
the emptiness (tongpanyi, Skt. śūnyatā) of conditioned existence, the illusion-
like nature of appearances.

One whose spiritual outlook is determined by the vow of the bodhisattva is

committed to accumulating the dual provisions of merit and wisdom by
cultivating the six perfections of the bodhisattva’s path: generosity, moral
discipline, forbearance, effort, meditation, and wisdom. The virtues of the
bodhisattva were extolled at length in the half-dozen Indian works that came to
be known in Tibet as the “six texts of the Kadam order,” the principal texts
studied among the first generations of Atiśa’s disciples. These six books are
often described as forming three pairs: the first two, the Udānavarga
(“Collection of Aphorisms”) and Jātakamālā (“Garland of Birth-Tales”), are
edifying works, containing verses and stories exemplifying the ideals of the
Buddhist life, and the self-sacrifice and endurance of the bodhisattva as he
progresses through diverse lifetimes toward perfection. The second pair, the
Śikṣāsamuccaya (“Compendium of Lessons”) and Bodhicaryāvatāra
(“Introduction to Enlightened Conduct”), both attributed to the eighth-century
master Śāntideva, emphasizes practical guidance on the Mahāyāna path in its
ethical dimensions. The last pair, the Mahāyānasūtrālaṃkāra (“Ornament of the
Mahāyāna Sūtras”) and Bodhisattvabhūmi (“Bodhisattva Stage”), elaborates the
same path from a preeminently doctrinal and theoretical perspective.
Corresponding to the Kadampa textual curriculum, and relating with particular
clarity to the two works of Śāntideva on the practice of the path, is the genre of
lojong, “mind-training,” or “spiritual exercise.” Lojong is concerned with the
practical challenges of the Mahāyāna path, the need for constant training of
thought, speech, and action in order to attune oneself to the ideal of a life wholly
directed to the enlightenment of the Buddha. The practice focuses upon the
active cultivation of equanimity, compassion, loving-kindness, and other virtues,
together with an awareness of the world as fleeting and empty, but it also
involves practical details of daily life: how to eat and to drink, what to think
while falling asleep, passing in and out of doors, mounting the stairs, going to
the toilet, etc. Thus lojong, together with the Indian works that inspired it,
became part of the common heritage of Tibetan Buddhism, informing the ethical
education of both monk and layperson. An example may be seen in a letter of
spiritual advice addressed to a thirteenth-century Mongol noblewoman, in which
Khubilai Khan’s Tibetan preceptor, the lama Pakpa (1235–80), writes:

The progressive path to enlightenment

The Mahāyāna “progressive path of enlightenment” (jangchup lamrim) was
understood similarly in all the Tibetan Buddhist orders. Its major themes,
with minor modifications in the various traditions, were often outlined as
follows:

Introductory
1. The merits of the teacher and the qualities to be cultivated by the pupil

I. Path of the “lesser person”

2. Understanding the precious opportunity afforded by human birth
3. Contemplation of death and impermanence

II. Path of the “middling person”

4. Contemplation of karma, the principle of the impersonal operations of moral causation
 5. Contemplation of the sufferings of beings in saṃsāra, from those in the lowest realms to the
worldly gods
6. Understanding the benefits of liberation, and seeking refuge in the Three Jewels of Buddha,
Dharma, and Saṅgha

III. Path of the “superior person”

7. Cultivation of the “four immeasurables”: compassion, loving kindness, sympathetic joy and
equanimity on behalf of all beings
8. The vow of the bodhisattva, to achieve enlightenment on behalf of all living beings
9–12. The actual practice of the bodhisattva (i.e., the six transcendent perfections, of which the first
four are generosity, ethical discipline, patience, and constant effort)
13. The fifth perfection, absorption in meditation, identified as the cultivation of tranquility (Skt.
śamatha, Tib. zhiné)
14. The sixth perfection, wisdom (Skt. prajñā, Tib. sherap), the cultivation of contemplative insight
(Skt. vipaśyanā, Tib. lhaktong), whereby emptiness comes to be directly realized
15. Introduction to the special teachings of the tantras

Additional topics that may be introduced in manuals on the path include the
formal analysis of the “stages and paths” (Tib. salam) traversed by the
bodhisattva, and the qualities of the enlightened buddhas, in particular, their
embodiments (Skt. kāya, Tib. ku), gnosis (Skt. jñāna, Tib. yeshé), and
activities on behalf of beings (Skt. buddhakarma, Tib. sanggyé trinlé).

When entering the road say, “May I enter enlightenment’s path!”

On crossing a river say, “May I traverse the torrent of sorrow!”
When you climb up a stairway say, “May I ascend the stairway of freedom!”
When meeting someone say, “May I meet with sublime individuals!”
When you see an empty pot say, “May I be empty of faults!”
When you see a full pot say, “May I be full of good qualities!”

Lojong, in short, constitutes the fabric upon which much of Tibetan Buddhist
practice is arrayed, in virtue of which that practice is coherent and whole, and
not merely an aggregation of doctrines, rituals, and routines. The compassionate
outlook it seeks to reinforce is expressed in a broad range of Tibetan customs; a
striking example is tsetar, the “freeing of life,” whereby one ransoms an animal
destined for slaughter so that it is free to live out its natural term. (It may be
noted, however, that this custom concerns merit-making on behalf of the donor
no less than mercy for the fate of the victim.)
One of the most popular disciplines of lojong is tonglen, literally, “sending and
receiving.” As in many forms of Buddhist meditation, the focal point here is the
breath, the mindful attention to inhalations and exhalations while seated in the
appropriate posture. But in tonglen, attention to the breath is accompanied by an
elementary visualization exercise, in which you imagine all the sufferings of
beings throughout the world taking the form of black smoke, which you absorb
and dissolve with each inhalation. With each exhalation, you emit a radiant light
characterized by the warmth of love, which touches all beings, healing their ills
and granting them peace. Meditating in this way, you cultivate the understanding
that self and other are ultimately no different and so realize that self and other
may be exchanged. This training of compassion imbued with profound empathy
should continue until other is valued above self.

The relativity of self and other in Mahāyāna thought pertains not only to the
cultivation of benevolence but to the fundamental insight that all phenomena are
conditioned and interdependent, and thus “empty” (Tib. tongpa, Skt. śūnya).
This understanding is the hallmark of the sixth perfection of the bodhisattva, that
of wisdom (Tib. sherap, Skt. prajñā), and was given its classical philosophical
articulation by the second-century Indian teacher Nāgārjuna, whose tradition
Atiśa upheld. He did not regard Nāgārjuna’s thought to be captured by the
strictures of philosophical argument alone but to be disclosed, rather, in the
cultivation of contemplative insight. For Atiśa, meditation on emptiness was the
essential practice and theoretical reason was of only limited value in this respect:

[Investigations of] perception and inference are unnecessary.

They have been formulated by the learned to refute the disputations of non-Buddhists.

Nevertheless, he deemed the analysis of everyday phenomena to be the

fundamental means to arrive at the insight that

There is neither seeing nor seer, but peace without beginning or end …
Neither an abode nor that which abides, no coming or going, unexemplified,
Ineffable, not to be viewed, unchanging, uncompounded—
If the adept realizes just this, affective and cognitive obscurations are abandoned.

In brief, Atiśa, following Nāgārjuna’s commentator Candrakīrti, held that

although our everyday language adequately describes apparent reality,
philosophical discourse nevertheless has a necessary role: not system-building
but the criticism of our presuppositions, dismantling them until we arrive at the
profound realization of emptiness and the opening that this entails.

Atiśa on the bodhisattva’s path:

All doctrines of the path are included in the six transcendent perfections. If
you realize emptiness without error, and are without desire, grasping, or
attachment towards outer or inner entities, you are continually graced with
the perfection of generosity. Because, without grasping or attachment, one
is untainted by unvirtue, you are continually graced with the perfection of
moral discipline. Because there is then no enmity due to clinging to I and
mine, you are continually graced with the perfection of forebearance.
Because the mind becomes enthusiastic after realizing that, you are
continually graced with the perfection of effort. Because there is no
distraction when entities are transcended, you continually are graced with
the perfection of meditation. Because there is no intellectual engagement in
the three spheres [of subject, object, and their interaction], you are
continually graced with the transcendent perfection of wisdom.
from Chegom Dzongpa, Scattered Sayings of the Kadampa Masters

… and on the practice of “mind-training” (lojong):

All doubts are to be abandoned, and assiduousness in practice to be cherished.
Renouncing sleep, torpor and lassitude, I must always make energetic efforts.
With mindfulness, attentiveness and care, thoroughly guarding the senses,
During three periods, day and night, I must examine the stream of the mind.
I am to proclaim my own faults, not look to those of others.
I must conceal my excellences, while proclaiming those of others….
Dwelling in wilderness retreats, may I put myself into hiding,
Like the dead corpse of a beast, and dwell there free from desire….
When among many, may I watch my speech.
When alone, may I watch my mind!

from Atiśa, The Bodhisattva’s Jeweled Necklace

Avalokiteśvara: the bodhisattva of compassion

By adopting an enlightened spirit and vowing to act in accord with the path of
the Mahāyāna, one becomes an aspiring bodhisattva. Those who make great
progress on this path, and who, after many lifetimes of striving, attain direct
insight into emptiness, come to realize the ten stages that define the higher
reaches of that path, culminating in the achievement of a buddha’s awakening.
Several of the great human teachers, such as the Indian masters Nāgārjuna and
Asaṅga, are supposed to have arrived at the first or even the third among the ten
stages. But the highest stages, and particularly the tenth, just preceding
buddhahood, are believed to be the domain of divine bodhisattvas, who subsist
for many eons and embody precise facets of the Buddha’s enlightenment. Thus,
Mañjuśrī, often depicted as a sword-wielding youth, is the very incarnation of
perfect insight, and Vajrapāṇi, the wrathful “bearer of the Vajra-scepter,” is
regarded as the apotheosis of spiritual power. Together with Avalokiteśvara,
who is Supreme Compassion, these are the best known of the divine
bodhisattvas and are often regarded as forming a trinity called the “Lords of the
Three Clans.” Typically, they were the patron-divinities of renowned teachers,
who are sometimes also regarded as their emanations. Among the “five
forebears” of the Sakyapa, for instance, Drakpa Gyeltsen is often thought to have
embodied Vajrapāṇi, and Sakya Paṇḍita, Mañjuśrī. Jé Tsongkhapa, too, is
identified with the bodhisattva of wisdom, while the Karmapas and the Dalai
Lamas are thought to be Avalokiteśvara (Tib. Chenrezi). These and many other
bodhisattvas are described in the teachings of the Mahāyāna sūtras, and their
cults were further developed in the tantras as well. Avalokiteśvara, who was
regarded as Tibet’s divine protector overall, enjoying a special place in Tibetan
historical and mythological conceptions, provides the clearest example of these
developments.

Although Buddhist teachings relating to Avalokiteśvara had been introduced to

Tibet by the eighth and ninth centuries, Atiśa played a cardinal role in promoting
this bodhisattva among Tibetans from the eleventh century on. In the form in
which he was usually represented by Atiśa, he was to be imagined as a white,
four-armed figure, with two hands clasped as in prayer and holding a wishing
gem, and the two to his sides holding, respectively, a rosary and a white lotus.
His mantra is the six-syllable formula Oṃ maṇipadme hūṃ, an homage to the
one “holding gem (maṇi) and lotus (padma)” and not meaning, as Western
writers often suppose, “hail to the jewel in the lotus.” (Tibetans, in any event, are
seldom interested in the semantic meaning of this mantra and prefer to interpret
its six syllables symbolically as conveying the blessings of compassion to beings
inhabiting the six realms of worldly existence.) In this form, Avalokiteśvara is
known as “Six Syllables.”

Atiśa’s teaching of Six Syllables corresponded to his emphasis on the teaching

of compassion as the proper motivation for the Mahāyāna path. It was a teaching
that was also tinged with elements of tantrism, in particular, in its use of
visualization and mantra, and in its promulgation by means of a special initiation
in which the disciple is granted the meditation instruction and mantra by a
qualified preceptor. Though visualization exercises are found throughout
Buddhist meditation teachings—we have seen this in the example of tonglen—
tantric visualization is distinctive in that it often requires the meditator to
identify herself with the deity contemplated. Atiśa’s teaching of Avalokiteśvara
directed Tibetans to find the bodhisattva of Supreme Compassion within
themselves and in all others as well.
Such was his popularity that Six Syllables was retrojected into the Tibetan past,
to become the progenitor of the Tibetan people. According to the popular myth,
Avalokiteśvara, in the form of a divine monkey, coupled with an ogress
(identified with goddess Tārā), and from their union the Tibetans were born. He
was believed, too, to have appeared as the emperor Songtsen Gampo, whose
promotion of the arts of civilization was regarded as the evidence of the
bodhisattva’s abiding compassion. In the twelfth century, the treasure-doctrines
of the Nyingmapa tradition greatly amplified the growing mythology. In this
revealed literature, Atiśa’s ethically oriented doctrine merges with the Great
Perfection teaching, with its emphasis on discovering ultimate reality in the
dynamic flow of ordinary awareness.

The most famous of these new revelations was the corpus known as the Maṇi
Kabum, the “Collected Works on Maṇi,” maṇi designating the six-syllable
mantra. These works are attributed to Songtsen Gampo, and in them we find a
rich, legendary tapestry in which Songtsen Gampo, princess Wencheng, and
others in the royal family and court figure as culture heroes, much as do Arthur,
Guinevere, and the Knights of the Round Table in the medieval traditions of
England and France. Supreme Compassion, the preferred name for
Avalokiteśvara in these texts, is regarded as the basis for love, kindness, and
nurturing among all creatures, but at the same time he is none other than the
creative power of mind, whose infinite potentialities for self-actualization
constitute the very basis for creation itself.

A meditation on Avalokiteśvara
When you cultivate the realization that your own mind is Supreme Compassion [enlightened
qualities] arise by themselves.
Thus his body, which is free from birth and death, is like a reflected image: it is free, it
appears, but it is devoid of substantial existence.
Speech as Supreme Compassion is like an echo, and is incessant.
Oṃ Maṇipadme Hūṃ, the natural voice of Reality, is uninterrupted:
Oṃ stills pride, purifies the heavens of the gods, and cuts off birth amongst them.
Ma stills jealous rage, purifies the realms of the demigods, and cuts off birth amongst them.
Ṇi stills lust, purifies the world of human beings, and cuts off birth amongst them.
Pad stills stupidity, purifies the habitats of animals, and cuts off birth amongst them.
Me stills greed, purifies the lands of tormented spirits, and cuts off birth amongst them.
Hūṃ stills hatred, purifies the hells, and cuts off birth within them.

from the Maṇi Kabum

In the teaching of Avalokiteśvara, the “Buddhist basics” are expressed in

particularly Tibetan form. The lessons of the Kadampa teachings of altruism and
ethical excellence, seen in Atiśa’s insistence on the essence of Mahāyāna
teaching as “emptiness imbued with compassion,” are seamlessly integrated with
elementary tantric practice, focusing on the visualization of the deity and the
recitation of his mantra, and informed by the Great Perfection tradition’s
emphasis on finding enlightenment in the here and now. This defines a
widespread cultural synthesis, serving to ground the concerns of the more
specialized intellectual and ritual traditions of Tibetan Buddhism.
Chapter 5
Philosophical developments and disputes

Tibetan monastic education

Under the Tibetan empire, Buddhist monks performed secretarial and clerical
duties for the state bureaucracy. This reflected the monasteries’ capacity to
provide a modicum of education including training in essential scribal skills.
Learned monks also served as tutors to the Tibetan royal family. Nevertheless,
monastic scholars did not entirely supplant the civil bureaucracy of the period,
not to mention the military administration.
With the ninth-century collapse of the Tibetan empire, this picture changed.
After the administration of the old Tibetan state declined, learning and literacy
came to be preserved primarily among lay and monastic religious specialists.
One mark of the religious domination of written Tibetan may be seen in the
transformation of the language itself: the archaic language now referred to as
“Old Tibetan” fell into disuse, and the originally artificial conventions of
Buddhist scriptural translations became the model for what we know today as
“Classical Tibetan.” From the tenth century to recent times, formal education
thus became primarily an aspect of religious training, the main exceptions being
education within families practicing specialized vocations (such as art, medicine,
and astrology) and aristocratic families, who nevertheless often continued the
ancient tradition of inviting learned monks to serve as tutors. In communities
with strong traditions of lay Buddhist devotion, even among nomads and
peasants, basic literacy was sometimes also maintained.
The level of literacy, whether of monks, nuns, or laypersons, was frequently
rudimentary. Recognition of the letters of the alphabet permitted one to use
prayer books as memory aids for the devotions one practiced, but the mastery of
the complex rules of Tibetan spelling and grammar, together with the fine
calligraphic penmanship that was essential for all occupations requiring writing,
were the domain of few people. This mastery was usually a prerequisite for
were the domain of few people. This mastery was usually a prerequisite for
advanced education of any kind, excepting those monks who were educated
primarily through debate practice and who were sometimes not very well trained
in writing.
In the monasteries, young novices were expected to memorize the texts recited
as part of the ritual cycle of the monastery to which they belonged. Rote
memorization, whether or not one understood the words, was key here. For a
primary function of the monastery was to ensure the regular performance of rites
deemed essential for magnifying the merits of donors and protecting the
community, including rulers and subjects. Prominent among ritual texts were
invocations of buddhas, bodhisattvas and the teachers of one’s lineage; offerings
to the many divinities of the Buddhist pantheon, as well as to the properly
Tibetan protective deities; confessionals and purifications; dedications of the
merits achieved through donation or religious practice; and much more.
Monasteries typically required their monks to be familiar with hundreds of pages
to secure the smooth performance of regular and punctual rituals. Before very
recent times, for many, and perhaps most monks, formal education ended here.
Small numbers among the monastics, however, were motivated and encouraged
to pursue higher levels of education. This often meant moving from one’s home
monastery to a larger center with better facilities, perhaps even a formally
constituted college. It was not uncommon for monks seeking higher education to
transfer their monastic residence in this way several times, until finding what
they regarded as the most promising circumstances in which to pursue their
studies, above all at the monastic colleges of the great Gelukpa monasteries of
Central Tibet and Tsang—Ganden, Sera, Drepung, and Trashi Lhünpo. Those
adhering to other orders gravitated to colleges affiliated with the traditions to
which they belonged, though the predominance of the big Gelukpa institutions
guaranteed that they drew their share of visiting students from these orders too.
From the late eleventh century on, the monastic colleges emphasized a highly
rationalized approach to Buddhist doctrine. At the forefront of this development
was the college of Sangpu, which first flourished under Ngok Loden Sherap, an
excellent scholar of Sanskrit who was inspired by the rigor of Indian
epistemological theories. The Sangpu curriculum was based on debate practice
and the careful study of major doctrinal and philosophical works, particularly
those of Dharmakīrti (ca. 600), whose logic served as the foundation for the
system as a whole. Also emphasized were the Perfection of Wisdom or
Prajñāpāramitā, the “meta-doctrine” or Abhidharma, the monastic code or
Vinaya, and the Madhyamaka or “Middle Way” (Tib. Uma) teaching of the
Indian master Nāgārjuna. Henceforth, these subjects, known as the “five great
textual traditions” (zhungchen-nga), would become the core curriculum of the
Tibetan monastic colleges, regardless of the order to which one belonged.
Although the study of these five topics required memorizing key Indian texts,
instruction at Sangpu and its successors strongly emphasized learning through
debate. Students mastered a Tibetan variation on Indian forms of argumentation
that came to be known as tel-chir, “implication and reason,” wherein an
argument was expressed as an implication statement followed by the warranting
reason, as in this example:

It is implied (tel) that a vase is impermanent.

Because (chir) it is composite.

Translated into Western schoolbook logic, this would read: “a vase is a

composite thing; all composite things are impermanent; therefore, a vase is
impermanent.” This shows us, however, that something seems missing from the
Tibetan formulation, namely, the explicit statement of the principle that “all
composite things are impermanent.” This would be supplied if the debater’s
opponent questioned the warranting reason, “because it is composite,” in which
case the former might reply by adding:

It is implied that composite things are impermanent.

Because, as the Buddha has said, “all composite things are impermanent.”

The Buddha’s authority, invoked as a reason here, could also be questioned,

especially if the quotation was contradicted by other scriptural citations. In
actual debate practice, however, adherence to purely logical criteria was seldom
the rule: verbal tricks might be employed to trap an opponent; and the debate
was always accompanied by vivid, ritualized gestures, partly contrived to mimic
a combat in which one might be hard put to maintain his cool. (The point being,
precisely, to learn to remain calm under pressure.) In all events, the objective of
a debate was to win, and few, even among masters of the game, might aspire to
win consistently on the merits of the argument alone. The training could be a
painful and frustrating one, as seen in the autobiography of a nineteenth-century
teacher from Amdo:
 On entering the monastic college, I studied the Abbreviated Logic Course, the way of reason.
Because I didn’t even understand the general application of the reason or implication, I was
rejected by my companions and despairingly scolded by my teachers, who took to beating me
harshly though it did no good at all.

6. Monks practicing debate in the courtyard of Ganden monastery, Tsongkhapa’s seat in Central
Tibet.

Debate encouraged able students to explore the implications of the texts they
were simultaneously engaged in mastering. In some monastic colleges, the
accent was placed less on debate and more on oral and written commentary,
resembling the emphasis in some types of Western education on “explication de
texte.” Several pedagogical styles thus emerged, characterizing in part the
approaches of differing monastic orders.

The emergence of Tibetan scholasticism

The Sangpu curriculum was refined by a succession of brilliant teachers,
including Chapa Chökyi Senggé (1109–69), who is credited with systematizing
the debate logic overall. Sakya Paṇḍita also received his early philosophical
education at Sangpu before continuing his studies with the Kashmiri master
Śākyaśrībhadra and his entourage of Indian scholars, with whom he applied
himself to mastering Sanskrit grammar and related subjects. This training would
lend a notably “Indological” perspective to his mature scholarship. In his
treatise, the Scholar’s Gate (Khepa Jukpé Go), he sets forth his scholarly ideals
in general, basing them on mastery of composition, rhetoric, and debate.

Four philosophical schools, five textual traditions

Following Indian sources, Tibetan Buddhists recognized four major philosophical schools, the first
two representing the “Little Vehicle” (Hīnayāna) attributed to early Buddhism and the second two
the “Great Vehicle” (Mahāyāna) that flourished beginning in the first centuries of the common era:

1. Vaibhāṣika (Tib. jedrak mawa) affirms an atomistic conception of reality and the theory that
perception encounters its objects directly.
2. Sautrāntika (Tib. dodépa) believes that we perceive phenomenal forms caused by the interaction
between objects and our sense organs, but that we do not directly perceive the objects that appear
to us.
3. Yogācāra (Tib. neljor chöpa, semtsam) embraces a type of idealism, according to which subject
and object are mere aspects of nondual cognition.
4. Madhyamaka (Tib. uma) argues that in the final analysis reality is beyond thought and speech, that
even concepts such as “nondual cognition” mistakenly posit concrete absolutes where in fact no
such thing can be affirmed. “Emptiness” serves to point to the intangible nature of reality but must
itself not be grasped as an ultimate fact.

The perspectives of these four schools are studied in detail in the “five great textual traditions”:

1. Vinaya (Tib. dülwa) primarily teaches the ethical discipline of the Vaibhāṣika.
2. Abhidharma (Tib. ngönpa) details the metaphysics of Vaibhāṣika, Sautrāntika and Yogācāra.

3. Pramāṇa (Tib. tsema)—logic and epistemology—is based on Sautrāntika and Yogācāra theory of
knowledge.
4. Prajñāpāramitā (Tib. parchin)—the “Perfection of Wisdom”—investigates the Mahāyāna
doctrines of the path to enlightenment from the perspectives of both Yogācāra and Madhyamaka.
5. Madhyamaka (Tib. uma) introduces the insight into universal relativity and emptiness that
characterizes the Madhyamaka philosophical system.

Indian traditions of logic and epistemology figured prominently among Sakya

Paṇḍita’s major concerns. His contributions included the revised Tibetan
translation of Dharmakīrti’s masterwork, the Verse Commentary on Logic
(Pramāṇavārttika), and his own synthesis of Indian Buddhist epistemology, the
Treasury of Epistemic Reason (Tsema Rikter). In other writings he commented at
length on current doctrinal debates, voicing trenchant criticisms of various
developments in Tibet. One of his foremost targets was the notion of sudden
enlightenment, which he often characterized as the “Chinese Great Perfection.”
A rigorous adherence to canonical precepts was, for Sakya Paṇḍita, the
touchstone of Buddhist practice:

If you speak in accord with the Buddha’s pronouncements you are a guru. If you practice in
accord with his speech you are a disciple. If you achieve provisions that conform to them you are
a patron. Where these are present, the teaching of the Buddha will be present as well.

The traditions of Sangpu and Sakya were largely responsible for the content,
style, and method of subsequent Tibetan scholasticism, which came to be
characterized by close study of the major Indian Buddhist philosophers—
especially Nāgārjuna, Asaṅga, and Dignāga, and their commentators
Candrakīrti, Vasubandhu, and Dharmakīrti—rigorous adherence to methodical
argument, and precise and elegant use of language. Nevertheless, skeptical
undercurrents sometimes emerged. Thus, the second Karmapa hierarch, Karma
Pakshi, authored a catalogue of disputed opinions in which he writes:

It is held that saṃsāra has a beginning and end, and it is held that saṃsāra is without beginning or
end. It is held that minds are of identical nature throughout all saṃsāra and nirvāṇa, and it is held
that all minds are of differing natures. It is held that sentient beings are newly produced, and it is
held that sentient beings are not newly produced…. But whatever such tenets—whether good, bad
or mediocre—one might harbor are the causes of good, bad or mediocre [conditions of] saṃsāra.
They are devoid of the life-force of nirvāṇa. Whatever tenets, hankerings, or particular
philosophical positions you hold, they cause you to be buddhaless and make you meet with
saṃsāra.

For thinkers like Karma Pakshi, it was an intuitive breakthrough achieved in

contemplation, and not the elaboration of dogmatic systems, that revealed the
true meaning of the Buddha’s teaching.
At the same time, others attempted to reconcile these opposing trends—
systematic and skeptical—in Buddhist thought. The fourteenth century saw a
veritable eruption of interest in topics like “buddha-nature,” “consciousness of
the ground-of-all” (Skt. ālayavijñāna), and “luminous mind,” all of which
seemed to imply some fundamental reality besides “emptiness.” This received its
impetus in part from techniques of contemplation and yoga that made use of
similar concepts, while the presence of these and related terms in some Indian
writings led scholars to argue that the highest teachings of the Buddha were to be
found only here. The debates this provoked were among the most contested
areas of Tibetan Buddhist thought and among the richest in terms of the range of
perspectives that emerged.
The third Karmapa Rangjung Dorjé contributed much here and set forth his
views in a celebrated treatise, Profound Inner Meaning (Zapmo Nangdön). The
thinker most associated with controversial ontological speculations, however,
was a junior contemporary of the Karmapa, Dölpopa Sherap Gyeltsen of the
Jonangpa order, who asserted that emptiness was not the true nature of the
absolute at all. This, he held, was in fact a plenitude and thus “extrinsically
empty” (zhentong), that is, empty just of relative reality. Dölpopa’s thinking—
affirming that the Buddha taught the absolute to be permanent, eternal, self, and
purity—sparked considerable controversy, and he was condemned by some as a
tacit adherent of the Hindu teaching of the supreme self, paramātman. After the
order to which he adhered, the Jonangpa, was suppressed during the 1650s by
the fifth Dalai Lama, largely for political reasons, his writings were banned, and
many believed the suppression to be due to perceived heresy. Nevertheless,
Dölpopa’s insistence that the absolute could not be conceived as a mere
nothingness touched a sore nerve in Tibetan Buddhist thought, so that his
teaching has been repeatedly revived, albeit with modifications, down to the
present time.
The concepts of luminosity and buddha-nature are prominent, too, in the work of
Longchen Rapjampa, the greatest exponent of the Nyingmapa teaching of the
Great Perfection. Nowhere is this more evident than in his treatment of the
“ground” (zhi), the basis for the actualization of the “fruit” (drebu) that is
buddhahood. In his reflections on the emptiness of the absolute, he avoids
Dölpopa’s position but nevertheless also criticizes the apparently nihilistic
tendencies of some Tibetan scholars. For Longchenpa, “emptiness” is the
unconditioned, primordially pure character of ultimate reality, wherein
buddhahood is an ever-present possibility. He thus resists Dölpopa’s conclusion
that emptiness is an extrinsic quality of a permanent absolute, while refusing to
treat emptiness as a synonym for nothingness, with the nihilism that this would
imply.

Three teachers on the absolute

Reality, or “suchness,” is the ground of all saṃsāra and nirvāṇa, and is
referred to by many names: the “primordial, indestructible, great seminal
point,” “Prajñāpāramitā,” “inborn gnosis,” and “ordinary cognition.” When
it is stirred by the agitating vital energy of intellect, extraneous thoughts
grow active. Owing to the appearance of dichotomized phenomena, one
adopts the convention [of distinguishing between] the “gnosis of the
ground-of-all” (ālayajñāna) and the “consciousness of the ground-of-all
(ālayavijñāna).”
from Karmapa Rangjung Dorjé (1284–1339), Profound Inner Meaning
The intention is to distinguish intrinsic emptiness from extrinsic emptiness.
Those who do not do so and … who maintain that all [the Buddha’s]
statements that ultimately there is existence, permanence, self, purity and
truth are of provisional meaning, while all statements of nonexistence,
impermanence, non-self, impurity and rottenness are of definitive meaning
[merely indulge in] coarse and bad views, without number.
from Dölpopa (1292–1361), Epistle to the Disciples
Nowadays, most of the teachers and all of the hermits alike make out the
ground to be a bare vacuity, nothing at all…. But by experientially
cultivating a ground that is nothing at all, the fruit of awakening as a
buddha, with all enlightened attributes, will not emerge, because the trio of
ground, path and result has been confounded…. Here, it is the
unconditioned and spontaneously present luminosity that is held to be the
ground. If the inherent structure of such a ground is not recognized as it is,
there comes to be unawareness. Due to that, having errantly constructed the
apprehending subject and apprehended object, one wanders in the three
realms.
from Longchen Rapjampa (1308–1363), Distinguishing Consciousness
from Gnosis
7. The great fifteenth-century stūpa of Gyantsé, with its many interior chapels, arranged as a three-
dimensional maṇḍala—the cosmos conceived as a divine palace—gives architectural expression to
the cosmic vision of Tibetan Buddhism.

Tsongkhapa and his critics

The fourteenth century was a golden age for Tibetan Buddhist philosophy.
Besides the figures just surveyed, a host of thinkers contributed to the
elaboration of every aspect of Buddhist thought, engendering lively
controversies in most areas. It became customary for aspirants to move from one
center to another, studying with different masters and honing their debating
skills on the way. One of those who entered this world of itinerant scholars as a
youth was Jé Tsongkhapa Lozang Drakpa, later to be revered as the founder of
the Gelukpa order. His dedication to the Kadampa teaching of the progressive
path of the bodhisattva was such that he and his successors often came to be
thought of as “new Kadampas,” and his treatise the Great Progression of the
Path is considered a definitive expression of this approach.
From his Sakyapa colleague, Rendawa Zhönnu Lodrö (1349–1412), he acquired
special concern for the Prāsaṅgika, or “implicationist,” interpretation of
Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka philosophy formulated by the Indian master
Candrakīrti; for it is the hallmark of this approach to demonstrate universal
relativity, or emptiness, only indirectly, by drawing out the implications of rival
hypotheses. (Those who used direct proof to establish emptiness were by
contrast known as Svātantrika, proponents of “autonomous argument.”) It was in
collaboration with Rendawa, moreover, that Tsongkhapa undertook a celebrated
rehearsal of the monastic code, the Vinaya. He thoroughly rejected the “extrinsic
emptiness” doctrine of Dölpopa, regarding it as exemplifying persistent Tibetan
misunderstandings of the idealistic Yogācāra school of Indian Buddhist
philosophy, and, though affirming the Prāsaṅgika interpretation of
Madhyamaka, he developed his own unique understanding of it. In short, while
drawing on earlier tradition, Tsongkhapa formulated a novel synthesis of the
Indian Buddhist legacy, emphasizing careful textual study and the demands of
logic.
Tsongkhapa clearly perceived that the many contested topics in the Buddhism of
his day could not be resolved by appealing to scriptural authority alone and
wrote:

A scriptural passage which merely says “this [text] is of this [level of meaning]” cannot establish
that to be so, for, as there is in general no invariable relationship [holding between such
statements and the levels of meaning to which they refer], the mere statement, “this [scripture] is
of this [level of meaning]” cannot prove a particular instance of interpretable or definitive
meaning.

The would-be interpreter is therefore thrown back on reason if he is to cut

through the conundrums posed by doctrinal texts. Contrary to those who
believed that reason served only to refute wrong opinions but that it otherwise
had no role on the Buddhist path, Tsongkhapa strongly affirmed the rational
character of Buddhist teaching.
Tsongkhapa’s commitment to reason pushed him to propose an innovative
interpretation of Candrakīrti’s philosophy, which provoked considerable dispute.
To illustrate his approach, we mention briefly his arguments concerning the
“consciousness of the ground-of-all,” or ālayavijñāna. At issue is whether the
Madhyamaka philosopher is required to affirm, even in relative terms, the
existence of such a “ground” in order to explain the continuity of karma from
one lifetime to the next. Tsongkhapa thought not and proposed to solve the
problem of karma and causation by maintaining that the annihilation (zhikpa) of
a thing could act in a causal stream just like a positive entity: it is a completed,
that is to say, annihilated, deed that brings about the result. This may appear to
be a rabbit pulled from the dialectical hat, and this, indeed, is just how his critics
perceived it. Together with several other distinctive aspects of his thought, his
thesis was universally rejected by those outside the Gelukpa order he had
founded. One of his sharpest opponents, the Sakyapa Gorampa Sonam Senggé
(1429–89), for instance, argued that it absurdly implied that “karma and its
effects are totally different, since at the level of conventions, they are set off
from one another by an intermediary, namely ‘annihilation as a real entity,’ just
like two mountains that face each other are set off from one another by the river
[that runs between them].” Much of the subsequent history of Buddhist thought
in Tibet may be interpreted in terms of the continuing debate between
Tsongkapa’s critics and defenders.

Later developments
Political turmoil in Central Tibet during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, in tandem with Tibet’s shifting relations with its Mongol and Manchu
neighbors, contributed to important changes in Tibet’s cultural geography,
whereby new centers of intellectual and artistic activity emerged in Tibet’s far
eastern regions of Amdo and Kham.

Tsongkhapa on the study of logic

Some say that these treatises [of logic and epistemology] are merely useful
in order to refute the misconceptions of the non-Buddhists, so that in places
[like Tibet], where [non-Buddhists] are not present, there is no reason to
study and to reflect upon them. But this undermines the teaching…. For
these texts fully establish the means to refute such inflated opinions as those
which hold there to be no former or past lives, no liberation or omniscience,
and hold the aggregates to be pure, happy, permanent and self, etc.
Therefore, even in this place where non-Buddhists are not present, you
must consider introspectively whether or not you need to eliminate inflated
opinions whereby you grasp your own aggregates as pure, happy,
permanent and self, etc., and whether or not you need to achieve certainty
in regard to past and future lives, liberation and omniscience, etc. And, if
those be needed, you must indicate whether, [to achieve them,] there is any
other means superior to these treatises on reason.

… and on causality and karma

Some hold that, if virtuous or unvirtuous deeds were to abide until the
maturation of the result, then they would be permanent, so that [one who
 maturation of the result, then they would be permanent, so that [one who
affirmed this] would fall into the extreme of eternalism, while if, on the
other hand, the deed that was performed were to be annihilated in the
second instant, then, because [something] annihilated cannot be an entity, it
could not generate the mature result, wherefore completed deeds would
vanish without trace.
Some respond to this argument, saying that, even though the deed be
annihilated, there is a ground for the successive emergence of the potency
of the deed, which is considered to be the ground-of-all, while others affirm
this to be the continuous stream of intellectual consciousness…. Our own
response is that, even without affirming [such] propositions, it is implied
that the completed deed will not vanish without trace. For there is no
contradiction involved if we assume that it is the annihilated deed that
generates a result…. For though [something] annihilated cannot be an entity
if you affirm concrete particulars [to be the defining type of entity], we do
not affirm the concrete particular even as a matter of convention, wherefore
both annihilated and unannihilated deeds are equivalent with respect to
whether or not they are entities.

The prominence of the East in this period is well illustrated in the life and work
of the notable eighteenth-century figure, Changkya Rölpé Dorjé (1717–86).
Born among the Monguor ethnic group of Qinghai, he was identified at the age
of four as the incarnation of a famous lama and later sent by the Manchus to
Beijing to be educated at the court. There he became the fast friend of a Manchu
prince, who later succeeded to the throne as the emperor Qianlong (r. 1736–99),
the greatest of the Qing monarchs. Changkya rose with his friend to become the
empire’s preeminent Buddhist clergyman, as well as the confidant and
biographer of the seventh Dalai Lama Kelzang Gyatso (1708–57). As
Changkya’s writings make clear, he adhered closely to Tsongkapa’s ideal of
reason in seeking to resolve the conflicted points of Buddhist teaching. This
found its most sustained expression in Changkya’s great synthesis of Buddhist
philosophies, Philosophical Systems Beautifying the World-Mountain, which
sought, so far as possible, to base itself directly upon Indian sources.
Nevertheless, Changkya’s work was in part motivated by his encounters with
Chinese Buddhism and his recognition that this tradition, differing in certain
respects from Tibetan Buddhism, emphasized aspects of the Indian Buddhist
legacy that had been relatively overlooked in Tibet. His interest in philosophical
systems was inherited by his disciple and biographer, Tuken Chökyi Nyima
(1737–1802), who complemented his master’s work with the Crystal Mirror of
Philosophical Systems, treating the peculiarly Tibetan systems of Buddhist
thought and practice, and offering a detailed exposé of Chinese traditions,
including Confucianism and Taoism as well.
In Kham, the nineteenth-century “nonpartisan” (rimé) movement sought to
emphasize the complementarities, and not the divisions, among the various
Tibetan orders and lineages. This outlook is well exemplified in the writings of
Mipam Namgyel (1846–1912), who was convinced that Tibetan Buddhists had
more in common than sectarian polemicists were willing to admit. In a satirical
essay, after noting some of the strengths and vulnerabilities of the four major
orders, he concluded that solidarity among them was the need of the day.
Despite continuing sectarian rivalries, the tolerant outlook he expressed here has
come to be broadly—though by no means universally—embraced in
contemporary Tibetan Buddhist circles.

Mipam on nonsectarianism
In the teaching in general, though you may favour your own faction, it’s
most important not to hate the others. In thinking about your own faction,
because you are followers of the Teacher, the Transcendent Lord Buddha
alone, you must perceive one another as intimates. The philosophical
systems of the teaching in Tibet began at the time of … the religious king
[Tri Songdetsen]. From that ancient and excellent legacy, all [the Tibetan
orders] are alike in affirming the four seals [the impermanence, suffering,
and selflessness of conditioned things, and the peace of nirvāṇa] that mark
the transmitted precepts of the teaching. Above and beyond that, all affirm
great, unelaborate emptiness and, what’s more, they also affirm the vehicle
of the tantras [which teach] the coalescence of bliss and emptiness.
Because, then, in point of fact, their views and systems are similar, they are
exceedingly close.
In thinking about other factions, [consider that] next to non-Buddhists and
barbarians, with whom we share not even tokens and dress, and who are [as
numerous] as nighttime stars, we, who are just a few, are like daytime stars
and are approaching the completion of the teaching. While something of it
remains, those who have entered into the domains of the teaching with
common purpose ought to cultivate the perception that they are most
closely related. Because mutual enmity will bring ruination, regard one
another as does a mother her child, or as does a begger a treasure, and so
cultivate a perception of joy.
from Mipam Namgyel (1846–1912), Surprises Due to a Conversation with
Friends
Chapter 6
Enlightenment in this very body

What is “Tantric Buddhism”?

Tibetan Buddhism is often characterized as “tantric,” though seldom with careful
definition. In several spheres, including monastic discipline and philosophical
education, non-tantric teachings and practices were generally privileged. Despite
this, Tibetan Buddhism was indebted to tantric traditions in aspects of popular
and monastic ritual, and yoga and meditation were most often tantric as well.
But just how is “tantra” understood in Tibet? The question is not an easy one to
answer and was much debated among Tibetan authorities themselves.
Though precise definition is elusive, some characteristics of Buddhist tantra are
widespread. Peltrül Rinpoché (d. 1887), a famous Nyingmapa author, raises the
issue while discussing how the disciple should attend to his teacher’s lessons.
According to the exoteric sūtras, he says, the student cultivates motivation,
respectful comportment, careful memorization, and similar qualities. None of
this is rejected by the tantras, but they add this difference: instead of regarding
your teacher, yourself, and your classmates as ordinary human beings, you learn
to perceive the learning environment as an awakened realm, in which the teacher
is the Buddha or presiding divinity, and you and your classmates are the
enlightened disciples, or the gods and goddesses, of the retinue. The teaching
itself, transcending the mundane here and now, is the perpetual flow of the
Buddha’s insight, continuously received by those receptive to it. In other words,
in the way of the sūtras, one is to cultivate positive qualities as causes for future
enlightenment, but in the tantras, the fruit of enlightenment is already here. The
tantras teach us to perceive the ordinary world as a buddha-realm. Hence,
Tibetan authorities often speak of the sūtras as teaching a causal vehicle, while
the tantras present the vehicle of fruition.
Although this helps to introduce the general ethos of tantra, it remains still
vague. Is the idea that buddhahood is ever-present sufficient to count as tantra?
Few in the Tibetan traditions would agree. It is in seeking greater precision that
the characterization of tantra becomes controversial. Without proposing a strict
definition, a number of frequently invoked features merit consideration.

Mantra: The use of spell-like formulae, called dhāraṇī, or mantra (Tib. ngak) is
pervasive in the tantras, so that their teaching is often called mantrayāna, the
“mantra vehicle.” While many non-tantric Buddhist sūtras employ dhāraṇī,
particularly as mnemonic formulae, in tantric contexts mantras pervade all
aspects of ritual and contemplation. Thus, the twelfth-century Sakyapa teacher,
Sachen Künga Nyingpo, defines the word “mantra” as meaning “that which
protects the mind,” and further explains: “By being skilled in the stages of
creation and perfection, sensory consciousness, and what flows from it, is
protected from intellectual engagement in mundane discursive thought.” (The
terms “creation” and “perfection” refer here to the two major phases of tantric
practice, the first emphasizing creative visualization and ritual, and the second
involving the perfection of the adept’s identification with the visualized deity
through exercises of internal yoga.)

Maṇḍala: Though the term maṇḍala (Tib. kyinkhor) is current outside of tantric
contexts to refer to ordered arrangements, including the well-appointed array of
a buddha and his divine and human disciples, in the tantras it designates
specifically a type of diagram—usually either painted on cloth or made of
colored powders sprinkled on a flat surface, and more rarely modeled three-
dimensionally—that schematically represents the divine palace of a particular
buddha, bodhisattva, or deity, accompanied by his or her divine circle of
attendants. This is symbolically correlated, moreover, with the macrocosmic
universe and with the microcosm of the individual. Thus, for instance, a
maṇḍala of five deities may be taken to correspond to the five bundles, or
skandhas, the basic elements of which a living being is formed, or to the five
elements—earth, water, fire, air, and space—composing the material world as a
whole.

Abhiṣeka: Entry into the tantras requires a particular consecration ritual, called
abhiṣeka (Tib. wangkur), “aspersion,” whereby the disciple is initiated by the
guru into the maṇḍala of a particular buddha, bodhisattva, or deity. As Sachen
Künga Nyingpo tells us, “one may practice after body, speech, and mind are
consecrated as the indestructible reality (vajra) of buddha-body, -speech, and -
mind.” Without obtaining abhiṣeka and assenting to the special vows (Skt.
samaya, Tib. damtsik) that this entails, one is not authorized to undertake the
ritual or contemplative practices of the tantras.
Visualization, the creative use of the imagination, is employed in all branches of
Buddhism, affording powerful means to further meditation. Tantric
visualizations are related to the principle of the maṇḍala, often involving the
meditator’s imagined identification with its central divinity. As Sachen explains,
“Concerning skill in the means of one’s favored deity, one transforms oneself
into that deity. All objects, form and so forth, that appear, are likewise made into
the deity. Then, one’s enjoyment [of objects] is like deity melting into deity. The
beginner just practices self-identification [with the deity], and, attaining stability
of mind, learns to make the features clear.” Corresponding to the requirement of
clear visualization, one may note a degree of iconographic elaboration, involving
divinities who may be male or female, benign or demonic, of any color, and
often endowed with many legs, heads, and arms, wielding the weapons, ritual
objects, and sacred substances with which they are associated, ritually and
symbolically.
Ritual: Buddhist tantra is distinguished from other forms of Buddhism by the
extreme elaboration of its rituals, which developed in India under the influence
of the ancient traditions of the Vedas and of Hindu tantrism. Characteristic of
tantric rituals are complex altar arrangements, involving manifold offerings,
representations, and symbolic objects; intricate programs of liturgical chant,
punctuated by use of mantras and special gestures (Skt. mudrā); and stipulations
regarding concentration (Skt. samādhi) to engender a visualized ritual program
corresponding to outer ritual performance. Specifications pertain to the
practitioner’s clothing and ornaments, and the details of instruments and
implements including drums, horns, and the ubiquitous vajra and bell. (The vajra
[Tib. dorjé], a type of scepter identified as both diamond and lightning bolt, is
the most widespread symbol of esoteric Buddhism and represents the
indestructibility and brilliance of the enlightened mind.)
Sensual pleasures are to be affirmed, not renounced. Sachen, like many
authorities, proposes that this is a fundamental distinction between the exoteric
Mahāyāna sūtras and the esoteric tantras: “The proclamation of two paths is
intended for two types of individual. Some are unconcerned with sensual
pleasures and so are able to abandon them. For them, the vehicle of the
transcendent perfections [taught in the sūtras] was proclaimed. Others are
greatly preoccupied by sensory pleasures and so unable to abandon them, and for
them the vehicle of indestructible reality was proclaimed.” However, the
affirmation of the senses in tantric rituals is not an authorization of ordinary
sensual indulgence. Tantric engagement in sensual phenomena is subservient not
to whims and desires but to precise ritual programs. Sachen’s explanation thus
continues: “Those who have entered the vehicle of secret mantra, being skilled
in both the stage of creation and that of perfection, may rely upon sensual
pleasures. For example, according to the tantras, the eye is made into [the
bodhisattva] Kṣitigarbha, and all form is made into [the goddess] Rūpavajrā.
One thereby enjoys [vision] in the manner of deity embracing deity, and
similarly sound and smell, etc., are all enjoyed as is appropriate.”
Yoga: In the highest practices of tantra, outer ritual receives less emphasis than
the esoteric techniques of yoga (Tib. neljor). “Yoga” in this case is not the
gymnastic yoga widely taught these days in health clubs. It refers, rather, to
practices of meditation through which the adept may achieve union (Skt. yoga)
with the highest reality. Tantric practices of creative visualization are thus
thought of as “deity yoga” and the recitation of the deity’s mantra as “recitation
yoga.” In the so-called perfection stage of tantric practice, the focus turns to the
subtle energies of the body, conceived as a network of energy channels
concentrated at vital points called “wheels” (Skt. cakra, Tib. khorlo). Whereas,
among ordinary persons, these subtle energies are dispersed and uncoordinated,
by means of tantric yoga they are united in the central channel, bringing about
swift liberation. Because modern gymnastic yoga is ultimately derived from
medieval Indian tantric systems, similar concepts remain familiar in the general
milieu of contemporary yoga practice. However, in Buddhist tantra, the internal
yogas are primarily contemplative techniques, corresponding to particular tantras
with their specific maṇḍalas and deities.

Transgression is sometimes also regarded as characteristic of tantric practice.

Adepts may indulge in what, in other contexts, is considered unclean or
polluting, for instance, consuming excrement or forbidden meats, taking
intoxicants, or seeking spiritual bliss through sexual enjoyment. Not all Buddhist
tantras encourage such actions, and many Tibetan authorities shunned these
aspects of the tantras altogether. Although Indian understandings of tantric
transgression have been disputed in recent scholarship, in Tibet there was broad
consensus that the transgressions mentioned in the texts were usually to be
treated symbolically, as their actual practice pertained only to small numbers of
highly advanced adepts. Even among the latter, the transgressions were to be
carefully constrained and limited to precise ritual contexts. Thus, for instance, at
the tantric feasts—literally the “wheel of the assembly” (Skt. gaṇacakra, Tib.
tsokkhor)—of the tenth and twenty-fifth days of the month, small morsels of
meat and a few drops of alcohol may be served to participants as tokens of the
transgressions whereby the great adepts of the past, such as Padmasambhava,
transcended all dualistic bounds to attain supreme realization. Nevertheless, the
ritual of the feast remains rigidly codified, so that even its “transgressions”
conform to a perfectly orchestrated routine. Hence, tantric transgression, as
understood in Tibet, is not at all antinomian, but is part of an ordered system.
Secrecy: The conception of the tantras as “esoteric” is directly related to the
frequent ascription to them of secrecy. This may be taken literally to mean that
their teachings and practices are to be concealed from the uninitiated, but often
also allusively, indicating that only those who are suitably receptive can gain
insight into the tantras, whether or not they are deliberately concealed.
Not all of these nine features are present whenever Tibetan Buddhists speak of
tantra, though the first four generally are. Tantra is best thought of not as a fixed
phenomenon but as a broad and complex category, whose constituents are linked
by a range of properties that are variously shared and divided among them.

Stages of tantric practice

Leaving definition aside, tantra in Tibet is more a matter of practice than of
theory and in practice is invariably transmitted directly from master to disciple.
As the great yogi and poet Milarepa is always considered the exemplary disciple,
his story will help us to understand tantra as part of Tibetan religious experience.

Four classes of tantras

In contrast to the Bönpo and Nyingmapa, who classify their tantric teachings variously within their
systems of “nine vehicles,” most of the other traditions of Tibetan Buddhism have adopted a system
with four classes of tantras (gyüdé zhi):
 1. Kriyātantra (Tib. jawé gyü, “tantras of ritual action”) and (2) Caryātantra (Tib. chöpé gyü, “tantras
of conduct”) emphasize rituals for purification and protection, in which the adept enters into a
temporary relationship with the divinity for the duration of the ritual performed. They differ in
general in the degree of the elaboration of their consecrations and other rites.
3. Yogatantra (Tib. neljor-gi gyü, “tantras of yoga”) further develops the practitioner’s contemplative
identification with the divinity, while in (4) Anuttara- (or Niruttara-) yogatantra (Tib. neljor lamé
gyü, “unexcelled Yogatantra”) a permanent identification is sought, and the accent shifts from
ritual to internal disciplines of yoga.

The relationship between adept and deity in these four classes of practice is
sometimes compared to that between lovers: first exchanging glances and
smiles; then holding hands and playing innocent games; next hugs and
kisses; finally the intimacy and bliss of union.

After practicing sorcery during his youth in order to avenge the hardships
inflicted on his family by a cruel uncle, Mila began to regret the sufferings he
caused through his success in the black arts. Motivated to achieve liberation, he
sought Buddhist teachings from several masters, but little good came of it. Upon
hearing the name of the translator Marpa, however, he was moved by great faith
and so journeyed to meet him. Marpa, for his part, recognized Milarepa’s
potential as soon as he saw him but was careful not to let this be known. As a
Tibetan proverb states, “the disciple’s faith is the ring that catches the hook of
the teacher’s compassion.” Tantric practice must be grounded in unswerving
devotion to a qualified teacher; without this, only its outer forms survive.
But faith alone is not sufficient to ready the disciple for initiation. Marpa was
aware of Milarepa’s potential but saw too that, owing to past sins, he was not yet
a fit vessel for the teaching. He therefore demanded that Milarepa undergo harsh
trials, virtually serving as Marpa’s slave, until, when all trace of pride was
broken, he was at last purified and suitably prepared. Initiated into the maṇḍala
of the deity Cakrasaṃvara, he was instructed in the corresponding esoteric
yogas, derived from the “Six Teachings of Nāropa,” above all the exercise of the
subtle energies known as the “wild woman” (tummo), the inner heat, mastery of
which allowed him to remain in the wilderness throughout the harsh Tibetan
winter with only a light cotton robe. (“Repa,” which became part of his name
and was subsequently adopted by many of his disciples as well, literally means
“cotton-clad.”) Through years of privation in solitary retreat he strove to master
this discipline, together with the remaining “Six Teachings,” through which he
came to realize the apparitional nature of existence and the visionary
possibilities of lucid dreaming in relation to the radiance of the mind. In the end,
he was believed to have become a buddha; he had succeeded in attaining the
tantras’ goal of enlightenment in “a single lifetime, a single body.”
Adepts such as Milarepa are rare, and so too teachers such as Marpa, who
perceive the specific needs of their disciples and instruct them accordingly. More
often training in the tantras is practiced following well-established patterns,
although the disciple’s faith in a formally qualified master is always an essential
prerequisite.
Instead of the trials that Milarepa endured, most disciples undertake the more
predictable challenge of the preliminary practices (ngöndro). All tantric rituals
involve preliminaries such as arranging the altar and the offerings, consecrating
the ritual implements, and the first steps of the ritual itself, including the
Buddhist refuge and the cultivation of bodhicitta, the compassionate spirit of
enlightenment. In the present context, however, the preliminaries are obligatory
spiritual exercises that may take anywhere from a few months to a year to
complete. Typically, they commence with the contemplation of fundamental
Buddhist themes: the unique opportunity of human existence; death and
impermanence; the sufferings of beings in saṃsāra; and the operations of karma.
A period of reflection, often in retreat, devoted to these is followed by a series of
practices including the performance of one hundred thousand repetitions of the
refuge, accompanied, with each repetition, by a full prostration, one hundred
thousand repetitions of the vow of the bodhisattva, and, similarly, one hundred
thousand repetitions each of the hundred-syllable purificatory mantra of the
Buddha Vajrasattva, of the offering of the maṇḍala (here meaning a symbolic
representation of the cosmos), and of the formula of guruyoga, the worship of
the divinized guru. The qualities cultivated by these practices—renunciation,
compassion, purity, and faith—qualify the student as a suitable candidate for the
major tantric practices. Following his or her initiation into the maṇḍala of the
deity—and the choice of deity depends above all on the specific lineage into
which one is initiated—these begin with the creation stage, in which the
visualization of the deity and recitation of its mantra are cultivated. This is
usually to be practiced for a prolonged period in retreat, requiring the
performance of a fixed number of repetitions of the mantra, together with a
variety of rituals cementing one’s relation with the deity. Mastery of the creation
stage is the prerequisite for the perfection practices, as exemplified by the “Six
Teachings of Nāropa.”
At the culmination of the tantric path, elaborate ritual and the intricate
disciplines of internal yoga give way to simplicity, as the adept focuses upon the
examination of the reality underlying all possible experiences. The subtle
radiance of mind finds its ground in emptiness and is identified with the
dharmakāya, the all-embracing “body of reality” of the buddhas. In the Kagyüpa
and allied traditions, the contemplation of the ultimate at this stage of practice is
the Mahāmudrā, the “Great Seal,” while among the Nyingmapa and Bönpo it is
the Dzokchen, or “Great Perfection.” Though these approaches each have
numerous particular features, according to the distinct tantric systems to which
they appertain, they share a common outlook reflecting the preeminence of
Madhyamaka thought in Mahāyāna Buddhist milieux. As summarized in a
prayer by the third Karmapa Rangjung Dorjé:

Free from intellectual contrivance,

this is the Mahāmudrā;
Without limiting parameters,
it is the great Madhyamaka;
As the gathering point of all,
it’s also called “Great Perfection”—
With confidence may we realize
the one knowledge embracing all!

Institutional and social entailments

Just as tantra is regularly taught through a progressed path involving well-
defined stages of practice, so the circumstances for tantric teaching have come to
be largely institutionalized. Most Tibetan Buddhist orders maintain a system of
“tantric colleges” complementing the dialectical colleges in which philosophical
subjects are taught. Among the Nyingmapa and Kagyüpa orders, for instance,
training in the tantras is typically conducted in a center of retreat (drupdra),
wherein the trainees are sequestered for a period of three years and three
fortnights (losum choksum), during which they practice in turn, under the
guidance of the retreat master, the preliminaries and the stages of creation and
perfection, culminating with the teachings of the Mahāmudrā or Dzokchen.
Among the Gelukpa, however, the tantric college (gyüdé dratsang) has a more
academic profile, combining training in ritual practice with progressive study of
the tantric scriptures upon which Gelukpa ritual traditions are based. In either
case, the collective retreat or tantric college is not seen as the end of training in
the tantras but as a beginning: the most highly motivated disciples may go on to
spend long years in solitary retreat, emulating past adepts such as Milarepa.
An important institution, too, is the Ngakpa Dratsang, the “College of Mantra-
adepts (ngakpa).” The “mantra-adepts” here are ordained lay priests, often
within the Nyingmapa order, who attend to a broad range of rituals required for
the peace and prosperity of the surrounding community. In many cases, Ngakpa
Tratsangs enjoy a relation of complementarity with a neighboring Gelukpa
temple or monastery. This symbiosis of celibate monasticism and lay tantrism is
a legacy of the fifth Dalai Lama, whose twin allegiances to the Gelukpa and
Nyingmapa traditions resulted in his nurturing the latter, even as he promoted
the former in tandem with the development of the Tibetan state.
In tantric Buddhism, the most crucial relationship is that between guru, or lama,
and disciple. The disciple pledges body, speech, and mind to the teacher who
bestows consecration upon him, and one’s oath to the teacher is inviolable. By
entering into a teacher’s circle, you become similarly bound by oath to your
fellow disciples, who thus become “vajra brothers and sisters.” Although such
relations could not be uniformly maintained, Tibetans traditionally took them
very seriously, and few charges against a person were more damaging of
reputation than that of being one who had violated samaya, the tantric vows.
The importance of oath-bound relations in tantric Buddhism had important social
implications. One feature that Tibet shared with many feudal societies was the
important role of sworn oaths and the obligations that were derived from them.
This was an essential characteristic of Tibetan culture quite apart from
Buddhism and is much emphasized, for instance, in Tibetan epic literature. With
the development of tantric Buddhism in Tibet, there emerged a degree of
congruence between lamas and lords. Of course, not all who were respected as
religious teachers held worldly rank, nor were more than a small proportion of
the nobles ever regarded as spiritual masters as well. But in a significant number
of cases lord and lama were one—the hierarchy of the Sakyapa order provides a
clear instance. Under such circumstances, the tantric vow, binding master and
disciples into a single spiritual family, served in effect to supercharge the
relation of fealty, which was now reinforced not merely by the social approval or
disapproval attached to it but by the menace of swift rebirth in the infernal
realms to any who transgressed their commitments.
8. A lay priest (ngakpa) at a Nyingmapa tantric college in Amdo. The structure to his left is the
sangtap in the college’s courtyard, the special furnace used for sang, the fumigation of the
environment through the offering of aromatic substances.

9. Dancers at a performance of cham, ritual masked dance, at the Tramdruk temple in Central Tibet.
Although cham may have its origins in indigenous Tibetan cults of the local protective deities, its
practice has been entirely reformulated over the centuries to conform with the ritual strictures of the
tantras.

With the development of identified incarnation (trülku) as the means to ensure

monastic succession, a process culminating in the transformation of Tibet itself
into an ecclesiastical state headed by one such incarnation line, that of the Dalai
Lamas, the tantric vow became a fundamental instrument binding Tibetan
society as a whole. The great network of Gelukpa monasteries, and often
establishments of other orders as well, was led by churchmen who were
themselves bound to the Dalai Lamas by their vows. The system of recognized
incarnation meant that the connections and obligations thereby created were
maintained over the course of generations. In this way, the formerly exceptional
relationship of tantric master and disciple became an instrument of social
cohesion.
As tantrism suffused the social order, so too the very fabric of space and time.
Thus the pilgrimage landscape of Tibet came to be conceived in terms of the
principle of the maṇḍala—Mount Kailash, for instance, was regarded as the
palace of the great tantric deity Cakrasaṃvara, in the center of a maṇḍala
inscribed in the lakes, rivers, mountains, and caves for hundreds of miles around.
Indeed, those of “pure vision” might journey to hidden lands (beyül), where
terrestrial paradises were to be found. And the rituals marking the festival cycles
were also tantric in most cases; often these were accompanied by masked
dances, cham, in which the deities of the maṇḍala were manifest to the eyes of
all.
Chapter 7
When this life ends

Among the Tamang people of Nepal, it is sometimes said that for weddings one
must send for a brahman priest, but that a funeral must be officiated by a lama.
Tibetan Buddhism is regarded as having a special command of mortuary ritual
and the means to assure a fortunate rebirth for the deceased. The prominence of
mortuary cult in Tibet reflects the confluence of both indigenous and Buddhist
beliefs and practices, as these have intermingled and developed for more than a
thousand years.

The uncertain fate of the dead

Archaeology and early Tibetan writings demonstrate the importance to pre-
Buddhist Tibet of mortuary rites. The Old Tibetan Chronicle, composed ca. 800,
opens with an account of the death of the first mortal king, Drigum Tsenpo, and
describes the origins of royal interment: the monarch’s hair was to be braided
and his face painted with vermillion; his body was preserved in a mausoleum,
with offerings of food and drink. Other documents discovered at Dunhuang also
detail the program at royal funerals, which required an elaborate and specialized
priesthood, and often followed the death by several years. These were solemn
moments for the old Tibetan monarchy, and later Tibetan historiography reflects
this in its scrupulous attention to the construction and placement of the
mausoleums of early kings, which have remained hallowed places of pilgrimage.
The careful attendance of the dead, their provision with adequate nutrition, and
traditions concerning the bodily ascent of the kings prior to Drigum Tsenpo to
the heavens—these demonstrate that there were clear Tibetan beliefs concerning
the fate of the dead prior to the advent of Buddhism. Just what those beliefs
were, however, remains uncertain. It is possible that reincarnation, at least in the
event of neonatal death, was affirmed, suggesting the concept of a persisting
soul. Nevertheless, several of the earliest Tibetan Buddhist documents clearly
treat the Buddhist idea of a repeating cycle of birth, death, and rebirth as alien to
earlier belief. One example is The Cycle of Birth and Death, a poem that begins
with the discovery of death by the Tibetan gods, one of whom, Precious Jewel,
becomes profoundly upset on learning that his father, Light Blazing King, is
dying; he searches throughout the universe for the means to overcome this
terrible situation. He ultimately finds the goal of his quest in India, meeting with
the Buddha, Śākyamuni, who assuages the gods’ fears by teaching them a tantric
funeral ritual, which will insure future well-being for the deceased.
From the late-tenth century on, Tibet absorbed newly transmitted rituals and
contemplative practices from India, including many that were intended to
forestall death or to guarantee that the deceased would realize an auspicious
path. Accordingly, funerary rites of Tibetan authorship responded to these new
inputs. The so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead, revealed as “spiritual treasure”
(terma) in the fourteenth century, is surely the most famous product of this
process.

Of central importance here was the conception of the bardo (Skt. antarābhava),
the “intermediate state” between death and rebirth. The idea originated in Indian
Buddhism in response to problems raised concerning the Buddhist denial of an
enduring self or soul, in the absence of which the connection between one life
and the next seemed inexplicable. The concept of a passage linking successive
lives was embraced by some schools as a plausible solution, and it was this
theory that was adopted as the bardo in Tibet.

The Ars Moriendi in Tibet

A fourteenth-century “treasure” attributed to Padmasambhava offers these counsels to prepare for
death:

After the earth element [in the body] dissolves into water, the body grows heavy, and
cannot be supported. When water dissolves into fire, the mouth and nose dry out. When the
fire dissolves into wind, bodily heat is lost. When wind dissolves into consciousness,
breath is forced out in a sudden exhalation, and you can’t accept the offerings you’re given
to swallow. At that time, you feel that you’re being pressed down by a great mountain, or
that you’ve been forced into darkness, or thrown into empty space, and all appearance is
accompanied by whirring and hissing noises. The entire atmosphere becomes glaringly
bright, as if a silken canopy were thrown open. In a tent of rainbow-light one’s awareness
seems to fill up space with peaceful and wrathful and semi-wrathful [spirits], who have
various sorts of heads and forms, and wield all sorts of weapons, roaring in all sorts of
 various sorts of heads and forms, and wield all sorts of weapons, roaring in all sorts of
ferocious tones…. And the light that shines is like a hundred-thousand suns rising at once.
At that time, know this: the thought that you are being crushed is not a mountain
oppressing you, for it is the dissolution of your own physical elements. Don’t be frightened
by that! The thought that you are being forced into darkness is not darkness, for it is the
dissolution of your own five sensory organs. The thought that you are falling through space
is not falling, for when mind and body part, and breath ceases, mind is without support. All
manifestations of rainbow-light are the radiance of your own awareness. All peaceful and
wrathful embodiments are forms of your own awareness. All sounds are its natural sound.
All the lights are its natural light. Have no doubt about it! For if you doubt, you’ll be
thrown into saṃsāra.

Introducing the Moment of Death, a treasure of Dorjé Lingpa

The notion of the bardo was not just theoretical, however. In some tantras, a
process was described in which the deceased experienced various sounds and
lights, to which he or she reacted with fear or attraction, thereby setting the
course to a new birth. Special meditations were developed to prepare for these
experiences, so that one might be assured a safe journey culminating in fortunate
rebirth.
With the promotion of such instructions in Tibet, funerary rites based on them
were elaborated, incorporating what may have been an indigenous Tibetan
funerary custom of calling the dead. The meditations of the bardo were no
longer the exclusive domain of the adept, but could be imparted by a priest
reading a guide to the bardo during the period when the deceased’s
consciousness was thought to be still wandering within it. With the great
distribution of the Book of the Dead—in Tibetan the “Great Liberation by
Hearing in the Bardo” (Bardo tödröl)—and similar works, such beliefs came to
pervade Tibetan conceptions of the fate of the dead.

The pure lands

If you were able to choose your course of rebirth, what would you choose?
Certainly, birth in the hells or among tormented ghosts must be avoided; so too
animal existences, subject as they are, according to Buddhist views, to short
lifespan, terror, pain, and stupidity. The gods and titans enjoy great power,
longevity, and heavenly pleasures, but they are subject, in the end, to the decline
of their merits and an inescapable fall into inferior realms. And human life is
considered to be really favorable only if one has the capacity and inclination to
enter the Buddha’s path, together with the resources to do so. For consciousness
wandering in the bardo, terrified by sounds and lights, the prospects therefore
appear dismal.

By all means, then, one should either put an end to rebirth by attaining nirvāṇa,
or else seek rebirth in a realm where one can learn and practice the Dharma and
thus progress to eventual liberation. Many such options seem available. In the
Tuṣita heaven, Maitreya, the coming Buddha, is already crowned as regent and
teaches the Dharma to the gods. In the mysterious land of Shambhala,
somewhere to the north, the kings preserve the Tantra of the Wheel of Time and
prepare for world conquest. On Mount Potalaka, Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva
of compassion, holds court; while on the isle of ogres the great adept
Padmasambhava will teach the tantras until the end of the eon.
One should never make travel plans in haste, however. To be born in the
presence of Maitreya, one requires the merits of a god. Only advanced adepts
will reach Shambhala, and to join Padmasambhava one risks birth among the
ogres instead of among human disciples. On close examination, even most
Buddhist paradises are therefore not without risk. It is for this reason that one
destination is favored over all: Sukhāvatī (Tib. Dewachen), the Land of Bliss to
the west presided over by the Buddha of endless light, Amitābha (Tib. Öpamé).
For this Buddha’s vow stipulates that all those who have faith in him and his
realm, and who have been morally upright, will be born in his presence on this
basis alone, without need for the merits of a god or the attainments of an
advanced meditator.

The teachings of the buddha Amitābha and his Sukhāvatī realm began in early
first millennium India but soon spread to China and enjoyed enormous success
throughout East Asia, giving rise to “Pure Land Buddhism,” which is sometimes
portrayed as resonating with Christian spirituality owing to its emphasis on the
devotee’s faith and the Buddha’s grace. In Tibet, however, there was no
sectarian development of this sort; instead, all of the Tibetan Buddhist orders
affirmed rebirth in the Land of Bliss as a preeminent, though not exclusive,
spiritual goal. Innumerable tantric as well as exoteric devotions, meditations, and
rituals were composed to ensure this happy outcome.

On preparing for rebirth as one sleeps

 At night, when going to sleep, lie down upon your right side. Perform the
refuge and cultivation of bodhicitta, and thinking to yourself that this very
place is the Sukhāvatī realm, visualize yourself as your favored
meditational deity. Visualize that before you, atop a lotus and lunar disk,
sits Amitābha, red in color, his hands resting in an even gesture and holding
a begging bowl filled with ambrosia. He sits in the cross-legged posture,
adorned with jewel-ornaments. Think that he is surrounded by the gurus.
Then, thinking that all around them are the buddhas and bodhisattvas,
mentally perform three prostrations…. Then, together with your
exhalations, imagine that your mind dissolves into the heart of the
Conqueror, indivisibly merging with the Conqueror’s heart. When you
inhale, imagine that light comes forth from the Conqueror’s heart, and
entering by the path of your speech, dissolves into your heart, so that the
Conqueror’s Mind and your mind indivisibly merge. After practicing that
for three cycles [of breath], imagine that the buddhas and bodhisattvas
dissolve into the gurus and the gurus then into Amitābha. Amitābha melts
into light and dissolves into yourself. And you, in turn, dissolve into light,
thinking the trinity of Buddha, meditational deity, and your own mind to be
indivisibly intermingled…. Go to sleep in that state, without letting your
thoughts wander…. By practicing this, in the future, sloughing off this body
like a serpent’s skin, you will be miraculously born from a lotus in
Sukhāvatī in the west, and hear the Dharma preached by Amitābha.

Sleep Meditation on Amitābha, by Sakya Paṇḍita (1182–1251)

The most powerful means to direct one’s course at death was generally
considered to be the practice of powa, “transference,” a tantric exercise intended
to cause the consciousness of the dying individual to depart suddenly from the
body through a forced opening at the crown of the skull, whence it may travel
immediately to a desired realm. Although, once again, this was initially a
technique reserved for virtuoso practitioners, at some point it came to be
popularized and, like the teachings of the bardo, could be performed on one’s
behalf by a suitably qualified priest. Because adepts of powa were believed to be
able to direct the consciousness to a blessed realm, the technique became not
only an essential aspect of personal religious practice but equally the stock in
trade for ritual specialists called upon to assist at the time of death and for the
subsequent funeral rites. Thus its performance became a major source of
religious revenue. Inevitably, given the devotional focus upon Amitābha’s Land
of Bliss, this came to be the preferred destination for the powa ritual as well.

Funeral customs
In Tibetan society the manner of one’s death is a matter of great importance.
Ideally, one should be comfortable and calm, and, if too ill to undertake
appropriate religious practices oneself, at least able to understand when friends,
family members, or, preferably, a lay priest or monk whisper instructions in
one’s ear to visualize one’s teachers and to mentally perform devotions to the
deities upon whom one has previously meditated. Those in attendance seek to
ensure that the dying be in a tranquil and virtuous state of mind, for final
thoughts contribute greatly to one’s future destination. Immediately following
death, the corpse is not to be touched until the powa has been performed. Lamps
are to be kept constantly alight surrounding the deceased, and family members
adopt the formal signs of mourning, leaving their hair disheveled, abandoning
ornaments, and wearing old clothes.
If at all possible, a lama known to be a master of powa is invited to perform the
rite in the presence of the deceased, but if this is not practical, the rite may be
performed from afar. After some hours have passed, it is permitted to handle the
corpse, and those who are charged to do so first touch the crown of the head, a
sign of the departure of consciousness effected by the powa. As these and
subsequent funerary activities are conducted, it is customary, too, to invite
monks to the household to perform constant prayers on behalf of the departed.
All clergy who participate in the last rites are to receive generous donations, for
it is essential to demonstrate and augment the merits of the deceased in this way.
An astrologer may also be consulted to prepare a death horoscope, and to
determine what special rites need to be undertaken.
Once the corpse can be handled, it is bathed with fragrant water and wrapped in
clean cloth, its orifices blocked with butter. It must also be bound with cords
made of plant fiber, a means to render it immobile and thus incapable of being
possessed by a zombie. As this clearly suggests, Tibetan mortuary practices, like
last rites in other cultures, are as much concerned to assuage the anxieties of the
living as they are to secure the peace of the dead. On the eve of the date
determined by the astrologer for the disposal of the corpse, special efforts are
made to multiply merits by making sure that prayers are recited and plentiful
lamps and incense offered at neighboring shrines, following which the corpse
will be removed from its former home, never to return.
will be removed from its former home, never to return.
The deceased departs on his or her final journey before dawn. Though interment
and burial in rivers were known, the favored means of disposal in Tibet were
cremation and “oblation for the birds (jator),” usually called “sky burial” in
English, a euphemism for the dismemberment of the corpse at a designated
charnel ground, where the remains are fed to vultures. It is not clear when this
custom, which has a marked affinity with burial by exposure as practiced in the
Zoroastrian religion, first became widespread in Tibet, but it has certainly been
the preferred means in recent centuries. Cremation, however, is frequently
practiced in lower elevation, forested regions, and in particular in areas such as
Ladakh, Bhutan, and Nepal, which are closely contiguous with the sphere of
Hindu civilization. Cremation is also often employed to dispose of the remains
of lamas and other dignitaries.
The practice of sky burial was first noted by European travelers in the Middle
Ages, and they interpreted it as evidence of cannibalism, imagining that bone
implements used in some tantric rituals were the gruesome remains of departed
parents. In fact, Tibetans regard the sky burial as an event of great solemnity, the
last and ultimate offering one can make, a sacrifice of one’s own flesh to feed
hungry creatures who bear the matter of which one was made to pure celestial
realms. Similarly, when cremation is practiced it is treated as a form of homa,
the ancient Indian ritual of offering sacrifices into the flames, thereby
transporting to heaven what is burned. The disposal of the corpse is both a final,
culminating act of generosity and a passage to higher stations.
Following the custom said to have been introduced by the Chinese princess
Jincheng during the eighth century, weekly observances are held for a period of
seven weeks, culminating in elaborate ceremonies marking the forty-ninth day
after death, at which point the deceased is supposed to have completed his or her
passage through the bardo and to have reached the point of rebirth. After this, a
service to mark the first anniversary of death is often performed and, in some
cases, a regular annual memorial.
Throughout this entire period, Tibetan families place considerable emphasis on
demonstrating their unstinting commitment to merit-making activities on behalf
of the departed. At present, parental funerals are as enthusiastically documented
in photography and video as are weddings in the United States, the reason for
this being that “people should know that we have done well by our parents.” As
this makes clear, rebirth is thought to be determined, not as normative Buddhist
doctrine would have us believe by the weight of one’s personal karma alone, but
also according to the merit that is generated on one’s behalf, particularly by
one’s descendants.

Saintly death
Death, for Tibetans, is an incisive index of how one has lived. A serene passing
contrasts sharply with dying in agony, a sense of closure following a life well
lived with feelings of dismay and regret. The events leading up to and
surrounding death, including the entire ensemble of mortuary rites, constitute a
distillation of the life they conclude. For this reason, the passing of a religious
figure is scrutinized with particular attention for signs of sanctity and indications
of future rebirth. It may be noted, for instance, that one died quietly in
meditation, or while practicing the yoga of powa. The unanticipated appearance
of flowers out of season, pleasant aromas, lights in the heavens, and more may
be regarded as omens. And of the innumerable signs that may accompany death,
none is rarer or more marvelous than the disappearance of an adept in the
“rainbow body” (jalü), the body of light. An oft-mentioned example is the death,
in 1872, of the Nyingmapa master Pema Düdül.
Most religious figures, however, even those renowned for their accomplishments
and sanctity, do not pass away so dramatically. Following their decease, their
remains will often be preserved in state for some time, so that disciples and
patrons from distant locations may arrive to pay last respects. Thus, as much as a
year may intervene between death and cremation (for, to the best of my
knowledge, the sky burial is seldom the means to dispose of the corpse of a
distinguished cleric). During this period, the deceased is considered to repose in
samādhi, and powa is usually not performed, for the saintly dead are thought to
direct their own destinies without the interference of others. Following
cremation, the ashes are carefully examined for hardened remains classed as
relics (ringsel), some of which may be preserved in memorial stūpas, while
some are distributed as blessings to disciples and sponsors, who carefully guard
them as sacred treasures.

An adept’s death
 In the water ape year (1872), on the new moon of the peaceful month of Vaiśakha, the
venerable lama [Pema Düdül] set up a meditation tent and dwelt there. He instructed his
disciples to come, and had them all settle into meditation, [visualizing the guru] upon the
crowns of their heads…. He then said, “Now, go back to your own places. After sewing
shut my tent-flap, no one is to come here for seven days.”
The disciples did what the lama had told them, and returned to their own places feeling
mentally ill at ease. At dawn on the seventh day, they performed prostrations before the
meditation tent which was the lama’s dwelling, and they opened it up. The lord’s robes and
meditation seat, his hair and the nails of his fingers and toes were there on his bed, but the
maṇḍala of his body had disappeared. At that, they lamented very much in sorrow,
whereupon the sky was all filled by rainbow lights and such. At that time, some intelligent
and supremely religious persons and some who were certainly his closest spiritual sons met
him in contemplative experiences, visions, and dreams, in which he granted them his
approval in speech, comforted them with the highest teachings, and so forth.

from the Biography of Nyakla Pema Düdül

In some cases, too, a deceased master will be mummified rather than cremated,
the preserved body encased in a stūpa as a relic unto itself and thus in effect
transformed into a perpetual shrine. This was practiced, for instance, in the case
of the Dalai Lamas, beginning with the fifth, whose gigantic, bejeweled
memorial is housed in the Potala Palace in Lhasa. The mummification of noted
spiritual leaders in Tibet may hark back to the ancient funerary rites of the rulers
of the old Tibetan empire, though the precise connections between them remain
to be studied in depth.

Postmortem journeys
An important class of mortuary specialist belongs at once to common and saintly
spheres. Indeed, liminality is the hallmark of the delok, the revenant, who, in
virtue of what we would term “near death experience,” is uniquely stationed to
offer testimony regarding the tribulations of those who traverse the bardo and
the varied rebirths they attain. Such persons, who may have had no formal
religious training before they “died,” frequently act as diviners and healers
following their experience, and written records of the deloks’ travels in the
beyond—whether fictional or based on the tales of historical revenants—are a
popular form of religious literature. An example is the legend of Chöwang, a
historical figure of the thirteenth century whose real biography contains no hint
of this story of his otherworldly adventures.
Following his father’s death and several failed attempts to convert his sinful
mother, Chöwang departs to visit Lhasa on a business trip as the story unfolds.
His mother dies before he returns home, leaving Chöwang tormented by anxious
concern for her destiny. Entering a trance, he “dies” and ascends to heaven,
where he meets the god Indra, who declares that, owing to his mother’s
arrogance and greed, she had quickly fallen from one realm to the one below.
Realizing that his mother is to be found nowhere but in the hells, Chöwang
meets with Yama, the lord of the dead, who urges him to give up his quest. But
the hero persists and determines to take his mother’s sufferings upon himself so
that she be released. He is told, however, that the workings of karma are
infallible, this being one of the messages that is highlighted throughout the delok
literature. This moral is made clear through a series of judicial proceedings in
Yama’s court that unfold before Chöwang’s eyes: A virtuous man who had once
sinned—with three friends he once stole and slaughtered a yak—is mercifully
sentenced to a series of human lives; a young woman, who had profited from her
husband’s trade as a diviner by deceiving those in distress, is condemned to a
sealed iron chamber in the pit of hell; a preacher of Avalokiteśvara leads female
disciples to higher rebirths, while most of their husbands descend; and the
virtuous wife of a doctor is sentenced to just a week in the poisonous waters of
purgatory in order to expiate her husband’s crime of imprudently bleeding (in
the medical sense) his patients.
After witnessing this, the fate of Chöwang’s mother is at last revealed: she has
been consigned to the sealed iron chamber in the very subbasement of hell. The
hero manages to penetrate even this dungeon; his appearance there causes the
demon-guardians to drop their weapons and faint, but at last he manages to find
his mother among the shades. By reciting Avalokiteśvara’s six-syllable mantra
he secures the release of tens of thousands, but his mother remains incorrigible.
Coercing her consciousness, he elevates her to the land of the hungry ghosts and
from there to the animal realm. Following this, she is condemned to take birth
once again, this time as a dog. In this form, she becomes receptive to her son’s
teaching of Dharma, and after returning with him to their ancestral home, she
gives up her canine form to be reborn in the heavens where her former husband
resides.
Such narratives pervade the delok literature. By offering first-person testimony
in confirmation of the truths of karma and Buddhist cosmology, they serve to
uphold the moral universe of Tibetan Buddhism, with its strongly marked
distinctions of merit and fault.
Chapter 8
Tibetan Buddhism today

Twentieth-century developments
Early in 1912, following the fall of the Manchu Qing dynasty, the thirteenth
Dalai Lama declared Tibetan independence. Although his vision embraced the
vast region of Tibetan habitation that had been claimed by the government of the
fifth Dalai Lama, the forces of Nationalist China and the warlords controlling its
western provinces sought to consolidate Chinese rule in the eastern Tibetan
regions of Kham and Amdo, and, indeed, continued to maintain that all Tibet
belonged to China. The Dalai Lama succeeded in holding the territory
corresponding to the actual Tibetan Autonomous Region, while Amdo mostly
fell into China’s Qinghai and Gansu provinces. In western Sichuan the new
Chinese province of Xikang was created, corresponding to eastern Kham.
Details aside, the status quo thus achieved reflected that which had prevailed
under the Manchus, but with the important difference that the Dalai Lama now
ruled an effectively independent state, if not one embracing the whole territory
to which he aspired.
The division of Tibetan regions between China and a free Tibet had important
entailments in the sphere of religion, whose ramifications are still felt to this day.
While many Tibetan religious leaders, even within Chinese-controlled areas,
remained loyal to the Dalai Lama and his government, others, who for one
reason or another were disaffected, if not with the Dalai Lama personally then at
least with his regime, decided to throw in their lot with the Nationalist Chinese.
In some cases, for instance that of the ninth Panchen Lama Chökyi Nyima
(1883–1937), who fled to China after a protracted dispute with the Lhasa
authorities over taxation, this involved a real commitment to the principles of
social and political modernization espoused by the founder of the Chinese
Republic, Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), and a desire to see similar progressive
developments in Tibet. One result was a period of warm interchange between
some Tibetan hierarchs and various groups in China: Chinese authorities in
several provinces sponsored huge public ceremonies conducted by Tibetan
lamas and monks, while ordinary Chinese devotees created Tibetan meditation
centers in major cities including Shanghai and Chongqing, and noted Chinese
Buddhist scholars became engaged in the study of Tibetan philosophical
systems.
This background helps to explain why it was that when events in China turned in
favor of the communists after World War II, some Tibetan modernists felt that
the revolutionary programs of the Communist Party offered the best prospects
for reform. Dobi Sherap Gyatso (1884–1968), for example, a renowned scholar
who had had a stormy relationship with the thirteenth Dalai Lama, first joined
the Chinese Nationalists but later turned to the communists. In 1952, two years
after China assumed control of Tibet, he became the first chairman of the
Chinese Buddhist Association. His attempt to find common ground between
Communist Party policies and the interests of his religion was embraced by
many educated Tibetan clergy during the 1950s, including both the present
fourteenth Dalai Lama (b. 1935) and the tenth Panchen Lama (1938–89), who
imagined that the ethical concerns of Mahāyāna Buddhism for universal well-
being might be realized under Mao’s socialist order.
It was not long, however, before the budding accord between Chinese
communism and Tibetan Buddhism collapsed. As China’s leaders came to
regard the monasteries as inimical to reform, they grew openly more critical of
religious leaders and institutions, and in 1956 some of the eastern Tibetan
monasteries associated with rebel movements were bombed. Tibetans generally
were horrified, and many from Amdo and Kham fled to Lhasa, where their
swelling numbers helped to provoke the Lhasa Uprising of March 1959,
followed by the Dalai Lama’s self-imposed exile in India. Relations between the
Tibetan Buddhist establishment and the Chinese government declined rapidly,
and by 1962 the two most noted Tibetan religious figures remaining in China,
the tenth Panchen Lama and Dobi Sherap Gyatso, proclaimed their disapproval
of the government’s handling of Tibetan affairs. In the years that followed, until
the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), religion was a principle target of
the Communist Party’s campaigns in Tibet: most of the several thousand temples
and monasteries that had formerly existed were destroyed, their libraries and
artwork dispersed or demolished, their monks and nuns—including prominent
hierarchs such as the Panchen Lama—subjected to reeducation and harsh
imprisonment, in which many perished.
While the disastrous conditions prevailing in China eliminated any scope for the
open practice and transmission of Tibetan Buddhism, a Tibet-in-exile was being
constructed under the Dalai Lama’s leadership in India. In addition, communities
that traditionally followed Tibetan Buddhism in the far north of India, as well as
in Nepal and Bhutan, dedicated renewed energy to the preservation and
development of their faith. This coincided with and helped to fuel a remarkable
growth of interest in Tibetan Buddhism among Europeans, Americans, and
overseas Chinese, with the ironic result that just as the tradition was eclipsed in
its homeland, it began to garner a widespread international following.
Among the teachers who succeeded particularly well in promoting their
traditions abroad were the head of the Nyingmapa order, Dudjom Rinpoché
Jikdrel Yeshé Dorjé (1904–87), the sixteenth Karmapa hierarch Rangjung Rikpé
Dorjé (1924–81), the great eclectic master Dilgo Khyentsé Rinpoché Trashi
Dawa (1910–91), and the master of the rare Shangpa Kagyü tradition Kalu
Rinpoché Rangjung Künkhyap (1905–87), who succeeded in establishing a
network of Western centers specializing in the traditional three-year retreat. A
number of younger teachers, including Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoché (1939–87),
Tarthang Tulku Rinpoché (b. 1934), Chögyal Namkhai Norbu (b. 1938), and
Sogyal Rinpoché (b. 1947), became permanently installed in the United States or
Europe, where they cultivated innovative approaches particularly geared to the
background and interests of their Western disciples. The Bön religion also
succeeded in gaining an international following, above all through the efforts of
the charismatic scholar and meditation master, Loppön Tendzin Namdak (b.
1926).
The greatest success, however, was reserved for the fourteenth Dalai Lama, who
assumed the role of an international spiritual superstar. Thanks to his abundant
energy, personal integrity, openness to diverse cultures, and lively interest in
dialogue of all kinds—religious, political, and scientific—the Dalai Lama was
able to reach far beyond the relatively narrow range of Westerners motivated
primarily by their involvement in Buddhism, and to engage in far-reaching
conversations in a variety of fields, including interfaith dialogue, human rights,
environmental issues, and the sciences. His worldwide popularity has been a
great source of frustration to Chinese authorities, who regard him as a political
renegade determined to split China apart, but, try though they may, they have not
made much headway in convincing others that this is so.
Reform and retrenchment
Following the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution and Deng Xiaoping’s rise to
power in 1978, liberalization policies initiated in China began to transform the
religious and cultural life of Tibet, and during the 1980s a remarkable upsurge of
Buddhist activity ensued. The Panchen Lama, who by then had been freed from
prison and rehabilitated, played a cardinal role here, encouraging the restoration
or reconstruction of temples and monasteries wherever feasible, and urging the
repatriation to Tibet of cultural treasures that had been taken to Beijing and
elsewhere in eastern China during the preceding decades. The small numbers of
surviving senior monks and nuns were augmented by a great many new novices,
some entering the monasteries on their own but many, as in earlier times, sent by
their families.
One of the several ironies stemming from the revival of Tibetan Buddhism in
contemporary China has been its success as a spiritual movement among affluent
and educated east-coast Chinese. The roots of this development may be found in
part in the upsurge of Tibetan Buddhist activity in Nationalist China after the
Qing dynasty and more immediately in the recent vogue of Tibetan Buddhism in
Taiwan, Hong Kong, and elsewhere in overseas Chinese communities. Today
eager students at leading universities in Beijing and Shanghai, much like their
Western counterparts, fill classes on Tibetan Buddhism, and wealthy Chinese
Buddhist devotees spend their vacations visiting teachers and temples in various
parts of Tibet. Indeed, some of China’s neo-Tibetan Buddhists, who have
money, passports, and a measure of liberty that few of China’s Tibetan citizens
enjoy, regularly travel to India to meet with and receive teachings from leading
masters in exile, including the Dalai Lama. Among Chinese students of Tibetan
Buddhism, however, it is well understood that their religious engagement may
be tolerated so long as it remains decisively apolitical.
While most Tibetan Buddhists in China, whatever their ethnicity, thus avoid
mixing religion and politics, some in the clergy are assertive in their conviction
that Tibetan religion and Tibetan autonomy are inevitably interlinked, and very
large numbers of Tibetans remain privately loyal to the Dalai Lama. Beginning
in the late 1980s, Tibet has been periodically rocked by protests and riots in
which the religious have played prominent roles, leading to ever-tightening
restrictions on Tibetan religious activity. This has produced a paradoxical
situation, paralleling patterns throughout China, in which the Chinese
government permits and even promotes liberalizing trends, only to suffocate the
ensuing expressions of freedom it regards as economically or politically
inconvenient.

10. In China, the practice of Tibetan Buddhism is now sometimes treated as a form of local folklore,
attracting the attention of tourists and broadcast media.

A series of significant crises erupted following the death, in 1989, of the highest
ranking Tibetan hierarch in China, the Panchen Lama. Though some effort was
made to coordinate the search for his successor, so that both the Dalai Lama and
Chinese authorities might be in agreement, misunderstandings arose, and in May
1995 the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile independently
announced the discovery of the young Panchen in Tibet. The Chinese reaction
was livid, and the young boy, Gendun Choekyi Nyima, who had been
recognized as the Panchen Lama by the Dalai Lama, was detained with his
family, never to be heard from again. The Chinese government rejected his
recognition and staged a lottery in November of the same year, choosing a new
Panchen Lama from a slate of officially designated candidates.
Although Chinese authorities have attempted to legitimize their selection
through a sustained publicity and propaganda campaign, China’s Panchen has
singularly failed to win the hearts and minds of the Tibetan people. This was
most dramatically demonstrated in late 1999, when two of the leading Tibetan
Buddhist figures in China—Arjia Rinpoché, the abbot of Kumbum monastery in
Buddhist figures in China—Arjia Rinpoché, the abbot of Kumbum monastery in
Qinghai, and Urgyan Trinlay, one of two young lamas recognized as the
seventeenth Karmapa incarnation—fled from China rather than acquiesce to the
government’s demand that they lend their affirmations to its recognition of the
Panchen. (Arjia Rinpoché settled in the United States, while Urgyan Trinlay,
effectively stealing the spotlight from a rival Karmapa, has become a close
protégé of the Dalai Lama in India and has won a broad following among
Tibetan exiles.)
Despite the involvement of numbers of mostly prosperous east-coast and
overseas Chinese in Tibetan Buddhism, few of the many Chinese who have
settled in Tibet for economic reasons have much interest in Tibetan religion and
culture. Their economic dominance of the towns has come to be profoundly
resented by Tibetans, particularly the youth, who suffer from high rates of
unemployment. In March and April 2008, a series of violent demonstrations
against the Chinese presence in Lhasa, in which numerous Chinese businesses
were torched and individual Chinese attacked in the streets, provoked a firestorm
of demonstrations throughout China’s Tibetan regions. Not since 1959 had such
widespread protest been seen. In parts of eastern Tibet, in particular, there was
considerable monastic involvement, embroiling such prominent centers as
Labrang Monastery in Gansu and Kirti Monastery in Sichuan. The Chinese
response, which would have no doubt been harsh under any circumstances, was
intensified by the negative attention these events created in the run-up to the
2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, and in the aftermath of the Tibetan protests
as many as one thousand monks were imprisoned. New restrictions were placed
on many monasteries, and political education campaigns intensified.
Among the most tragic outcomes of the ongoing tensions over Tibetan affairs in
China—in which the conditions of religious establishments and questions
surrounding the status of the Dalai Lama play a major role—has been a
significant number of self-immolations. Although beginning among Tibetan
exiles in India as a manner of protesting Tibet’s loss of independence, 2012–13
saw a wave of self-immolations, the majority involving monks or ex-monks,
mostly in their teens or early twenties, from Kirti Monastery or nearby regions in
the Tibetan districts of Sichuan, Gansu, and Qinghai. Tight restrictions on the
monasteries in places in which ethnic Tibetans increasingly feel themselves to be
losing ground to neighboring Chinese have no doubt contributed to the
background conditions for such dramatic expressions of protest, but these events
have yet to be fully explained. Notable, once again, is the role of the religious in
relation to questions of Tibetan identity and autonomy.
In recent years, discussions of Tibetan Buddhism in the popular press have
tended to be preoccupied with the question of the Dalai Lama’s religious
succession. (The Dalai Lama has already retired from his political functions, his
succession in this respect having been determined in early 2011 by the election
of Lobsang Sangay as prime minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile.) The
topic has given rise to much ill-informed speculation, due in no small measure to
the resistance on the part of the Dalai Lama himself to making public a clear
succession plan. The issue is particularly delicate, because it is apparent that the
government of China has its own plan: it will use its Panchen Lama to recognize
a new Dalai Lama when the time comes, and, as it has done in the case of the
Panchen Lama, it will impose this choice on the Tibetan people whatever their
sentiments regarding its legitimacy may be. It is therefore incumbent upon the
Dalai Lama and his partisans to arrive at a succession strategy that will
effectively neutralize the Chinese effort.
It seems that it is due to the cat-and-mouse game in which the opposing parties
are thus engaged that the Dalai Lama has opted to let a degree of uncertainty
reign in regard to his real intentions: perhaps the identity of the next Dalai Lama
will be decided while the present Dalai Lama is still alive; perhaps the Karmapa
will be his successor; perhaps a citizen of India will be chosen as Dalai Lama;
perhaps a woman…. In my view, none of these scenarios is very plausible; they
have been allowed to float primarily because they create a quandary for the
Chinese. The present Dalai Lama’s imprimatur on any such option will have the
effect of delegitimizing in advance, at least in the eyes of the Tibetan people
(and it is this that is all-important), a Chinese attempt to have their Panchen
Lama recognize the Dalai Lama’s successor. The Dalai Lama’s Tibetan
followers in the end will most likely follow a traditional selection process,
perhaps presided over by the Karmapa or another figure designated as the Dalai
Lama’s religious regent, and making sure that the procedure conforms with
widespread Tibetan expectations.

The view from the West

Besides the Tibetan populations of China and South Asia, and others who have
adhered to Tibetan Buddhism for centuries, including many Himalayan peoples
and the Mongols of Russia, Mongolia, and China, Tibetan Buddhism today has
achieved a modest following in many parts of the world. In Western countries,
although some Tibetan Buddhist centers adhere closely to traditional models,
there have also been significant innovations among them. The concern in
Tibetan societies for merit-making, divinations, and apotropaic rituals, though
not wholly absent, is reduced relative to a strong interest in the intellectual and
contemplative facets of Buddhist teaching. (The disinclination of Westerners to
participate in traditional merit-making is, for instance, evident in the practice of
admitting participants to discourses and initiations on payment of a set fee rather
than a voluntary donation.)
Particularly noteworthy is the prominent role of Tibetan Buddhist interlocutors,
beginning with the Dalai Lama, in the ongoing dialogue between Buddhism and
science (above all physics and the cognitive sciences). At the same time,
Buddhist methods of contemplation have become an object of study among
psychologists and others. (One major area of current scientific work is
remarkable for its absence in these conversations, namely, evolutionary biology,
which seems particularly difficult to reconcile with Buddhist conceptions of
karma.) In some contexts, the religious content of Tibetan Buddhism is all but
forgotten, and “Tibetan Buddhism” is reinscribed in contemporary settings as an
option among therapies or self-realization techniques. Despite a pronounced
tendency in the context of dialogue with the sciences to abstract Tibetan
Buddhism from its ancestral religious framework, however, the Dalai Lama
himself has remained an engaged participant in interreligious dialogue, urging
that compassion, rather than the details of belief, be seen as a possible meeting-
point among differing faiths.
Tibetan Buddhism has also served to involve Americans and Europeans in the
Tibetan political cause, but this has been accomplished unevenly. It has
contributed to the formation of vocal pro-Tibet lobbies in many countries, often
allied with broader human rights organizations, ensuring that the Dalai Lama
regularly meets with national leaders and other prominent personalities. These
activities infuriate Chinese leadership but yield few practical results; for China’s
importance in world affairs is such that no government will allow relations to be
compromised on account of the Dalai Lama or the Tibet question. Polite
meetings with him, and occasional legislative gestures of support, are, however,
useful means for Western political figures to remind China of abiding human
rights concerns, while throwing a bone to activists at home.
One may also note the rapidity with which Tibetan Buddhism in the West is
becoming non-Tibetan. The translation of texts has assumed tidal proportions, so
that for many adherents there is now no reason to learn the Tibetan language.
Westerners who have completed lengthy retreats and programs of traditional
study, some of whom sport the title of “lama,” increasingly act as teachers
among Western Buddhists, while a number of trülkus have been recognized in
North America and Europe as well. Only time will tell whether Tibetan
Buddhism will succeed in planting enduring roots in the West—even if in a form
no longer quite Tibetan—or whether it will prove to be a passing trend. For the
present writer, in any case, the chief interest of this tradition remains its long,
endlessly varied, and intricately refined development within the splendid
civilization of Tibet.
References and further reading

The author’s The Tibetans (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006) surveys Tibetan history
and culture, and includes a detailed bibliography. Sources of Tibetan
Tradition, ed. Kurtis Schaeffer, Matthew Kapstein, and Gray Tuttle (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2013) provides translated selections from
almost two hundred works. The Library of Tibetan Classics, published by
Wisdom Publications, provides authoritative, complete translations of major
works representing all schools of Tibetan Buddhism.
The following notes specify the sources of citations throughout this work, with
additional reading recommendations. Unless otherwise mentioned, all
translations are the author’s.

Chapter 1
Quotations from “a twelfth-century Bön text” are based on my “The
Commentaries of the Four Clever Men: A Doctrinal and Philosophical
Corpus in the Bon po rDzogs chen Tradition,” East & West 59 (2009): 107–
30. For Zurchungpa, see Dudjom Rinpoche Jikdrel Yeshe Dorje, The
Nyingma School of Tibetan Buddhism: Its Fundamentals and History, trans.
Gyurme Dorje and Matthew Kapstein, 2nd ed. (Boston: Wisdom
Publications, 2002), 1:629. The sang liturgy is translated from the Ri bo
bsang mchod of Lha-btsun Nam-mkha’-’jigs-med.
Geoff Childs, Tibetan Diary: From Birth to Death and Beyond in a Himalayan
Valley of Nepal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) is an
outstanding introduction to the ethnography of Tibetan Buddhism. For a
broad survey of the anthropological literature, see Geoffrey Samuel,
Civilized Shamans: Buddhism in Tibetan Societies (Washington, DC:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993). Per Kværne, The Bon Religion of Tibet
(London: Serindia Publications, 1995) offers an accessible introduction to
Bön. Donald S. Lopez Jr., ed., Religions of Tibet in Practice (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1997) provides an anthology relating to ritual,
 pilgrimage, meditation, etc.

Chapter 2
Selections from Tri Songdetsen’s edicts and the Samyé debate are from my
“Buddhist Thought in Tibet: An Historical Introduction,” in The Oxford
Handbook of World Philosophies, ed. William Edelglass and Jay L. Garfield
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 244–62. The discussion of the
vehicles from the Lta ba’i khyad par of Ye-shes-sde is presented here for the
first time. The “early text in which ‘Bön’ unambiguously denotes the pre-
Buddhist religion” is edited and translated in Pasang Wangdu and Hildegard
Diemberger, dBa’ bzhed: The Royal Narrative Concerning the Bringing of
the Buddha’s Doctrine to Tibet (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der
Wissenschaften, 2000). The extract from Tri Desongtsen’s edict on tantric
practice and the summary of the nine vehicles are from my The Tibetan
Assimilation of Buddhism: Conversion, Contestation, and Memory (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Chapter 3
Ronald M. Davidson, Tibetan Renaissance (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2005) studies the period of the post–tenth-century revival of Tibetan
Buddhism with particular attention to the Sakyapa. For the “eight lineages,”
refer to my “gDams-ngag: Tibetan Technologies of the Self,” in Tibetan
Literature: Studies in Genre, ed. Roger Jackson and José Cabezón (Ithaca,
NY: Snow Lion Publications, 1995), 275–89; and “Tibetan Technologies of
the Self, Part 2,” in Ramón Prats, ed., The Pandita and the Siddha
(Dharamsala: Amnye Machen Research Institute, 2007), 110–29.

Chapter 4
The “elegy of worship” comes from my “The Guide to the Crystal Peak: A
Pilgrim’s Handbook,” in D. Lopez, Tibetan Religions in Practice, 103–19.
On pilgrimage, see Toni Huber, The Cult of Pure Crystal Mountain (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Translations from the writings of
Atiśa throughout the chapter are my own. Pakpa’s “letter of spiritual advice”
is cited from my “Chos-rgyal ‘Phags-pa’s Advice to a Mongolian
Noblewoman,” in Historical and Philological Studies of China’s Western
 Regions 3 (2010): 135–43. Verses from the Maṇi Kabum are from my “The
Royal Way of Supreme Compassion,” in D. Lopez, ed., Tibetan Religions in
Practice, 69–76.
Thupten Jinpa, Mind Training: The Great Collection (Boston: Wisdom, 2006) is
a superb collection of the major works of the lojong genre.

Chapter 5
The “nineteenth-century teacher from Amdo” is Düjom Dorjé, on whom see my
“The Sprul-sku’s Miserable Lot: Critical Voices from Eastern Tibet,” in
Amdo Tibetans in Transition, ed. Toni Huber (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 99–111.
Citations from Karma Pakshi, Karmapa Rangjung Dorjé, Dölpopa, Longchen
Rapjampa, Tsongkhapa, and Mipam are based on my “Buddhist Thought in
Tibet,” in Edelglass and Garfield, Oxford Handbook of World Philosophies.
The passage from Sakya Paṇḍita is translated here from his Skyes bu dam pa
la spring ba. The quotation from Gorampa is based on the translation of José
Cabezón and Geshe Lobsang Dargyay, Freedom from Extremes: Gorampa’s
“Distinguishing the Views” and the Polemics of Emptiness (Boston:
Wisdom, 2007), 137.
For a thorough account of Tibetan monastic education, see Georges B. J.
Dreyfus, The Sound of Two Hands Clapping: The Education of a Tibetan
Buddhist Monk (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Tuken’s
great synthesis of Indian, Tibetan, and Chinese philosophy is now available
in a fine English translation: Geshe Lhundup Sopa and Roger R. Jackson,
eds. and trans., The Crystal Mirror of Philosophical Systems: A Tibetan
Study of Asian Religious Thought (Boston: Wisdom, 2009).

Chapter 6
Peltrül Rinpoché’s discussion of the “characteristics of Buddhist tantra” may be
found in his beautiful introduction to Nyingmapa tantric practice, translated
in Padmakara Translation Committee, The Words of My Perfect Teacher
(San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1994). The traditional account of Milarepa’s
discipleship is Tsangnyön Heruka, The Life of Milarepa, trans. Andrew
Quintman (New York: Penguin, 2010). Quotations from Sachen Künga
Nyingpo’s Rgyud sde spyi rnam are translated here for the first time. The
verse by Karmapa Rangjung Dorjé is from his Phyag chen smon lam
 (“Mahāmudrā Prayer”).

Chapter 7
Part of this chapter is based on my The Tibetan Assimilation of Buddhism. The
“fourteenth-century ‘treasure’ attributed to Padmasambhava” is the Gdam
ngag mar gyi yang zhun gdam pa ‘chi ba’i ngo sprod revealed by Rdo-rje-
gling-pa. For the sleep meditation by Sakya Paṇḍita, see my “Pure Land
Buddhism in Tibet?” in Approaching the Land of Bliss: Religious Praxis in
the Cult of Amitabha, ed. Richard Payne and Kenneth Tanaka (University of
Hawai’i Press, 2004), 16–41; and on the death of Pema Düdül, my “The
Strange Death of Pema the Demon-Tamer,” in The Presence of Light, ed.
Matthew T. Kapstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 119–56.
The legend of Chöwang is based on my “Mulian in the Land of Snows and
King Gesar in Hell: A Chinese Tale of Parental Death in Its Tibetan
Transformations,” in The Buddhist Dead: Practices, Discourses,
Representations, ed. Bryan J. Cuevas and Jacqueline I. Stone (Honolulu:
University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), 345–77.
Gyurme Dorje, trans., The Tibetan Book of the Dead, ed. Graham Coleman with
Thupten Jinpa (New York: Viking, 2006) provides the fullest selection from
the famous “Book” in English. Bryan J. Cuevas, Travels in the Netherworld
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) offers an attractive selection of
delok tales.

Chapter 8
Early twentieth-century relations between Tibetan and Chinese Buddhists are
studied in Gray Tuttle, Faith and Nation: Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of
Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); and in several
of the chapters of my edited volume, Buddhism Between Tibet and China
(Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2009). Case studies in Tibetan Buddhism
during the 1980s and ’90s may be found in Melvyn C. Goldstein and
Matthew T. Kapstein, eds., Buddhism in Contemporary Tibet: Religious
Revival and Cultural Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998). Donald S. Lopez Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-la: Tibetan Buddhism and
the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) provides an
entertaining account of Western engagements in Tibetan Buddhism, while
his Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed (Chicago: University
 of Chicago Press, 2008) surveys many areas of recent dialogue between
Buddhism and science, with particular emphasis on the role of Tibetan
Buddhism therein.

Video and Internet Resources

Videos available on DVD
Destroyer of Illusion: The Secret World of a Tibetan Lama. Dir. Richard Kohn.
1991/2006. Festival Media. An engrossing ethnographic film documenting
the Mani Rimdu festival in Nepal, with its elaborate rites of masked dance.
The Lion’s Roar. Dir. Mark Elliot. 1985/2006. Festival Media. A moving portrait
of the sixteenth Karmapa.
Milarepa: Magician, Murderer, Saint. Dir. Neten Chokling. 2008. Shining
Moon Productions. Compelling interpretation of Milarepa’s early life, his
career as a black magician, filmed in Tibetan from a distinctively Tibetan
perspective. A sequel, following Milarepa’s discipleship under Marpa, is
promised.
The Reincarnation of Khensur Rinpoche. Dir. Ritu Saran and Tenzin Sonam.
1991/1999. White Crane. Outstanding record of the search for a deceased
master’s reincarnation.
The Saltmen of Tibet. Dir. Ulrike Koch. 1997/2002. Zeitgeist Films. Stunning
documentation of the occupations and rituals of the salt-gatherers of far
western Tibet.
Tibet: A Buddhist Trilogy. Dir. Graham Coleman. 1979/2006. Festival Media.
Trilogy filmed in Nepal, India, and Ladakh, introducing the Dalai Lama,
tantric meditation practices, and mortuary rites.
Tibetan Buddhism: Preserving the Monastic Tradition. Dir. Edward Bastian.
1982. University of Wisconsin. Introduction to monastic life in the refugee
monastery of Sera in South India.
The Yogis of Tibet: A Film for Posterity. Dir. Phil and Jo Borack. 2002. JEHM
Films. A remarkable encounter with adepts of the esoteric techniques of
tantric yoga.

Websites
Himalayan Art Resources (http://www.himalayanart.org/). The world’s largest
educational resource for Himalayan Art and iconography.
The Tibetan and Himalayan Library (THL) (http://www.thlib.org/). A publisher
of websites, information services, and networking facilities relating to the
Tibetan plateau and southern Himalayan regions.
The Treasury of Lives: Biographies of Himalayan Religious Masters
(http://www.treasuryoflives.org/). A bibliographical encyclopedia of all
known past masters of Himalayan religion, both Buddhist and Bon.
Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center (http://www.tbrc.org/). The Tibetan Buddhist
Resource Center (TBRC) is dedicated to seeking out, preserving, organizing,
and disseminating Tibetan literature.
Index
A
Abhidharma, 64, 67
absolute. See ultimate reality
Altan Khan, 40
Amdo, northeastern Tibet, 37, 39, 42, 43, 65, 74, 90, 106, 108
Amitābha Buddha, 97, 98, 99
animals
as realm of rebirth, 11, 14, 50, 60, 95, 105
ransomed from slaughter, 54
Arjia Rinpoché, 112
Asaṅga, 57, 69
astrology, 2, 3, 35, 62
Atiśa Dīpaṃkaraśrījñāna, 30–31, 38, 50–57, 58–60
atiyoga. See dzokchen
Avalokiteśvara (Chenrezi), bodhisattva of compassion, 2, 13, 31, 45, 57–61, 97,
105
Dalai Lamas and Karmapas identified with, 58
as “Six Syllables,” 58, 59
awakening. See buddhahood; enlightenment

B
bardo, the intermediate state between death and rebirth, 34, 94–99, 101, 104
Beijing, 42, 76, 110, 113
Bengal, 30, 50
Bhṛkuṭī, Nepalese princess, 13
Bhutan (Drukyül), 35, 101, 108
blessings, 4, 22, 45, 49, 58, 103
bodhisattvas, 2, 13, 14, 20, 22, 25, 27, 37, 45–61, 63, 81, 83, 98
 enlightened spirit (bodhicitta) of, 50–57, 87, 98
lama as, 3, 37, 58
“Lords of the Three Clans,” 58
path of, 30, 32, 45, 49–57, 71
six perfections of, 51, 53, 56
ten levels/stages of, 20, 57
ten perfections of, 20
vows of, 51, 53, 87
See also Avalokiteśvara
Bön and Bönpo, 4–7, 9, 22, 41, 44, 46, 88, 109
emergence of, 23–25
nine vehicles of, 27–28, 85
priesthood of (bon, shen), 5, 23, 24
“Southern Treasure” of, 27–28
buddhahood, 20, 25, 33, 57, 70, 80. See also enlightenment
Buddha(s), 8, 10, 14, 15, 20, 21, 24, 25, 32, 45, 48, 49, 53, 54, 57, 63, 68, 69, 70,
72, 77, 79, 80, 81, 86, 87, 94, 95, 97, 98
authority of, 65
“body of emanation” of, 37
“body of reality” of, 88
images of, 12–13, 38, 46
Tibetan emperor as representative of, 16
buddha-nature, 69, 70
Butön Rinchendrup, 36

C
Candrakīrti, 56, 69, 73, 74
canonical scriptures, sūtras, 4, 15, 16, 36, 58, 79, 80, 82
of the Bönpo, 25
printing of, 43
See also Kanjur; Tanjur
Central Asia, Buddhist monks from, 12, 15
Central Tibet, 13, 20, 23, 24, 30, 37, 40, 43, 50, 64, 66, 74, 91
Chan Buddhism, 20–22
chang, Tibetan ale, 5, 6
Changkya Rölpé Dorjé, 42, 76
Chapa Chökyi Senggé, 66
China, 12, 23, 25, 39, 40, 42, 43, 97, 107–14
Communist Party of, 107, 108
Nationalist, 106, 107, 110
Chinese twelve-year animal cycle, 49
Chinese Buddhism, 13, 16, 20–21, 68, 76, 77, 101, 107, 110
Chinggis Khan, 36
Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, 109
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoché, 109
Chomden Rikrel, 36
Chongqing, 107
compassion, 2, 3, 19, 20, 28, 31, 45, 48, 51–61, 86, 87, 115
emptiness imbued with, 31, 60
See also Avalokiteśvara
Confucianism, 77
cremation, 100, 101, 102, 103
Cultural Revolution, 107, 109

D
Dalai Lama I Gendün–drup, 40
Dalai Lama II Gendün Gyatso, 40
Dalai Lama III Sonam Gyatso, 40
Dalai Lama IV Yönten Gyatso, 41
Dalai Lama V Ngawang Gyatso, 41–42, 43, 70, 89, 103, 106
Dalai Lama VI Tsangyang Gyatso, 42
Dalai Lama VII Kelzang Gyatso, 76
Dalai Lama XIII Tupten Gyatso, 44, 106–7
Dalai Lama XIV Tenzin Gyatso, 107–16
Dalai Lamas, 7, 37, 58, 91, 103
 origin of title, 40
death, 4, 5, 10, 13, 19, 34, 50, 51, 52, 60, 87, 94, 96, 99, 100, 101, 104
of the first mortal king, 93
saintly, 102–4
See also funerals and mortuary rites
debate, 21, 22, 24, 38, 69, 74
as educational practice, 63–66, 68
demons, malefic spirits (dré), 1, 3, 5–11, 96, 105
as causes of illness, 2, 5, 6, 10
maintaining harmony with, 4, 25, 28
subjugated by Padmasambhava, 5, 16
See also lu (nāgas)
Deng Xiaoping, 109
dependent origination (Skt. pratītyasamutpāda), 19, 20. See also relativity
Dergé, Kham, 43
Dharma (chö), the Buddhist teaching, 15, 24, 25, 48, 53, 97, 98, 105
Dharmakīrti, 64, 68, 69
Dignāga, 69
Dilgo Khyentsé Rinpoché Trashi Dawa, 109
divination (mo), 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 28
divinities (lha), 5–11, 16, 25, 26, 28, 32, 45, 48, 58, 63, 79, 81, 82, 85. See also
tantric deities
Dobi Sherap Gyatso, 107, 108
Dölpopa Sherap Gyeltsen, 37, 70, 71, 73
Dorta the Black, 36
Drakpa Gyeltsen, 33, 58
Drepung monastery, 40, 42, 64
Drigum Tsenpo, 93, 94
Drigung Kyopa Jiktensumgön, 35
Drigung monastery, 49
Drigungpa order, 34–35
Drokmi Śākya Yeshé, 32, 33, 38
Dromtön Gyelwé Jungné, 30, 38
Drukpa Kagyü order, 35
Dudjom Rinpoché Jikdrel Yeshé Dorjé, 108
Dunhuang, 20, 23, 93
dzokchen (“Great Perfection”), 27–28, 34, 37, 59, 61, 68, 70, 88, 89

E
emptiness, insubstantiality (Skt. śūnyatā), 19, 31, 51, 53, 55, 56, 57, 60, 67–71,
73, 77, 88
extrinsic, 37, 71, 73
enlightenment, awakening, 8, 10, 11, 15, 20, 32, 49, 51, 54, 57, 61, 72, 79, 80,
86, 87
progressive path to, 52–53
“sudden” vs. “gradual,” 17–22, 68
epidemics and plague, 13, 14
esotericism. See tantra and tantrism
ethics and morals, 20, 21, 22, 26, 28, 30, 34, 45, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 59, 60,
67, 97, 105, 107
exorcism, 6, 28

F
faith, 2, 31, 86, 87, 97
feasts and festivals, 48–49, 92
of the Buddha’s descent to Laṅkā, 49
of the Buddha’s enlightenment and decease, 48–49
Dzamling chisang (“general fumigation of the world”), 8, 49
Great Prayer Festival, 38
of the Guru and of the ḍākinī, 48, 84
of the new year, 48
four (noble) truths, 18–19, 20
funerals and mortuary rites, 13, 23, 24, 28, 47, 93, 94, 99–102. See also bardo;
transference of consciousness at death
G
Gampopa, 34, 51
Ganden monastery, 37, 64, 66
Ganden Podrang regime, 42
Gansu province, 23, 43, 106, 113
Gayādhara, 32
Gelukpa order, 37–44, 64, 71, 74, 89, 91
ghosts (Skt. preta), 11, 14, 48, 50, 95, 105
gnosticism, 21
Godan Khan, 36
Gorampa Sonam Senggé, 74
Great Seal. See Mahāmudrā
Great Perfection. See dzokchen
Gugé kingdom, 29–30, 49, 50
guru. See lama

H
hells, 11, 14, 50, 60, 90, 95, 104, 105
Hinduism, 70, 82, 101

I
incense fumigation (sang), 2, 7–11. See also festivals: Dzamling chisang
India, Indian, 12, 16, 20, 25, 29, 32, 33, 39, 48, 82, 83, 94, 97, 101, 108, 110,
112, 113, 114
adepts and masters, 5, 15, 17, 22, 26, 29, 32, 33, 35, 38, 39, 55, 57, 64, 66,
68, 73
Buddhism, 4, 9, 13, 15, 16, 18, 20, 25, 31, 32, 48, 73, 76, 94
learning and literature, 1, 12, 16, 31, 35–6, 51, 54, 64, 68, 69, 76
monastic universities, 17, 30
Iran, 12

J
Jamchen Chöjé, 40
Jamgön Kongtrül, 43
Jamyang Chöjé, 40
Jamyang Khyentsé Wangpo, 43
Jamyang Zhepa, 43
Jangchub-ö, king of Gugé, 30
Jé Tsongkhapa Lozang Drakpa, 37–38, 40, 42, 43, 51, 66, 76
identified with Mañjuśrī, 58
philosophical innovations of, 72–75
Jincheng, Chinese princess, 13, 101
Jokhang Temple, Lhasa, 38
Jonangpa order, 35, 37, 39, 40, 41, 70
Jowo Śākyamuni statue, 13, 38
juniper, as incense, 8, 9, 11

K
Kadampa order, 30–31, 34, 36, 38, 39
six texts of, 51–52
teaching of, 49–57, 60, 71
Kagyüpa orders, 33–35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 51, 88, 109
Kalu Rinpoché Rangjung Künkhyap, 109
Kamalaśīla, 21–22
Kanjur, “translated scriptures,” 16
karma(n), deeds, 2, 3, 14, 19, 45, 51, 74, 75, 87, 102, 104, 105
of buddhas, 53
purification of, 2
Karmapa order, 34, 36, 40, 43
Karmapa I Düsum Khyenpa, 34
Karmapa II Karma Pakshi, 36, 69
Karmapa III Rangjung Dorjé, 36, 37, 70, 71, 88
Karmapa V Dezhinshekpa, 39
Karmapa X Chöying Dorjé, 43
Karmapa XVI Rangjung Rikpé Dorjé, 109
Karmapa XVII Urgyan Trinlay, 112, 114
Kashmir, 30, 35, 66
Kham, far eastern Tibet, 42, 43, 74, 106, 108
“eclectic” movement (rimé) in, 43, 77–78
Khedrup-jé, 42
Khön, aristocratic family, 32, 33
Khoshud Mongols, 41
Khotan, 13
Khubilai Khan, 36, 54
Khyungpo Neljor, 35, 39
Kirti monastery, 113
Könchok Gyelpo, 32, 33
Kumbum monastery, 43, 112

L
Labrang Trashi–khyil monastery, 43, 113
Lachen Gongpa Rapsel, 23
Ladakh, 41, 101
lama(s) (Skt. guru), 1, 2, 4, 7, 45, 46, 89, 90, 93, 100, 101, 103
defined, 3, 31
“reincarnated” (see trülku)
Lang Darma, 22
laypersons, 3, 8, 16, 17, 20, 25, 28, 30, 33, 47, 48, 54, 62, 63, 89, 90, 99
Lhalung Pelgi Dorjé, 22
Lhasa, 12, 30, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 104, 107, 108, 112
Uprising of March 1959, 108
Lha Totori, 12
Lhazang Khan, 42
Lijiang, Yunnan, 43
lineages, 22, 29, 30, 31–35, 63, 77, 87
eight, 38–39
See also orders
Ling, region in eastern Tibet, 13
Lingjé Kagyü order, 35
Lingjé Repa Pemadorjé, 35
Lobsang Sangay, 113
logic, 30, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 73, 75
Longchen Rapjampa, 37, 70, 71
Loppön Tendzin Namdak, 109
lu (nāgas), serpent-demons, 5, 6, 7

M
Machik Lapdrön, 35, 39
Madhyamaka, 64, 67, 68, 73, 74, 88
Mahāmudrā, 33, 34, 88
Mahāyāna, the “greater vehicle,” 11, 19–20, 25–26, 30, 31, 32, 35, 50–57, 58,
60, 82, 88, 107
Maitreya, the coming Buddha, 97
Maitrīpa, 33, 38
Manchus, 42, 43, 74, 76, 106
maṇḍala, 26, 80–81, 83, 86, 92
as symbolic offering, 87
Mandaravā, Indian consort of Padmasambhava, 17
Mañjuśrī, bodhisattva of wisdom, 57, 58
mantras, 10, 11, 26, 80, 82, 83, 87, 89
of Avalokiteśvara, 2, 9, 58–61, 105
Mao Zedong, 107
Marpa Chöki Lodrö, 33–34, 38, 86
mausoleums, 24, 93, 94
medicine, 6, 35, 62
meditation, 2, 18, 20, 51, 53, 54–55, 56, 59, 60, 79, 81, 83, 95, 97, 98, 99, 102,
103, 107, 109
merit (sonam), 2, 3, 9, 14, 45, 51, 52, 54, 63, 95, 97, 100, 101–2, 105, 115
Milarepa, 34, 85–87, 89
mind–training (lojong), 31, 52, 54–55, 56–57, 59
Ming dynasty, 39–40
Mipam Namgyel, 44, 77–78
Moheyan, Chinese Chan master, 20–22
monasteries and temples, 1, 5, 6, 7, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 22, 29, 30, 32, 37, 38, 40,
41, 42, 43, 46, 47, 49, 59, 63, 64, 66, 89, 91, 108, 110, 112, 113
monastic colleges and education, 15, 17, 30, 31, 45, 50, 54, 62–66, 79, 88, 89, 90
monastic ordination, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 23, 25, 28, 29, 34, 39, 41
Mongolia and the Mongols, 36, 37, 39, 40–41, 42, 54, 74, 114
mountains, 49
gods of, 9
Kailash, 49, 92
Potalaka, 97
Pure Crystal, at Tsari, 49
Mūlasarvāstivāda order, 15
mummification, 24, 103, 104

N
Nāgārjuna, 55, 56, 57, 64, 68, 73
Nālandā monastery, 17
Nāropa, 33, 38, 39
six teachings of, 33, 86, 87
Nanzhao kingdom, 13
Naxi kingdom, 43
Nepal, 1, 8, 12, 13, 25, 29, 32, 45, 93, 101, 108
Ngok Lekpé Sherap, 30
Ngok Loden Sherap, 30, 64
Niguma, 39
nirvāṇa, 15, 19, 20, 25, 69, 97
Nyangrel Nyima Özer, 27
Nyetang Drölma monastery, 30
Nyingmapa lineage and order, 23, 25–28, 29, 34, 37, 38, 39, 44, 59, 70, 79, 85,
88, 89, 90, 102, 108
 nine vehicles of, 27–28, 85
Nyugulung monastery, 32

O
Oḍḍiyāna, northwestern India, 16, 39
orders of Buddhist monasticism, 15, 20, 29–44
four, 38–38
Orgyenpa, 36, 37, 39

P
Pabongkhapa Dechen Nyingpo, 44
“Pacification” (Zhijé) lineage, 35, 39
Padampa Sanggyé, 35, 39
Padmasambhava, 5, 26, 27, 28, 38, 84, 96, 97
as “Precious Guru” (Guru Rinpoché), 16
“speaking image” of, 17
Pakmodrupa Dorjé Gyelpo, 34
Pakmodrupa order, 34, 37
Pakpa Lodrö Gyeltsen, 36, 54
Panchen Lama I (IV) Lozang Chögyen, 42
Panchen Lama VI (IX) Chökyi Nyima, 107
Panchen Lama VII (X) Chökyi Gyeltsen, 107, 108, 110, 111
Panchen Lama VIII (XI) Gendun Choekyi Nyima, 112
rival Gyeltsen Norbu recognized by Chinese government, 112, 114
Pema Düdül, 102, 103
Perfection of Wisdom (Skt. Prajñāpāramitā), 35, 64, 67
persecution and sectarian strife, 22, 42–44, 77
philosophy, 1, 2, 15, 16, 22, 25, 30, 36, 37, 50, 55, 56, 62–78, 79, 88, 107. See
also scholasticism
pilgrimage, 7, 13, 45, 49, 91, 94
pious disciples (Skt. śrāvaka), 14, 20
vehicle of, 18, 27
Potala palace, Lhasa, 41, 42, 104
protection, rites of, 1, 2, 3, 63, 80, 85
Pure Lands, 96–99
purification, 2, 3, 7–11, 19, 26, 31, 45, 48, 60, 63, 85, 87

Q
Qianlong, Manchu emperor, 42, 76
Qing dynasty, 42, 76, 106, 110
Qinghai province, 23, 43, 76, 112, 113

R
Radreng (“Reting”) monastery, 30, 36
“rainbow body,” 102, 103
“Red Hill” (Marpori), Lhasa, 42
refuge in the “Three Jewels,” 21, 48, 53, 87, 98
relics, 102
Rendawa Zhönnu Lodrö, 73
Rinchen Zangpo, 29, 32
rites and rituals, 2, 3, 4, 7, 9–11, 13, 14, 23, 24, 25–28, 31, 32, 33, 35, 46–49, 54,
61–63, 65, 79–85, 87, 89–95, 98, 99–102, 104, 115. See also exorcism; incense
fumigation (sang); funerals and mortuary rites; tantra and tantrism; protection;
purification
royal edicts, 14, 18

S
Sachen Kunga Nyingpo, 33, 80–83
Śākyamuni Buddha, 12, 13, 25, 94
portrait of, 13
Sakya Paṇḍita Künga Gyeltsen, 35–36, 58, 66, 68, 98
death anniversary of, 49
Sakyapa order, 32–33, 35–36, 37, 38, 39, 43, 49, 58, 68, 73, 74, 80, 90
“five forebears” of, 33, 58
Śākyaśrībhadra, 35, 66
saṃsāra, the round of rebirth, 11, 14, 18, 19, 20, 25, 45, 50, 51, 53, 69, 87
 six abodes of, 10, 11, 14, 60
Samyé monastery, 15, 16, 18, 21, 22
Sangpu monastery, 30, 64, 66, 68
Sanskrit, 15, 24, 64, 68
Śāntarakṣita, 15, 16, 17, 22
Śāntideva, 52
scholasticism, 44, 66–78
secrecy, 26, 83, 84
self and selflessness, 19, 20, 55, 77
self-awakened ones (Skt. pratyekabuddha), 14, 20
vehicle of, 19, 27
self-immolation, 113
Sera monastery, 40, 64
blessing of the sacred dagger at, 49
Shambhala, 97
Shanghai, 107, 110
Shangpa Kagyü lineage, 35, 39, 109
Shenrab Miwo, Buddha of the Bön religion, 25
Sichuan province, 106, 113
Silk Road, 12
“sky burial,” 100, 101, 102
Sogyal Rinpoché, 109
Sonam Tsemo, 33
Songtsen Gampo, 12, 13, 38, 59
sorcery, 22, 85
suffering, 18, 19, 20, 50, 51, 53, 55, 77, 85, 87, 104
Sukhāvatī, 97, 98
Sun Yat-sen, 107
spiritual exercise, 45. See also mind-training
spiritual pollution (drip), 4, 9, 10
stūpas, 46, 71, 103
symbolism, 16, 27, 31, 32, 40, 48, 58, 81, 82, 84, 87
T
Tai Situ Jangchup Gyeltsen, 37
Tanjur, “translated commentaries,” 16
tantra and tantrism, 9, 11, 16, 23, 25–28, 29–35, 39, 48, 53, 58, 59, 61, 77, 94,
95, 98, 99, 101
as a branch of Mahāyāna Buddhism, 25
classes of, 85
definition of, 25–26, 32, 79–84
“exoteric” and “esoteric” vehicles of, 27–28, 32, 85
sex and violence in, 31, 32
social aspects of, 88–92
stages of practice, 84–88
in teachings on Avalokiteśvara, 58–61
vajrayāna, 27
of the Wheel of Time (Kālacakra), 35, 39, 97
Yogatantra, 28
See also dzokchen; translation of scriptures, ancient vs. new; secrecy; yoga
tantric deities, 59, 61, 80–83, 85, 87, 98, 99
Cakrasaṃvara, 86, 92
Guhyasamāja, 31
Hevajra, 32
Vajrasattva Buddha, 87
Vajrayoginī, 39
See also Avalokiteśvara, Tārā
Taoism, 77
Tārā, goddess, 31, 59
Tarthang Tulku Rinpoché, 109
terma, “spiritual treasure,” 17, 27, 28, 59, 94, 96
revealers of, 27
Three Jewels (Skt. Triratna), 48, 53
Tibetan Autonomous Region, 106
Tibetan Book of the Dead, 13, 94, 95
Tibetan empire, 13, 16, 22–23, 24, 26, 49, 62, 76, 104
Tibetan language, 23, 25, 62–63, 69, 116. See also translation
Tiksé monastery, 41
Tilopa, 38
Toling monastery, 29
Tramdruk temple, 91
transference of consciousness at death (powa), 34, 49, 99, 100, 102
taught at Drigung, 49
translation of scriptures, translators, 15, 16, 18, 25, 26, 29, 33, 38, 39, 49, 62, 68,
86, 116
ancient vs. new, 26–27, 29, 31, 32, 38
Trashi Lhünpo monastery, 40, 64
as seat of Panchen Lamas, 42
Tri Desongtsen, 22
on the tantras, 26
Tri Detsuktsen, 13, 14
Tri Düsong, 13
Tri Relpachen, 22
Tri Songdetsen, 14–16, 18, 20, 22, 26, 77
conversion of, 14
disputed funeral of, 24
trülku, as rebirth of a deceased teacher, 36, 37, 47, 76, 91, 116
Tsang, west Tibet, 40, 41, 43, 64
Tsangpa Gyaré, 35
Tsari, 49
Tsenpo, Tibetan emperor, 12, 13, 14, 24, 26, 93, 94
as earthly representative of Buddha Vairocana, 16
Tuken Chökyi Nyima, 76–77
Tümed Mongols, 40

U
Üdumtsen. See Lang Darma
ultimate reality, 19, 20, 25, 28, 34, 37, 51, 55, 59, 67, 70, 71, 88

V
Vairocana, Buddha of Radiant Light, 16
Vairocana, Tibetan translator, 26
vajra (dorjé), symbol of tantric Buddhism, 27, 81, 82, 89
Vajrapāṇi, bodhisattva of spiritual power, 57, 58
vajrayāna. See tantra and tantrism
Vedas, 82
vehicles of Buddhist teaching, 18–20, 27–28, 67, 77, 80, 82, 83, 85
Vikramaśīla monastery, 30
Vimalamitra, 26, 38
Vinaya, monastic code, 15, 17, 18, 47, 64, 67, 73
virtue, 9, 19, 22, 37, 51, 54, 56
Virūpa, 38
visualization, 26, 28, 55, 58–61, 80, 81–2, 83, 87, 98, 99, 103
vows, 17–18, 81, 89, 91

W
Wencheng, Chinese princess, 12, 38, 59
West Tibet, 23, 25, 29–31, 35, 40, 41, 49. See also Gugé kingdom
world-maintenance vs. world-transcendence, 3, 4

X
Xikang province, 106

Y
Yama, 104
Yarlung, in southeastern Tib, 12
Yarlung Sheldrak, 17
Yeshé-dé, Tibetan translator, 18
Yeshé-ö, king of Gugé, 29, 30
Yeshé Tsogyel, Tibetan consort of Padmasambhava, 17
yoga, 26, 28, 31, 32, 33, 35, 39, 69, 79, 80, 83, 85, 86, 87, 102
Supreme (atiyoga) (see dzokchen)
Yogācāra, 67, 73
Yongle, Ming emperor, 39
Yuan dynasty, 39
Yunnan province, 13, 43

Z
Zen. See Chan Buddhism
Zhangtön Chöbar, 33
Zhangzhung kingdom, 25
Zoroastrianism, 100
Zunghar Mongols, 42
Zurchungpa, 5–6
Zurpoché, 5–6