How were the Tibetan people converted to Buddhism? And who did the converting?

Tibetan historians always say that the conversion happened during Tibet’s imperial period. Butön, for example, says that that the Tibetans were converted to Buddhism when Songtsen Gampo set down the new royal laws based on the ten virtues of Buddhism. Other histories consider the real conversion to have been carried out a century later by the trio of Trisong Detsen (the emperor), Śāntarakṣita (the monk) and Padmasambhava (the tantric adept).

But sources that can be dated back to the time of the Tibetan emperors are not so clear about this, which has lead some modern scholars to argue that Buddhism at the time of the Tibetan Empire was a religion of the nobility, only found at the Tibetan court (see the comments to the previous post). Modern scholars have also argued that the adoption of Buddhism by Trisong Detsen and his successors was an act of international diplomacy. Buddhism, after all, was an international religion and many other major powers of the period — the Chinese empire, Central Asian city-states and Indian kingdoms — were Buddhist.

Then it would hardly have mattered whether the majority of ordinary Tibetans were Buddhists or not. The point was that Tibet should be perceived as a Buddhist country. So most Tibetans would have had little or no experience of Buddhism in the imperial period.

But was this really the case?

*  *  *

I’ve recently been looking at some of the early records of the Tibetan tsenpos to see whether any of them expressed the aspiration to convert the Tibetan people in general, and not just the nobility.

The second edict of Trisong Detsen (dated to 779 by Hugh Richardson) records the way in which Buddhism was made the state religion of Tibet. Looking very much like the official minutes of a meeting, it describes various discussion during which the court deliberated on how to establish Buddhism in Tibet, beginning with Trisong Detsen’s own account of how he was converted to Buddhism:

Then with the help of teachers of virtue I listened to the dharma was studied and the texts were brought before my eyes. Then I deliberated upon how the Buddhist religion should be practised and spread.

So, by his own account Trisong Detsen did want to spread Buddhism in Tibet. Along with that, he had some harsh things to say about the old religion:

At that time it was declared that those who followed the old Tibetan religion were getting everything wrong…

Among the old practices he disapproved of are painting your body red, casting spells on the government, and causing diseases and famine. Later the tsenpo convened another meeting, this time with lords from all over the Tibetan empire:

The minor princes under our dominion such as the Azha ruler, and the outer and inner ministers were consulted and a council was held. Together they considered in brief these things, first that trust should be put in the word of the Buddha; secondly that the example of the ancestors should be followed; and thirdly that help should be given by the power of the teachers of virtue.

So at this meeting everyone agreed to an empire-wide project establishing Buddhism, with a caveat that the traditional ways of the ancestors should be followed as well.

Further to that, a council was held about how the right path should not be changed, and how it could be increased. Thus an excellent summary of the dharma was made

What was this summary of the dharma? Earlier in the edict, Trisong Detsen explains the basics of Buddhism as the fact of impermanence, the inevitability of cause and effect (i.e. karma) and the need to practice the ten kinds of virtuous action in order to obtain a good rebirth. So the summary agreed at this meeting was probably something along those lines.

*  *  *

But Trisong Detsen’s recorded aspiration to spread the word of the Buddha has little to say about ordinary Tibetans. Let’s skip forward to the reign of Senaleg, in the early years of the 9th century. One of his edicts was preserved on the Karchung pillar, which survived almost undamaged right through to the Cultural Revolution, when it was smashed to pieces. This pillar edict is concerned with the appointment of senior Buddhist teachers to lead the religion in Tibet. It says:

But from the time when the tsenpo and his descendents are young until the time when they become rulers of the kingdom and thereafter, teachers of virtue shall be appointed from among the monks. By teaching religion as much as can be absorbed into the mind, the gate of liberation for the whole of Tibet, through the learning and practice of the dharma, shall not be closed.

Note here the apparently inclusive statement that “the whole of Tibet” will have access to the “gate of liberation.” This egalitarian sentiment is made even more clear further down the pillar:

And when for the Tibetan subjects from the nobles downwards, the gate leading to liberation is never obstructed and the faithful have been led towards liberation, from those among them who are capable there shall always be appointed abbots to carry on the teachings of the Buddha.

It seems clear enough that the phrase “from the nobles downwards” must include every Tibetan subject, however lowly.

*  *  *

Noble sentiments indeed, but how could such a project realistically be carried out? How do you convert a whole people to another religion? This is a big question, and I won’t try to answer it. In any case, as Matthew Kapstein has pointed out, this “conversion” took place over several centuries (or to put it another way, there were several “conversions”).

But if we travel now back to Dunhuang, from our little excursion to Central Tibet, there is a piece of evidence that might hint at how the grand project of converting the Tibetans to Buddhism was put into practice. There’s a scroll with a short summary of Buddhism in Chinese, called A Summary of the Essential Points of the Mahāyāna Sūtras. Its colophon says (in Chinese):

At the sixth month of the water tiger year, send the letter with tsenpo’s seal of Great Tibet and the Sūtra of Ten Kinds of Virtuous Behaviour to every county, to be circulated and recited. On the 16th day of the latter eighth month this copy was made.

This scroll has been dated to 822, in the reign of the last great Buddhist Tibetan emperor, Ralpachen. I am tempted to join up the dots here from (1) the summary of the dharma made by Trisong Detsen’s council and agreed by all the local rulers of the Tibetan empire, (2) the aspiration firmly expressed by the edict of Senaleg that all Tibetans should have access to Buddhism, and (3) the order from Ralpachen’s court to send copies of a summary of the ten Buddhist virtues to every part of the realm.

Many questions remain (you might be asking yourself some already, if you made it this far). But I think we can glimpse a genuine aspiration expressed by the Tibetan emperors to bring Buddhism to all of the Tibetan people, high and low. And we can see one way this might have been carried out, by the copying of brief summaries of the dharma all over Tibet (which would then have been taught orally to the non-literate, presumably, though literacy seems to have been quite widespread by the end of the empire). This might have been enough to initiate at least the first stage in the conversion of the Tibetan people to Buddhism.

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References

The pillar inscriptions quoted here are all to be found in the collections of Hugh Richardson (1985), Fang Kuei Li and W. South Coblin (1987) and now the volume edited by Kazushi Iwao and Nathan Hill and recently published by the Old Tibetan Documents Online Group (2009). The translations in this post are my own “provisional” ones.

The scroll mentioned here (Or.8210/S.3996) has been studied by Daishun Ueyama (1995: 314-323). The Chinese title is Da cheng jing zuan yao yi 大 乘 經 纂 要 義.

The issue of the conversion of the Tibetans has been treated from several different angles in Matthew Kapstein’s The Tibetan Assimilation of Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2000).

I’m also looking forward to reading the just-published Buddhism and Empire: The Political and Religious Culture of Early Tibet by Michael Walter (Brill).

Images

The first two images are by Hugh Richardson, showing his Tibetan assistant taking rubbings from the Karchung (skar cung) pillar. The photos are (c) The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, and can be seen, along with many others, at the wonderful Tibet Album website.

The scroll is Or.8210/S.553, another copy of the Summary of the Essential Points of the Mahāyāna Sūtras.

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Tibetan

The second edict of Khri srong lde btsan (from Hugh Richardson, “The First Tibetan Chos ‘byung” in High Peaks, Pure Earth):

(p.97; 110b) de nas dge ba’i bshes gnyen gyis bstangs te chos kyang gsan / yi ge yang spyan sngar brims nas / sangs rgyas kyi chos spel zhing mdzad par bsgroms so / / de na bod kyi chos rnying pa ma lags la / sku lha gsol ba dang cho ga myi mthun pas / kun kyang ma legs su dogs te /

(p.98; 110b) ‘bangs su mnga’ ba rgyal ba rgyal phran ‘a zha rje la bstsogs pa dang phyi nang gi blon po rnams la bka’s rmas / bka’ gros su mdzad nas / gcig tu na sangs rgyas bcom ldan ‘das kyi bka’ lung la bsten / gnyis su na yab mes kyi dpe lugs la ‘tshal / gsum du na dge ba’i shes gnyen gyi mthus bstangs pa dang yang sbyar nas mdor brtags na / … de lam legs par ni ji ltar myi ‘gyur ched ni ji ltar che zhe na / chos kyi mdo ni legs su bgyi bas /

The Skar cung pillar inscription:

(ll.33–42): / / btsan  po dbon sras / / sku chu ngur bzhugs pa yan cad / / chab srId kyi mnga’ bdag mdzad pa man chad kyang / / dge slong las / dge ba’I bshes nyen bskos ste / chos thugs su cI chud chud du bslab cing / / bod yongs kyIs kyang chos slob cing spyad pa’I sgo myi gcad / nam du yang bod ya rabs man cad/ bod ‘bangs las thar par gzud pa’I sgo myi bgag par / dad pa’I rnams las thar par btsud de / / de’i nang nas nus pa las / / bcom ldan ‘das kyI ring lugs rtag du bsko zhIng / / bcom ldan ‘das kyI ring lugs byed pa’I rnams chos ‘khor nas bya’o cog gI bka’ la yang btags ste / /

I’m a little worried that I might have suggested in previous installments of this “Decline of Buddhism” series that the downfall of the Tibetan empire was a direct result of the assassination of the Tibet emperor Lang Darma. This may be true in a sense, but many Tibetan historians (and most modern ones) see this as just one stage in a series of unfortunate events. The next stage was the division of the empire between two disputed successors. Almost every previous succession to the Tibetan imperial throne had been disputed, but one side had always come out on top. This time neither side was strong enough to subdue the other, and so the country was split in two.

The next stage of disintegration was a series of uprisings (the Tibetan word is kheng log) against the prevailing authorities, setting Tibetan clan against clan. The first of these uprisings happened just around the corner from Dunhuang, the home of our manuscripts.

While Tibet was splitting in two in the mid-ninth century, a civil war broke out in the Gansu region, near the border with China. An aristocrat from the Ba clan called Khozher gathered his own army and set himself up as a local warlord. He spurned the authority of the local Tibetan governor, claiming that the governor’s clan (the Dro) had orchestrated the murder of Lang Darma, and that it was his duty to take revenge on such rebels.

Khozher also portrayed himself as a kind of nationalist, fighting against the resurgent Chinese forces in the area, but in his brutality (he had every male in the whole region put to the sword) he left little hope of a better alternative. The people turned against him, and most of his army deserted.

The incorrigible Khozher set out for China, boasting that we would return with hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers. But when he offered his submission to the Chinese emperor in return for an imperial post, he was rejected. Khozher was finally ousted when the a local Chinese warlord swept through Gansu province. Though no longer a force to be reckoned with, he continued to cause trouble, and when he was eventually, and inevitably, put to the sword, his severed head was taken to Chang’an as proof that this troublesome warlord was finally dead.

Such was the first uprising, and the end of Tibetan rule in Gansu.

* * *

All of which brings us to another prayer for Tibet…

Recently we looked at a prayer for the protection of Tibet that seemed to date back to the Tibetan imperial period. This time let’s look at a prayer that seems (to me) to date from the troubled period of the uprisings and the ‘dark age’ that followed.

This prayer is actually part of a Vajrayāna empowerment ritual (IOL Tib J 752). That in itself suggests that it probably comes from the tenth century, when most, if not all, of the tantric manuscripts at Dunhuang were written. This time, instead of a prayer to eliminate the opponents to Tibet, we have a prayer to pacify the troubles within Tibet itself. “Please bring peace swiftly,” is the plea, “to the conflicts in the kingdom of Tibet.” The key word here is “conflicts”, which is khrug pa in Tibetan, defined in various dictionaries as a fight, dispute or conflict, and particularly in the Great Treasury of Words, as “a mixing up of the established order”. This is, I think, comparable to the idea of “uprisings” (kheng log).

So here are the tantric practitioners at Dunhuang, surrounded by clan-on-clan violence, praying for peace (and failing that, a firm helmet):

Please bring peace swiftly to the conflicts in the kingdom of Tibet. And then please grant long life and a firm helmet to a king who protects the dharma. As for the enemies who threaten us (such as the enemies of the Vajrayāna and those who obstruct the virtuous ones gathered here in our maṇḍala, and all of those who harbour poisonous thoughts), please subdue them with the appropriate one of the four enlightened activities…

* * *

See also:

The Decline of Buddhism I: Was Lang Darma a Buddhist?
The Decline of Buddhism II: Did Lang Darma persecute Buddhism?
The Decline of Buddhism III: Why should the secret mantra be kept secret?
The Decline of Buddhism IV: Keepers of the flame

And here you can read about a prayer for peace in Tibet in troubled times a thousand or so years later.

Tibetan text
IOL Tib J 752, verso: /bod rgyal khams khrug pa yang myur du zhI nas//chos skyong ba’i sgyal po sku tshe ring dbu rmog brtsan bar gyur cIg//gzhan [yang] rdo rje theg pa’i dgra bgegs su gyur pa dang//bdag cag gI dkyIl ‘khor ‘dir ‘dus pa’I dge ba’I bar cad byed pa la bstsogs pa//gnon gyI dgra bgegs su gyur ba//gdug pa’i bsam pa can cI mchis pa thams cad/ /’phags pa’I sa ‘phrin las rnam bzhi gang gIs ‘dul ba bzhin du/ /’dul skal du bzhes nas zhIng zhing zlog gyur cig mdzad du gsol …

* Note that calling Tibet a “kingdom” (rgyal khams) is not unprecedented, and we also find the same phrase bod rgyal khams in the prayers for the Dega Yutsal monastery (PT 16). The phrase that is translated here as “a firm helmet” (dbu dmog brtsan) also appears frequently in PT 16, as well as in some of the pillar and rock inscriptions from Central Tibet. It has powerful resonances of the divine right of the Tibetan tsenpos, difficult to communicate in translation. I detect in this prayer a hope that the tradition of the Buddhist tsenpos will be revived by some unnamed king.

References
On the uprisings in general see:

• Vitali, Roberto. 1996. The Kingdoms of Gu.ge Pu.hrang: According to mNga’.ris rgyal.rabs by Gu.ge mkhan.chen Ngag.dbang grags.pa. Dharamsala: Tho.ling gtsug.lag.khang lo.gcig.stong ‘khor.ba’i rjes.dran.mdzad sgo’i go.sgrig tshogs.chung.
• Roberto Vitali. 2004. “The role of clan power in the establishment of religion (from the kheng log of the 9-10 century to the instances of the dByil of La stod and gNyos of Kha rag).” In The Relationship between Religion and State : (chos srid zung ‘brel), in Traditional Tibet, edited by Christoph Cuppers. Nepal, Lumbini International Research Institute.

On the conflicts near Dunhuang, see:

• Petech, Luciano. 1983. “Tibetan Relations with Sung China and the Mongols.” In China Among Equals: The Middle Kingdom and its Neighbours, 10th–14th Centuries, edited by Morris Rossabi. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press: 173–203.
• Iwasaki Tsutomu. 1993. “The Tibetan Tribes of Ho-hsi and Buddhism during the Northern Sung Period”. Acta Asiatica 64: 17–37.

And for a nice account of both see Chapter 2 of:

• Ronald Davidson. 2005. Tibetan Renaissance: Tantric Buddhism in the Rebirth of Tibetan Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. [pp.67-68]

A Mystery

So, there’s this manuscript from Dunhuang with a prayer for the protection of Tibet. That was the first thing to pique my interest. Prayers and rituals for protecting Tibet from foreign invasions are common enough from the time the Mongols were sending armies into Tibet in the 13th century. Rituals to repel enemy armies were usually performed by tantric practioners from the Nyingma school, like the famous Sokdokpa, whose name in fact means “Mongol-Repeller”. But this prayer is much earlier than those.

Unlike those Mongol-repelling rituals, this Dunhuang prayer is not very tantric. It does invoke local protectors and spirits, but no tantric Buddhist deities. It was written, according to the colophon, by a certain Bandé Paltsek, who I am inclined to identify with the famous translator Kawa Paltsek. There’s nothing in the prayer to suggest that it couldn’t have been written by Paltsek during the late eighth or early ninth century.

So that’s interesting too. But here’s the really intriguing thing: every time the word “Tibet” (bod khams) appears in this manuscript, it has been defaced. And not just randomly but in a rather specific way. The “o” in bod has been rubbed out, and various bits of khams have been rubbed away, but never the whole word.

I have been puzzled by this strange defacement for a while, and I still can’t find a satisfactory answer for it. I do think it was done before the closing of the cave in the early 11th century (though this could also be debated). Is this censorship? Was the idea of “Tibet” troublesome to an ancient reader of the manuscript? That reader could well have been one of the local Chinese who helped to oust the Tibetans from Dunhuang in 848, or a later descendent.

Then again, perhaps the reader was not quite so sensitive as to be offended by the very word “Tibet” but feared the power of the prayer, or the talismanic force of the manuscript containing the prayer. Taking out bits of the word “Tibet” might confuse the great beings invoked in the prayer, who would no longer know who they were supposed to be protecting.

Or was the reason less hostile than I am supposing? Perhaps the reader only meant to amend the manuscript. One of the regions near Dunhuang was known as Dekham (bde khams). Taking the “o” out of bod and replacing it with an “e” would give us this name. This could be an unfinished attempt to direct the prayer to a local region, perhaps after the fall of the Tibetan empire and a unified “Tibet”. But if so, why did the reader also deface khams, which could just be left as it is?

No, I am not quite convinced by any of these solutions, and so dear reader, I leave the question open to you. And here, restored and rendered imperfectly into English, is Paltsek’s prayer for the protection of Tibet.

*  *  *

A Prayer for Tibet

Conquerors and your entourage – in order to expel Tibet’s obstacles, please come to this heavenly mansion. By the power of the Teacher’s blessings and compassion and our own faith, supreme divine substances sufficient to fill the sky are presented in their fullness. By the power of the qualities of the Sugatas and our own virtue, please pacify this region, and clear away Tibet’s obstacles.

The offering to the bodhisattvas on the Very Joyous and Stainless levels and the others – please protect us with your great power. By our presenting these unsurpassed offerings, oh sons and your sublime entourage, please consider your commitment to obey. By the compassion and blessings of the Noble Ones, please clear away Tibet’s obstacles.

The offerings for the Noble Arhats: The Mahāsthavira retinue, Bharadvāja and the others – please protect us with your great power. By our presenting these unsurpassed offerings, oh great ones worthy of offerings, please consider your commitment to obey. By the compassion and blessings of the Noble Ones, please clear away Tibet’s obstacles.

The offerings for the gods of the form realms: from the great king Brahma to the gods of the Brahma heaven – please protect us with your great power. By our presenting these unsurpassed offerings, oh gods of the Brahma heaven, please consider your commitment to obey. By your compassion and blessings please clear away Tibet’s obstacles.

The offerings to the gods of the desire realm: from the great gods of Paranirmitavaśavartin to the lord of the gods Indra – please protect us with your great power. By our presenting these unsurpassed offerings, oh gods of the desire realm, please consider your commitment to obey. By your compassion and blessings please clear away Tibet’s obstacles.

The offerings to the four great kings: Dhṛtarāṣṭa and the others – please protect us with your great power. By our presenting these unsurpassed offerings, oh four great kings and your entourage, please consider your commitment to obey. By your compassion and blessings please clear away Tibet’s obstacles.

The offerings to the ten local protectors: Wangpo Dorjé and the rest – please protect us with your great power. By our presenting these unsurpassed offerings, oh guardians and your entourage, please consider your commitment to obey. By your compassion and blessings please clear away Tibet’s obstacles.

The offerings to the nāgas: the eight classes of nāgas and so on – please protect us with your great power. By our presenting these unsurpassed offerings, oh eight classes of nāgas and your entourage, please consider your commitment to obey. By your compassion and blessings please clear away Tibet’s obstacles.

The offerings to the protectors of the temple: those who guard the stūpas of Jambudvīpa – Pāñcika and so on – please protect us with your great power. By our presenting these unsurpassed offerings, oh protectors and your entourage, please consider your commitment to obey. By your compassion and blessings please clear away Tibet’s obstacles.

The offerings to the spirits (jungpo) of the ten directions – the king of the spirits, lord of the demons (dön), and the entourage of demons of the intermediate directions – please protect us with your great power. By our presenting these unsurpassed offerings, oh spirits and your entourage, please consider your commitment to obey. By your compassion and blessings please clear away Tibet’s obstacles.

The chapter summarizing the offerings is complete. It is Bandé Paltsek’s chapter on offerings.

*  *  *

A note on the name of Tibet

Here I have taken bod khams to mean “Tibet” in general. Another early example of this is seen in the prayers for the founding of the Dega Yutsal temple (PT 16, 33r4; note that here the happiness of Tibet is down to the king and ministers, not the Buddhas and deities). Thus I take bod khams to mean something like “the realm of Tibet” in the same way as bod yul does later. But I have seen it suggested that these are really two words, bod meaning central Tibet and khams meaning, well, Kham, eastern Tibet. In which case we should translate the term as “central and eastern Tibet”. I’m not sure where that leaves western Tibet, however, and I am still happy to assume that bod khams is just “Tibet”.

*  *  *

References

1. On the attempts to repel the Mongol menace with magic in the 13th century, see Luciano Petech’s Central Tibet and the Mongols (Rome: Is.M.E.O., 1990), pages 13, 17, 18.

2. On the prayers for Dega Yutsel, see Matthew Kapstein’s recent article “The Treaty Temple of the Turquoise Grove, in Buddhism Between Tibet and China (ed. Matthew Kapstein, Boston: Wisdom, 2009).

*  *  *

Tibetan Text (IOL Tib J 374)

The manuscript in question comprises a mere three folios, numbered 1 (gcig) to 3 (gsum). It’s not yet been digitized, I’m afraid, hence my own fuzzy photographs above. Initially, I thought the pages of the prayer were both scrambled and incomplete. Then I realized that the only problem was that the prayer was followed in the manuscript by another short (and this time, certainly tantric) prayer. The last folio has the end of our prayer on one side, and the short tantric prayer on the other, but unlike the other folios, it has been numbered on the verso, so that it looks like the little tantric prayer is on the recto, not the verso. If we just turn over this last folio, then everything falls into place nicely. Though it does seem to be incomplete at the beginning (the first page begins with the syllables dgongs shig, which look like the end of a verse), we can’t be missing much, as it begins with the offering to the buddhas themselves, surely the top of the hierarchy of protectors invoked here. The haphazard numbered of the manuscript seems to have been done by a later reader, perhaps the same person responsible for the defacement.

$/ /dgongs shIg//rgyal ba’I ‘khor bcas rnams//b[o]d kh[ams] kyi ni bgegs gzhil phyir//gzal yas khang ‘dIr gshegs su gsol//ston pa’I thugs rje byin rlabs dang//bdag cag gi ni dad pa’I mthus//nam ka ‘i mtha’ dag ma lus par//lha rdzas mchog gis bkang ste mchod//bder gshegs che ba’I yon tan dang//bdag cag gi ni dge ba’I mthus//yul phyogs su ni zhI ba dang//b[o]d khams bgegs rnams bsal du gsol//

byang chub sems dpa’ rnams la mchod pa’//rab dag [=dga'] drI myed la bstsogs/pa’//rab tu mthu’ brten bskyabs gsol te//bla myed mchod pa ‘dI phul bas//sras kyIs dam pa’I ‘khor bcas kyis//stun kyi dam tshIgs rje dgongs ste//’phags pa’I thugs rje byin rlabs gyIs//b[o]d khams bgegs rnams bsal du gsol//

‘phags pa dgra bcom ba rnams la mchod pa’//gnas brtan chen po ‘khor bcas ste//ba ra dwa tsa las btsogs la//rab tu bthu’ brten bskyabs gsol ste//bla myed mchod pa ‘di phul bas//sbyIn gnas chen po ‘khor bcas kyIs//stun kyi dam tshIgs rje dgongs/ste/’phags pa’I thugs rje byin rlabs kyis//b[o]d [khams] bgegs rnams gzhIl du gsol//

gzugs khams kyi lha rnams la mchod pa’//tshangs pa’I rgyal po chen po nas//tshangs rIs kyIs ni lha rnams la//rab tu bthu’ brten bskyabs gsol ste//bla myed mchod ‘dI phul bas tshang rIs kyi ni lha rnams kyIs//stun kyi dam tshigs rje dgongs zhing khyed kyI thugs rje byin rlabs kyis//b[o]d [khams] bgegs rnams bsal du gsol//

‘dod khams kyI lha rnams la mchod pa’//gzhan ‘phrul dbang gi lha chen nas//brgya ‘byin lha’I bdang po la//rab tu bthu’ brten bskyabs gsol ste//bla myed mchod pa ‘dI phul bas//’dod khams kyi ni lha rnams kyis//stun kyI dam tshIgs brje dgongs ste//khyed kyi thugs rje byin rla[b]s kyis//b[o]d [kham]s bgegs rnams bsal du gsol//

rgyal chen rIgs bzhI la mchod pa’//yul ‘khor srung nI las bstsogs la//rab tu mthu’ brten bskya+bs+ gsol ste// +bla myed ched pa ‘di phul bas//+ rgyal chen rIgs zhI ‘khor bcas kyIs//stun kyI dam tshigs rje dgongs shing//khyed kyi thugs rje byi[n] rla+b+s kyIs//b[o]d khams bgegs rnams bsal du gsol//

phyogs skyong bcu la mchod//dbang po rdo rje las stsogs la//rab tu mthu’ brten skyabs gsol ste//bla myed pa ‘dI ‘bul bas//mgon po ‘khor bcas thams cad gyIs//stun gyI dam tshIgs rje dgongs ste//khyed gyI thugs rje byIn rlabs gyIs//b[o]d [khams] bgegs rnams bsal du gsol//

lha klu sde brgyad la mcho+d+ pa’//lha klu sde brgyad las btsogs la//rab tu mthu’ brten skyabs gsol ste//bla mted mchod ‘dI ‘bul bas//lha klu sde brgyad ‘khor bcas gyis//stun dam tshIgs rje dgongs ste//khyed gyi thugs rje byin rlabs gyis//b[o]d khams bgegs rnams bsal du gsol//

gtsug lag khang gI srungs ma la mchod pa’//’dzam gling mchod brten bsrungs mdzad cIng//span tsa ka ni las btsogs la//rab tu mthu’ brten//skyabs gsol ste//bla myed mchod pa ‘dI phul pas//srungs ma ‘khor bcas thams cad gyis//stun gyi dam tshigs rje dgong ste//khyed gyi thugs rje byin rlabs gyis//b[o]d [khams] bgegs rnams bsal du gsol//

phyogs bcu ‘byung po rnams la mchod pa’//’byung po rgyal po gdon gyi bdag//phyogs mtshams gdon gyi tshogs bcas la//rab tu mthu’ brten skyabs gsol ste//bla myed mchod pa ‘di phul bas//’byung po ‘khor bcas thams cad gyis//stun gyi dam tshigs rje dgongs zhIng khyed gyI thugs rje byin rlabs gyIs bdag cad gi bsam sgrub mdzad//

//$//mchod pa bsdus pa’I le’u rdzogs s+ho//dge slong dpal brtsegs gyi mchod pa’I le’u lags+ho//://:

A few years ago I came across this photograph in the archives of the British Library. It is a portrait of two early European scholars of Tibet: F.W. Thomas and Giuseppe Tucci. It was taken in 1955 by Tucci’s photographer and partner Francesca Bonardi. Before I saw the photo I wasn’t aware that these two knew each other, or that Thomas had ever travelled to Italy. The meeting of these very different personalities is a rather intriguing event.

Guiseppe Tucci (1894-1984) was arguably the foremost non-Tibetan scholar of Tibetan history and culture (such types are still known by the ungainly neologism Tibetologist, which like the similarly ugly Buddhologist is a term likely to cause faint mirth in the uninitiated) in the first half of the twentieth century.

Tucci was a natural linguist, learning Hebrew and Latin in his childhood, before turning to Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chinese. Tucci was an explorer, making several expeditions to Western Tibet in the 30s, where he collected the materials (manuscripts, paintings and statues) for his scholarly work. And Tucci was a prolific writer. Among his many publications the Indo-Tibetica series and the two huge volumes of Tibetan Painted Scrolls are still essential reading.

In early life Tucci was a supporter of Mussolini and the philosophy of fascism, and in 1937 he was sent by the Italian Government to Japan, to strengthen cultural ties between Japan and Italy. Here he lectured and published extensively on Zen, spiritual liberation, and the art of war. After his return to Italy and the defeat of Mussolini, Tucci abandoned this vein of work, and his interest in fascist philosophy and Zen, returning to Tibetan studies.

In the mid 50s, when the photograph with Thomas was taken, Tucci had just made two expeditions to Nepal and was about to embark of on series of archaeological digs in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. He was also very active in public life, one of his achievements being the founding of the Istituto italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente (IsMEO) in Rome. Several brief biographies are available online (see the references below).

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The career of Frederick William Thomas (1867-1956) was, in contrast, conducted in the universities and libraries of England. He was a student of classics, and then a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge at the end of the 19th century and a professor at Balliol College, Oxford in the 30s. These two Oxbridge stints bookended his job as librarian for the India Office Library, where he worked for thirty years. It was here, where he had the responsibility of sorting through the thousands of Tibetan manuscripts brought back from Central Asia by Aurel Stein, that Thomas found the raw materials for his most important scholarly work.

Thomas had little interest in the Buddhist materials from Dunhuang, and his work focused on early Tibetan history (letters, military communiqués and the like) and folklore. Most of this work was put together and published by Thomas after he retired to a cottage in Oxfordshire, where he worked in a damp and chilly study (at least he complained often in his letters that it was so). Here he put together his great 4-volume series of historical texts Tibetan Literary Texts and Documents from Chinese Turkestan, collected narrative texts in Ancient folk-literature from North-Eastern Tibet, and a study of the extinct Nam language (his equally pioneering work on the Zhangzhung language still remains unpublished).

The photo with Tucci was taken the year before Thomas’s death. According to the Dictionary of National Biography:

To his last years Thomas retained the lean and athletic figure of the strenuous sportsman. His manner was keen and affable, and he enjoyed speaking in learned company. He celebrated his retirement by undertaking a tour of India in 1938 which would have taxed the strength and energies of the most intrepid traveller. He retained the full scope of his great intellectual powers to the end, although deafness at the last diminished his social enjoyment.

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Tucci is still, no doubt, the preëminent scholar of his time, but those of us interested in the early history and culture of Tibet still owe Thomas a great debt. It is a pity that his works are so difficult to find, apart from in the major libraries. As an attempt to make Thomas’s work more available, I’ve been trying to get his major unpublished and out-of-print catalogues up on the IDP website. You can see his work on the documents about Dunhuang from vol.II of Tibetan literary texts and documents here, and his unpublished card catalogue slips of the Tibetan manuscripts Aurel Stein found in the Tangut/Mongolian regions of Etsingol and Kharakhoto here.

I see these two figures in quite different settings: Tucci striding across the dry and desolately beautiful landscapes of Western Tibet, Thomas bent over his desk in damp, verdant Oxfordshire. Tucci, the scholar “in the field”, Thomas the “armchair scholar”. One thing they had in common was that they both published their major works before 1959, when when the Tibetan diaspora changed forever the relationship between Westerners and Tibetans, and the nature of scholarship on Tibet.

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(The stamp and postmark from the envelope containing the photograph, marked October 1956. On the back of the photo, Francesca Bonardi wrote: “Con tanti cari auguri dal Prof. Tucci e da.”)

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Some online resources:

• On Tucci and his manuscript collections (IsIAO)
• Wikipedia on Tucci
• A blog about Tucci
• A Tucci biography
• F.W. Thomas in the Dictionary of National Biography
• Wikipedia on Thomas (with an incomplete bibliography)

See also:
Gustavo Benavide. 1995. “Guiseppe Tucci, or Buddhology in the Age of Fascism” In Donald. S. Lopez (ed.), Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism Under Colonialism. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

These days it’s easy to think of Tibetan Buddhism as an international religion. We usually see this as something that came about in the second half of the twentieth century, when so many Tibetan lamas fled the country. Before that time, Tibetan culture is often presented as if it was enclosed within the mountain fastness of Tibet, taking its own path in splendid isolation.

But if you know a bit of history, this picture doesn’t look quite right. Tibetan Buddhism was very popular at the courts of the Mongols and the Manchus, becoming for centuries the religion of choice for the ruling classes in China. And the religion of the Mongolian people is also essentially Tibetan, as a result of great missionary efforts on the part of Tibetan lamas.

And then there are our Dunhuang manuscripts. Dunhuang was, of course, located at the northeastern end of Great Tibet, the old Tibetan empire, and even after the fall of the empire many aspects of Tibetan culture remained. But while neighbouring areas like Tsongka and Liangzhou had a large Tibetan population, the residents of Dunhuang were always mostly Chinese.

So questions arise — Who actually wrote the Tibetan manuscripts found in Dunhuang? Who was practising Tibetan Buddhism there? There are no simple answers, but I think we can say that most of the time it wasn’t the Tibetans.

*  *  *

Let’s take an example. The Questions and Answers on Vajrasattva is one of the great tantric treatises of the early period of Tibetan Buddhism, written by Nyan Palyang, an important Tibetan tantric scholar of the ninth century. The questions are all about the Mahāyoga class of tantric practice (and shed some light on the early role of Dzogchen, as I discussed some time ago). This treatise was preserved in the Tibetan canons, as well as in several Dunhuang manuscripts, one of which (IOL Tib J 470) is signed by the scribe, like this:

Though it’s written in Tibetan this is certainly a Chinese name. The first part of it is a rank, rather than a proper name: phu shi which is almost certainly Fushi 副使, an official title (found elsewhere in 10th-century Dunhuang) for the third-highest ranking district official in the Chinese government of tenth-century Dunhuang. So, this Tibetan treatise on the practice of Mahāyoga meditation was copied down on an (incidently rather nice quality) scroll by a Chinese official at Dunhuang.

Other Tibetan tantric manuscripts are written by Khotanese, by Uighur Turks, sometimes, even by Tibetans. Tibetan Buddhism was clearly by this time a genuine international religion, a cultural point of contact between a great many ethnically diverse people.

How did this happen? Well, when the Tibetans occupied Dunhuang (and other non-Tibetan speaking areas) they forced the locals to learn Tibetan. Official correspondence and legal documents had to be written in Tibetan, and the mass-produced sutras that the emperor Ralpachen funded (see here) were mainly written by Chinese locals. After the Tibetans were kicked out, locals carried on using Tibetan to draw up contracts and write letters. The Tibetan language became a lingua franca for Central Asia — one of our Tibetan manuscripts, for example, is a letter from the (Chinese) ruler of Dunhuang to the (Khotanese) king of Khotan.

And these locals, like our Chinese official, found that their second language, Tibetan, was also the ideal language for learning about the newest developments in tantric practice (which had only a very limited circulation in Chinese translation).

*  *  *

Why does this matter? Well, consider that when the Mongol leader Godan Khan met Sakya Pandita in order to agree of Tibet’s status vis-a-vis the Mongol Empire, they met at Liangzhou — a few days journey from Dunhuang. The Mongols were inheritors of the Tangut practice of appointing Tibetan monks as imperial preceptors, and the Tanguts just formalized previous power relationships between Tibetan Buddhists and minor Chinese rulers in Dunhuang and the surrounding areas. Let me quote Christopher Beckwith, who says it better:

The Tibetan successor states in Liangzhou and neighboring areas were pro-Buddhist. When the Tanguts finally occupied this region they simply continued to support an already long-established Buddhist church. Furthermore, Tibetan monks were quite active at the court of the Sung dynasty in China, where they assisted in the translation of several important Buddhist texts into Chinese. When the Mongols finally supplanted the Tanguts, they did not disturb the existing Buddhist establishment; on the contrary, they supported it as strongly as their predecessors had.

And the tantric patron-priest model that the Mongols and Tibetans used to conceptualize their political relationship was hugely important for later Tibetan history. But rather than trying to draw a dubious causal line between the interest of a local Chinese official in Tibetan tantric Buddhism and Sino-Tibetan political relations, I will just express the hope that the Fushi’s scroll (and others like it) can give us an insight into the otherwise forgotten lives of the ordinary(ish) people within these grand historical movements. As Leo Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace:

The movement of nations is caused not by power, nor by intellectual activity, nor even by a combination of the two as historians have supposed, but by the activity of all the people who participate in the events…

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References
1. Christopher Beckwith. 1987. “The Tibetans in the Ordos and North China.” in Christopher Beckwith (ed.), Silver on Lapis. Bloomington: The Tibetan Society. pp.3-11.
2. Gray Tuttle. 2007. Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China. New York: Columbia University Press.

Can monks do magic? Should they? We often picture monks (or at least the ideal of the monk) firmly in the setting of the monastery, either seeking enlightenment through study and meditation, or carrying out in the affairs of the monastery. But magic? Well, it seems that throughout most of the history of Buddhism the answer to the first question has been yes, and to the second usually why not? In fact, the  Buddhist canon contains enough spells to rival the repertoire of Merlin, Saruman and Harry Potter put together.

Let’s not make the mistake of thinking that this only applies to Tibetan Buddhism, through some insidious influence of shamanism (whatever that is). No, Indian, Chinese, Japanese monks have all mixed potions, cast spells and exorcised demons. There’s a story about Bodhiruci – an Indian monk who taught for many years in China – that nicely illustrates this. Once, when a Chinese monk spotted Bodhiruci casting a spell to make the water in a well boil, the monk started to pay special homage to him. But Bodhiruci stopped the monk and explained that all Indian monks learn these skills. (The story, from Daoxuan’s Further Lives of Eminent Monks, is retold in Richard McBride’s article.)

And let’s not think that this only applies to tantric Buddhism. Spells were being cast by Buddhists long before the tantras appeared. Indeed, the recitation of verses against disease or evil spirits goes right back to the beginnings of Buddhism. Mantras are found in the texts of the Sarvāstivadin sect and in the paritta texts of the Theravadins. (See Peter Skilling’s article.)

And there’s nothing mysterious, dubious or underhand about it. Buddhist monks have traditionally lived apart from, yet among lay people, who support their way of life. And ordinary people have turned to the monks for help with their everyday needs, whether serious calamities like illness, the complications of childbirth and spirit possession, or the questions that are answered by astrology and divination. Buddhist monks faced competition from the Brahmins in India, from the Bön and Shen in Tibet, and from the Daoists in China. They all had their spell techniques – and if they were to win the hearts and minds of ordinary people, the Buddhists would need spells too.

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Spells are written to be used, of course, so it’s interesting to look at an actual book of spells that was owned by a Buddhist monk – one of our 9th or 10th century Dunhuang manuscripts, IOL Tib J 401. That funny writing at the top of this post, that looks like the “outline” effect of my old word processor is the cover of a book of spells, on which a monk has written his name in big letters. You can’t miss it: “This is the ritual manual of Bhikṣu Prajñāprabhā.” Well, through the twists and turns of interdependent origination, this is now the ritual manual of the British Library, and more generally, of everyone who has a web connection and an interest in such things.

The book has a handmade quality; it seems to have been stitched together from recycled paper (long pothi pages, folded in the middle). So what’s in it? Spells, spells and more spells. Just one of the rituals allows the adept to cast spells for the following purposes:

• If you want a prophecy
• To bring demons under your power
• To pacify malignant people
• To overcome wild animals
• To cause a spring to come forth to alleviate thirst
• To sharpen your insight
• To create various valuable objects
• To find a treasure
• To cure an illness
• To cure a severe illness up to the point of death
• To cure an illness-ghost with a trap
• To cut off curses and bad births
• To reverse water, making it flow upwards
• To make it flow downhill again
• To cure madness
• To avoid being bitten by a dog
• To divide two lovers
• To reconcile two friends
• If you are unable to talk to others
• If you want to be friendly with another person
• To bind someone

This list gives us an idea of the many needs of ordinary people that could be addressed by the monk magician. Then there are the more complicated rituals that accomplish a single aim, like:

A fire puja (also called homa), which cures insanity. Fire pujas are found in many religious traditions in India, and they travelled with Buddhism to Tibet, China and Japan. In this spell the monk throws metal filings into the fire nine times – causing a dramatic series of flashes, I’m sure. Then five ritual daggers are stabbed into the ground as if pinning down a demon.

Thread-winding magic for “men with obstructed water” and “women with inverted wombs.” The monk knots and unknots the red thread several times while reciting mantras. In the end the thread is flung into the road – just as in the traditional Tibetan way of disposing of the thread cross.

A barley frog. People suffering from joint problems, swellings and the like were often thought to be afflicted by water spirits called Lu (a Tibetan cousin of the Indian Naga). In this ritual, barley flour is molded into the shape of a frog. Then a cavity is made in the top of the frog with a bamboo stick, and a special ointment prepared in the cavity. The ointment is then applied to the afflicted person’s body. The barley frog is then checked to determine the success of the ritual:

Lift up the frog, and if a golden liquid emerges from under it, they will definitely recover. If it is merely moist, then they will recover before too long. If there is only meat with gluey flour, they will be purified by the end of the illness. It is not necessary to do the ritual again. If there is only gluey flour, break it up and do the ritual again.

Prasena divination. This special kind of divination involves calling down a deity to answer questions put to it. In the ritual in this spell book the deity is called “the sky-soarer” or the Khyung (a Tibetan cousin of the Indian Garuda). The deity speaks through a “pure” (that is, pre-pubescent) child, or shows that child visions in a mirror, or on the flat of his own thumb. Though such rites of spirit-possession might seem “shamanic” they are described in Indian scriptures like the Amoghapāśa Sutra and the Questions of Subāhu, and prasena is apparently an Indian word, though no-one seems quite sure what it might mean (though Michel Strickmann had a good go at it). Prasena (often simply known as “pra”) has a long a fascinating history in Tibet, including being used in the quest for the present Dalai Lama after the death of his predecessor, for example (see Lama Chime Radha’s article).

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Buddhist collections of spells like these always contain some reminder of the wider perspective of Buddhist aspirations. In our spell book, it seems that a certain level of spirtual attainment is necessary for the spells to be effective. And at the end of the spell book everything is tied back into the great themes of Buddhism with a prayer to the Mañjuśrī, the bodhisattva of wisdom:

In the supremely precious, jewelled land of Ultimate Emanated Bliss
The realm radiantly coloured like stainless gold
The youth with five locks is lovely to behold.
By making offerings and inviting this supreme spiritual friend
I pray that he will come because of his kindness for this place
And carry out the accomplishment of this adept’s rituals:

“I have been blinded by the net of darkness
Mañjuśrī come near and treat me with kindness.
Your discernment, like the fire at the end of an aeon
Clears away the mere appearance of darkness in the mind;
Please bestow it upon me.”

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References
1. Cantwell, Cathy and Robert Mayer. 2008. Early Tibetan Documents on Phur pa from Dunhuang. Vienna: OAW.
2. Chime Radha, Lama. 1981. “Tibet.” In Carmen Blacker and Michael Lowe (eds), Oracles and Divination. London: Random House. 3-37.
3. McBride, Richard. 2005. “Dhāraṇī and Spells in Medieval Sinitic Buddhism.” JIABS 28.1: 85–114.
4. Skilling, Peter. 1992, “The Rakṣā Literature of the Śrāvakayāna.” Journal of the Pali Text Society 16: 109-182.
5. Strickmann, Michel (edited by Bernard Faure). 2002. Chinese Magical Medicine. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

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See also: A Soldier’s Prayer

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Note for readers of Tibetan: What is a no pyi ka?
The front cover of the spell book says bIg kru prad nya pra ba ‘I no pyi ka. I hope that most will agree that the name is probably Bhikṣu Prajñāprabhā, but what is a no pyi ka? I first came across the word in a poetical passage by Jigme Lingpa (at the beginning of his Pad ma dkar po) where he calls it “the essence of hearing, thinking and meditating” (thos bsam sgom pa’i snying po no pi ka). The term is much more common the Dunhuang manuscripts, and an interpretation was first suggested by Kenneth Eastman in 1983, when he noted that the Tibeto-Sanskrit glossary in Pelliot tibétain 849 glosses it as sgrub thabs – the Tibetan word that we usually consider a translation of the Sanskrit sādhana, a manual for ritual and/or meditation. Robert Mayer and Cathy Cantwell, in their 2008 book on Phurba manuscripts, suggest (with thanks to Matthew Kapstein) that the probable origin of all this is a Sanskrit term sādhanaupayika. Thus sādhanaupayika becomes nopayika becomes no pyi ka. This would be very neat because we thus get to the original Sanskrit term behind the Tibetan word sgrub thabs: sādhana = “accomplishment” = sgrub, while aupayika = “means” = thabs.

Whether or not the Tibetan emperor Lang Darma really did persecute Buddhist monks and monasteries, as he is said to have done during his ill-fated reign in the 840s, there is no doubt that a catastrophic collapse did indeed occur in Central Tibet. As society fragmented, revolutions and civil wars broke out and the Buddhist monasteries were abandoned. In Central Tibet, monastic Buddhism was all but wiped out. It took over a century – a Dark Age for Tibetan Buddhism – till monks began to appear in Central Tibet again.

There’s a tradition that monastic Buddhism survived in Tibet thanks to a few heroic monks, keepers of the flame of the monastic lineage. According to an old Tibetan saying, during this dark age the embers of the Buddha’s teaching were kept in the East. The story is that several monks refused to renounce their robes, and instead hit the road as Buddhist refugees. After much travelling they ended up in Amdo in Tibet’s northeast, which had avoided the complete collapse of monastic Buddhism. These refugees had taken their books with them, including most importantly the books of the vinaya, the monastic code that is the heart of the tradition of monastic ordination. This ensured the survival of the ordination lineage through the dark age.

Tradition preserves the names of a few of these refugee monks who settled in Amdo.The chaotic flight and eventual resettling of these monks is summarized in a passage from Nelpa Pandita’s history:

Yo and Mar, with a Central Asian monk called Shakya Sherab acting as their servant, settled in the rocky cave of Anchung Namdzong. Tsang settled in the temple of Khangsar Yaripug. Kwa Ö Chogdragpa, returning from Nepal, heard the news and left on the road to the north with a mule-load of abhidharma texts, finally settling in the temple of Palzang Kharchag Drilbu. Lhalung Rabjor Maldrowa and Rongtön Senge Drag left Yerpa with many books of vinaya and abhidharma, fleeing to Nagshö. After that, Lhalung settled in the temple of Dashö Tsal and Rongtön settled in Jang Chajerong.

Most later histories also add that Lang Darma’s assassin, Lhalung Palgyi Dorje, fled to Amdo too. In any case, the crucial point is that the first three of these refugees (Yo, Mar and Tsang) passed on their ordination lineage to a young local fellow. This young man had been brought up in the local non-Buddhist traditions, but had developed some faith in Buddhism and decided to ask the refugee monks for ordination. With the help of two Chinese monks, the young man was ordained, and given the religious name Gewa Rabsel.

*  *  *

Apparently Gewa Rabsel became an important figure in the religious scene of Amdo, but we don’t really know much about him. He is said to have spent a significant portion of his life teaching at the monastic mountain retreat of Dentig, which still exists in a valley west of Lanzhou. Gewa Rabsel ordained many local Amdo monks, and later histories also make Gewa Rabsel the religious preceptor of the famous men who came from Central Tibet in search of a living ordination lineage. These men (their number various in the sources) were the ones who brought the ordination lineage back to Central Tibet, and gradually restored Samyé and many other old monasteries that had fallen into ruin.

The story is convincing in its general outlines. There certainly must have been refugee monks, there probably was a Gewa Rabsel, and the idea that the monastic lineage was brought back to Central Tibet from Amdo is convincing. But even the Tibetan historians had some doubts about it. The main problem is the idea of Gewa Rabsel ordaining the men who brought the monastic lineage back to Central Tibet. Considering that the refugee monks who ordained Gewa Rabsel  arrived in Amdo some time in the 840-50s, and the “men of Central Tibet” received their ordination from him some time in the 970-80s, Gewa Rabsel would have to have lived an unfeasibly long time.

In fact we don’t have to accept this part of the story, even if we stay with the traditional histories. Though some early historians, notably Butön, had Gewa Rabsel ordaining the men from Central Tibet, others were not so sure. Sönam Tsemo wrote in the 12th century of this ordination lineage: “Some say it was received from Lachen Gewa Sel. Some say it was received from Tülpa Yeshe Gyaltsen.” And Nelpa Pandita, in his 13th century history, argued that there couldn’t be a direct connection between Gewa Rabsel and the monks who brought Buddhism back to Central Tibet:

Now, between the iron bird year when the dharma was snuffed out and the earth bird year when the embers were fanned and dharma communities appeared in Central Tibet, nine year-cycles passed. For 109 years there were no monks in Central Tibet. Therefore to say that the six men of Central Tibet received their vows from Lachen Gongpa Sel is a deceptive explanation which is utterly wrong.

In truth, Nelpa Pandita argues, the men of Central Tibet were ordained by one Drum Yeshe Gyaltsen – a disciple of a disciple of Gewa Rabsel and  no doubt the same person as the Tülpa Yeshe Gyaltsen mentioned by Sönam Tsemo. Similarly, Gö Lotsawa in the Blue Annals also denies any connection between Gewa Rabsel and the six men of Central Tibet, although he does say that some other histories make that connection. So a longer, and more convincing lineage for the keepers of the flame looks like this:

1. The refugees: Yo, Mar and Tsang
2. Gewa Rabsel
3. Yangong Yeshe Yungdrung
4. Drum/Tülpa Yeshe Gyaltsen
5. The men of central Tibet

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So who was this Drum Yeshe Gyaltsen? He was a local Amdo man who was ordained by one of the students of Gewa Rabsel. He established a monastery in Amdo, which followed a fairly strict interpretation of the vinaya, banning agriculture and animal husbandry, as well as luxurious cushions or carpets. Interestingly, he also banned political activity and certain  funeral rituals involving the inscription of syllables (which could have been a good source of income for the monks).

Despite its strictness, Drum’s monastery seems to have been quite successful, and its ordination lineage became known as “the lineage of the ascetics” (tsüngyü). Why “ascetics”? Well, there was also another Amdo lineage known “the lineage of the scholars” (khégyü), which came from a monastery established by a monk called Nub Palgyi Jangchub and was much more lax in its discipline. It was mainly distinguished from Drum’s lineage by the fact the monks were allowed to meddle in politics. As a result, Nelpa Pandita says that the monks of this lineage “were of little use for religious training.” Nyangral’s history doesn’t mention the specific differences between the lineages, but does suggest that the split came about because of “a little bit of wordly activity.”

The difference between the approaches of the two lineages is illustrated in this amusing story about their two founders (from Nelpa Pandita’s history):

One day Drum went to the residence of Nub, and they talked a lot about the dharma. Then Drum said, “Let’s sleep; where shall I make my bed?” Nub replied, “Here, same as me.” Drum said, “They say you drink alcohol in secret. Can I stay in the attic?” Nubs replied angrily, “Ha! you’re so strict, it’s like you have wood for brains!” Thus Drum became known as “Wood-for-Brains”.

In the end, Drum had the last laugh. It was his lineage of ascetics that was passed down to the six men of Central Tibet and used to revive the monasteries there. The restoration of the temples, and the ordination of hundreds of new monks, set the scene for the “later diffusion” of Buddhism in Tibet – the visit of Atisha and the Kadam school that grew up around his teachings, the new scholasticism of Shalu monastery, and so on… This ordination lineage even survived into the 20th century in the Nyingma tradition as the Mindröling lineage, and in the Gelug tradition as the “Abbot’s lineage of Lachen”.

Apart from these survivals, it has to be said that the ordination lineage from Gewa Rabsel was ultimately eclipsed by new ones. In fact it had a rather controversial reputation, some people objecting to the fact that the refugee monks and Gewa Rabsel had performed all of three stages of ordination in a single ritual. Others defended this practice by pointing to the sublime nature of Gewasel and his preceptors, and the dire straits in which the monastic ordination found itself in the period of fragmentation.

Gewa Rabsel remains one of the culture heroes of Tibetan Buddhism, who kept the flame of the monastic lineage alive and passed it on so that it was eventually brought back to Central Tibet, where it lit the fires of a Buddhist revival. Let us also not forget Drum Yeshe Gyaltsen, the wooden-headed abbot who kept his monks free enough from politics to preserve a meaningful model of monasticism for the Tibetans of the generations to come.

*  *  *

See also:
The Decline of Buddhism I: Was Lang Darma a Buddhist?
The Decline of Buddhism II: Did Lang Darma persecute Buddhism?
The Decline of Buddhism III: Why should the secret mantra be kept secret?

Some thoughts on the dates of Gewa Rabsel…
Gewa Rabsel’s name has several variations: he is known as Gewa Rabsel or simply Gewa Sel, as Gongpa Rabsel or Gongpa Sel, and often merely by the honorific Lachen (”great lama” or “great soul”). His dates are not given in the earlier sources, but the Blue Annals states that he was born in a water mouse year, and died in a wood pig year, at the age of 84. Traditionally these dates are supposed to be equivalent to 952–1035, but this is skewed by the mistake made by all later Tibetan historians in dating the death of Langdarma a whole 60-year cycle too late, So we should move these dates back one cycle, giving us 892–975.

Even with those earlier dates, the connection with monks fleeing central Tibet in the 840s or 850s seems rather unlikely. If we move them back by one further sixty-year cycle to 832–915, Gewa Rabsel would have been a young man when the refugee monks arrived in Amdo. This does place him rather far from the revival of monastic Buddhism in Tibet at the end of the tenth century, but that’s not a problem if we follow the histories that don’t insist on a direct connection between Gewa Rabsel and the six men of Central Tibet.

And on the names of Yeshé Gyaltsen…
The name Tülpa (thul pa) Yeshé Gyaltsen given by Sönam Tsemo is probably a corruption of Dülwa (’dul ba), and a “Dülwa Yeshé Gyaltsen” does indeed appear in some histories. So Tülpa and Dülwa Yeshé Gyaltsen were surely the same person. What about Drum Yeshé Gyaltsen? Since Drum (’grum) is a clan name, while Dülwa an honorific indicating an expert in the vinaya, it’s likely that these names also refer to a single person.

As for Drum’s nickname “Wood-for-Brains”, this is shing klad can in Tibetan. Here I’m following Helga Uebach’s reading of Nelpa Pandita’s text, which actually gives shing glag can. The same story features in the Nyangral Nyima Özer’s history, where we have shing rlag pa can. (Note that in this version Nubs also gets a nickname, phag shing rta, which might be translated as “Pig Wagon”.) Finally, in the Sba bzhed (R.A. Stein’s version) we have phying klag can. Not at all conclusive I know, but I like Uebach’s solution.

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References (Tibetan dharma histories)
1. Butön Rinchendrup: Chos ‘byung gsung rab rin po che mdzod. Beijing: Khrung go bod kyi shes rig dpe skrun khang. 1988. English translation in Obermiller, E. 1931-2. The history of Buddhism (Chos ḥbyung) by Bu-ston. I The Jewellery of Scripture, II The history of Buddhism in India and Tibet. Heidelberg: O. Harrosovitz. Reprint 1986, New Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications.
2. Gö Lotsawa Zhönupal: Deb ther sngon po. Chengdu: Si khron mi rigs dpe skrun khang. 1984. English translation in Roerich, G.N. 1949. The Blue Annals. Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal. (See p.67.) Also available here.
3. Nelpa Pandita: Ne’u chos ‘byung — Nel-pa Paṇḍita’s Chronik Me-tog Phreṅ-wa: Handschrift der Liberary of Tibetan Works and Archives, Tibetischer Text in Faksimile, Transkription und Übersetzung. Munich: Kommission für Zentralasiatische Studien, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1987. (The first quote is from pp.122-3 and the others from pp.128-9.)
4. Nyangral Nyima Özer: Chos ‘byung me tog snying po – facsimile in Schuh, Dieter. Die grosse Geschichte des tibetischen Buddhismus nach alter Tradition rÑiṅ ma’i chos byuṅ chen mo. Sankt Augustin: VGH Wissenschaftsverlag. (See p.445-6. Nyangral mentions another Amdo ordination lineage, called Me(rme), and unlike other sources, he apparently states that the both the ascetics’ and scholars’ lineages lasted and became famous in Central Tibet, though it isn’t very clear – see p.446.5.)
5. Sönam Tsemo: Chos la ‘jug pa’i sgo – in Sa skya bka’ ‘bum, vol.I (See p.318b).
6. T.G. Dhongthog Rinpoche: Sa skya’i chos ‘byung. New Delhi. 1977.

References (English works)
Davidson, Ronald M. 2006. Tibetan Renaissance: Tantric Buddhism in the Rebirth of Tibetan Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. (See Chapter 3 for an excellent account of this period based on a variety of historical sources.)

Also see here for a summary of the traditional story from the Berzin Archives.

Astrology was, and surely still is, an important part of life in Tibet. As in most other Asian countries, astrology played the vital role of deciding whether to carry out an important activity – a journey, a marriage, a funeral, a battle – and which days were best for embarking on such activities. Tibetan astrology is often said to be a combination of Chinese and Indian astrologies. According to one history, it was the tsenpo Tridé Tsugtsen who introduced Chinese astrology to Tibet in the 8th century. The influence of Indian astrology comes mainly through the Kālacakra tantra I believe, from the 11th century onwards.

There is an old saying, going back to the time of the Tibetan empire, that characterises Tibet’s neighbours according to their special talents (at least in Tibetan eyes):

• To the south is India, the land of religion
• To the north is Turkestan, the land of horses, weapons and war
• To the west is Persia, the land of wealth, jewels and trade
• To the east is China, the land of divination and astrology

Tibet already had a divination method that had little to do with Chinese astrology, in which dice were used to consult oracle deities – the ancestor of the mo divination still practised today. But the study of the stars and their portents was something the Tibetans encountered, and apparently were impressed with, in their early contact with China.

Now I wouldn’t be venturing into an area of which I know so very little, were it not for an amazing and totally unexplored manuscript from the Dunhuang cave that looks like the earliest Tibetan text on Chinese-style astrology – Or.8210/S.6878. It’s been written on the back of a Chinese sutra, and since it was filed along with the Chinese scrolls, the Tibetan side was ignored. How, I don’t know. It’s full of diagrams and ends with the rather strange tortoise that graces the top of this post. So I will say a little about this manuscript, and hope to learn something from anyone who knows more about the subject and is kind enough to comment.

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The first diagram comes under the heading “divining the good and bad dates for beginning a journey.” The first result is this:

When the day falls in the “gate of the sky”, if you go on a long journey, it will be good and auspicious.

If you look in the diagram, the “gate of the sky” (gnam gyi sgo) is one of the eight divisions of the diagram, under which is written “the 1st day, the 9th day, the 10th day, the 17th day and the 25th day.” So the sky is divided into eight parts.

I guess it’s not so difficult to do this astrology after all – just check the day of the month against the diagram, and read the result. There are bad days too:

When the day falls in the “junction of the sky”, wherever you go a great loss will occur – very bad.

The word I translated as “loss” is god ka, which usually means a financial deficit, so I have the feeling that the main purpose for making this astrological calculation is to check on the possible success of a journey for the purpose of trade. That is, travelling merchants (not scarce on the Silk Route) would ask an astrologer (probably a Buddhist monk) to check the best days for embarking on a journey. I say “probably a Buddhist monk” because these astrological diagrams have been written on the back of a Chinese Perfection of Wisdom sutra.

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Other diagrams on the scroll contain the twelve animals of the Chinese and Tibetan zodiacs, and underneath is the phrase “If the male and female are joined in this way…” The animal years in the Tibetan calendar always come in male or female form (usually the even-numbered years are the male ones, and the odd-numbered years the female). Note that in the diagram here the animals are divided into pairs. This could be a combination of the animal of the current year with the animal of the day, or of one’s birth year, but I haven’t been able to work this one out yet.

And what of the star animal of this manuscripts – the golden turtle? Well, in early China (I mean the Han dynasty if not earlier) the main methods for divination were to use bones, yarrow sticks and turtle shells. It was the ability of the turtle to live to a great old age that attracted people to it. Turtles from the Yangtse River were thought to have divine powers, and those over a foot long were believed to be a thousand years old. In their age they represented wisdom and – unfortunately for the turtles – longevity, with the inevitable result that they were eaten as a remedy for the problems of old age. Pictured below is the Chinese Pond Turtle, also known as the Golden Turtle.

Turtles – which have the lovely name rubel (rus sbal) in Tibetan – also had a cultural significance in Tibet. Have a look at the metaphors and riddles of Padampa Sangyé attached to the redoubtable Tibeto-Logic site here. One asks “who drew the design on the turtle’s back; who was the artist?” Which brings us to the fact that the turtle depicted here appears to be without its shell. In fact it looks suspiciously like the artist had never seen a real turtle.

So, how to do the turtle divination? The instructions are quite straightforward, although you need to know what a lunar day is. You need to count the number of lunar days since the day you lost the thing, going around the points of the turtle, and then take the result from where you end up on the turtle’s body. If you lost the thing within thirty days, start at the head and go round clockwise. If it’s over thirty days, start at the bottom and go round anticlockwise. And if you don’t read Tibetan, here’s a translation of the body parts

*  *  *

The divination practice (mo) of the golden turtle: for finding things that have escaped or been mislaid.

Whichever lunar day it happens to be, calculate from the first day it was lost to the current lunar day, and the result is found in connection with where this falls on the body part of the turtle. If it was lost within the last thirty days, then count to the right from the head. If it is not within thirty days, then count going round to the left from the tail. Write the good or bad result at the turtle’s tail.

• If it was lost on the lunar day of the head, it will be found if you look in the vicinity of a laundry washer.
• If it was lost on the lunar day of the ears, then even if you come across it on the road while searching for it, it will not be beneficial to get your hands on it.
• If it was lost on the lunar day of the arms, you will find it if you look for it on a high mountain, in a ravine, or in the middle of a graveyard.
• If it was lost on the lunar day of the armpits, you will find it if you look for it at the goldsmiths, at the watermill, or in the town centre.
• If it was lost on the lunar day of the feet, you will find it if you look at the the royal gates, the minister’s place, or the conference site.
• If it was lost on the lunar day of the tail, you will find it if you look in the direction of your girlfriend.

*  *  *

Tibetan text
@//gser gyI ru bal mo ste//bros pa dang/rlag btsal pa’/zla ba gang la bab kyang rung ste//tshes zhag gcig nas bgrangs la stor pa’I/nyi ma ru sbal kyi tshigs gar bab pa dang/sbyar te gdab bo/zla ba sum/cu thub na nI/mgo nas g.yas logsu bgrang/zla ba sum cu myi thub na ni/mjug bas g.yon logsu bskor te bgrango//bzang ngan gyi tsigs ni/ru sbal kyi mjug du bris so//
@//mgo ‘i nyi ma la/stor na btso blag mkhan gyI/ ‘khor du btsal na rnyed//rna ba’I nyi ma la stor na/btsal te lam du phrad kyang /bdag gI lag tu thob la myI phan no//lag pa’I pa’I nyi ma la stor na/rI mthon po dang/grog mo dang/mchad khrod du/btsan (=btsal) na rnyed//mchan khung gI nyi ma la stor na/gser mgar dang/rang tag (=’thag) dang/grong ‘khor du btsal na rnyed//rkang pa’I nyi ma la stor na/rdze (=rje?) sgo dang/zhang lon dang/ tshong dus su btsal na rnyed//mjug ma’I nyi ma la stor na/grog (=grogs?) mo pyogsu btsal na rnyed//

Translator’s notes

• Two words I am uncertain about here are grong ‘khor, which I have tentatively translated as “town centre”, and rdze sgo, which I have even more tentatively translated as “royal gates” (assuming rdze = rje).
• The word tshong dus, which I’ve translated as “conference site” is found in the Dunhuang manuscripts referring to several places where royal/governmental conferences were held during the Tibetan empire. Later, it usually means a marketplace.
• I’ve chosen to read grog mo in the final sentence to grogs mo, changing a ravine to a girlfriend. Since we already had a ravine in an earlier result, it seems redundant here. I like this reading, but it might not be right.

*  *  *

References
1.Baumann, Brian. 2008. Buddhist Mathematics According to the Anonymous Manual of Mongolian Astrology and Divination. Leiden: Brill.
2. Cornu, Phillipe. 2002. Tibetan Astrology. Boston: Shambhala.
3. Loewe, Michael. 1994. Divination, mythology and monarchy in Han China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
4. Ho Peng Yoke. 2003. Chinese Mathematical Astrology. London: Routledge Curzon.

The funerals of the ancient Tibetan kings (the tsenpos) were solemn ritual affairs involving a range of specialist priests and lasting months or even years. At the end of the whole process, the tsenpo was buried in a huge mausoleum made of packed earth. It is not very clear exactly what happened during the long period between the tsenpo’s death and his interral in the tomb. But there is a crucial passage in one of the stories in the Old Tibetan Chronicle from Dunhuang, which tells of how the first funeral ceremony for the Tibetan tsenpos came about.

The vital passage appears in the story of Drigum Tsenpo, the first of the royal line not to pulled back up to heaven on a sky cord. In the story, the tsenpo’s body has remained on earth and, to add insult to injury, been kidnapped by a spirit. The spirit demands a child as a ransom for the body of the tsenpo. When a child fitting the purpose is found, the child’s mother makes certain demands that set the precedent for the funeral rituals of the tsenpos for all futurity:

When he asked the mother, “What do you want in recompense for her?” the mother answered: “I want nothing but this: that in all future when a bTsan-po, who has withdrawn as a ruler, dies, a top-knot of the hair should be bound like a braid, the surface (ngo, of the body) should be anointed with vermilion (mtshal), the body should be lacerated and scratched, incision should be made into the corpse of the bTsan-po, and it should be taken away from men that it may decay. Food should be eaten and drunk. Will you do like that, or will you not do like that?” Thus she spoke. (Haarh 1969: 405)

Now, Haarh’s work is a tour de force, but I have some doubts about his translation here. And since one often sees it repeated in accounts of the funerals of the tsenpos, it seems worth having another look at it. Since it’s such an important passage, I don’t want to be dogmatic here. I will just suggest an alternative way of reading the text.

The piercing of the tsenpo’s corpse is mentioned in the Old Tibetan Annals for the tsenpo Dusong (in 778/9) and the regent Tri Malo (712/3). As Haarh says, this probably refers to an embalming treatment of the corpse. But there seem to be no references to cutting off the tsenpo’s hair, anointing his face with vermilion and lacerating his body. And another reason to think the mother is not talking about the tsenpo here is that ordinary words for face and body (ngo and lus) are used, rather than honorific ones (zhal and sku). I also think that it’s logical to translate this passage so that the mother starts to talk about the treatment of the corpse when she specifically says “the corpse of the tsenpo” and not before that.

So, here’s a different way of reading this crucial passage:

When he asked the mother, “What do you want in recompense for her?” the mother said: “I want nothing but this: that forever to come when a noble tsenpo dies, [the mourners] cut off their topknots, anoint their faces with vermilion, and lacerate their bodies. The corpse of the tsenpo is to be pierced, and taken away to the people. The food is to be eaten and drunk. Will you do it like that?”

If it is the mourners who cut off their hair, paint their faces and cut their bodies, and not the tsenpo, that means we need to revise our ideas of the funeral practices of the early Tibetans a little. What interests me most is the way this reading of the text brings the funeral rituals of the tsenpos closer to those of other Eurasian cultures – for example, the Scythians. We know quite a lot about the funerals of the Scythian kings because Herodotus wrote about them in the 5th century BC. Here’s what he wrote:

The tombs of their kings are in the land of the Gerrhi, who dwell at the point where the Borysthenes is first navigable. Here, when the king dies, they dig a grave, which is square in shape, and of great size. When it is ready, they take the king’s corpse, and, having opened the belly, and cleaned out the inside, fill the cavity with a preparation of chopped cypress, frankincense, parsley-seed, and anise-seed, after which they sew up the opening, enclose the body in wax, and, placing it on a wagon, carry it about through all the different tribes. On this procession each tribe, when it receives the corpse, imitates the example which is first set by the Royal Scythians; every man chops off a piece of his ear, crops his hair close, and makes a cut all round his arm, lacerates his forehead and his nose, and thrusts an arrow through his left hand.*

And as a commentator on Herodotus recently wrote: “The magnificent funerals of the Scythian kings have several parallels among Eurasian nomads of every age…” Indeed, restricting ourselves to the practices of cutting off the hair and self-laceration among mourners, we can easily pick out the following further examples. It was reported that at the funeral of Attila the Hun, mourners cut off their hair and made deep cuts in their faces. They kept the body in a ceremonial tent for a time before being buried. The Xiongnu (a nomadic empire that ruled northern China for a while in the 3rd and 4th centuries AD) buried their kings in large tombs, and plaits of hair have been found in some of those that have been excavated. The Khazars (around in the 7th-11th centuries) buried their dead in mausoleums near rivers, and at the funerals they beat drums, whistled and lacerated their faces. And so on

What we see again and again is the mourners cutting off their hair and lacerating their faces and bodies. This seems to me to be quite persuasive circumstantial evidence for rereading the Old Tibetan Chronicle in the same way. It also shows just how much the religion of the early Tibetan clans preserved the culture of their nomadic ancestors from the northern steppes. Other aspects of the tsenpo’s funerals which I haven’t mentioned here are also found among Eurasian nomadic peoples – like the long period elapsing between death and burial; the sacrifice of animals, especially white ones, and especially horses; and the killing and entombment of the king’s retainers.

I think all this helps us to see the early Tibetan religion (at least the myths and rituals surrounding the tsenpos) in the wider Eurasian cultural matrix shared by Scythians, Huns, Khazars, Turks, Mongols, and many more people of nomadic origin. If course that was only one part of the rich cultural heritage that characterized Tibet’s pre-Buddhist religion, but thanks to the success of the tsenpos, a particularly important part.

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Tibetan text

Pelliot tibétain 1287, ll.44-47: de blu na ji ‘dod ces ma la drIs na / ma na re gzhan myI ‘dod / nam nam zha zhar / btsan po rje dbyal zhig nongs na / thor to ‘phren mo ni bcings / ngo la mtshal gyis byugs / lus la ni bzhags / btsan po ‘i spur la nI ‘tshog / myI la ‘phrog lom / zas la nI za ‘thung / de ltar bya ‘am myi bya zhes mchi nas /

And another note…

I also have doubts about the latter part of Haarh’s translation, that is, the line (referring to the tsenpo’s corpse “and it should be taken away from men that it may decay.” In Tibetan, this is myI la ‘phrog phom. For a start, I’m pretty certain the last syllable is not phom. I’ve been pouring over the image (see left) and I think the most likely reading is lom, though I’m not sure what this could mean in the context. In any case, that’s not a pha. Haarh interpreted this phom as a form of ‘bam pa, “decay”. There being no reason to read phom, there’s no reason to think the text is talking about decay. Why should it, when the point of piercing the tsenpo’s corpse was embalmment?

It’s also interesting that the Tibetan has myi la, not myi las — that is, it is not clear that the corpse is to be taken “from” the people. The point of the long delay before burial among the Scythians, Ossetians and the Mongols was to bring the corpse to various clans so that they could make offerings and pay homage. Could we read this line then as “it should be taken to the people”? As Haarh pointed out (on pages 358-60), the Old Tibetan Annals mentions corpses being placed in a ring khang, which he interpreted as a Totenhaus, or “house of the dead.” But this doesn’t necessarily exclude the possibility that the tsenpo’s corpse — like those of Scythian and Mongol leaders — was also taken of a grand tour of the major clans first.

Suggestions are welcomed, as ever…

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See also
Buddhism and Bon I: the religion of the gods
The Red-Faced Men I: warriors with painted faces

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References
1. Asheri, David, Alan Lloyd and Aldo Corcella. 2007. A Commentary on Herodotus, Books I-IV. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2. Baldick, Julian. 2000. Animal and Shaman: Ancient Religions of Central Asia. London: I.B. Tauris.
3. Haarh, Erik. 1969. The Yar-lun Dynasty. Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gad’s Verlag.
4. Heller, Amy. 2003. “Archeology of Funeral Rituals as revealed by Tibetan tombs of the 8th to 9th century.” Transoxiana (Ērān ud Anērān Webfestschrift Marshak 2003). Click here.
5. Herodotus. (translated by George Rawlinson). 1885. The History of Herodotus, New York: D. Appleton and Company.

* You can see the Herodotus quote above in its proper context, which is Book 4 of the Histories, here.

Images
1. Scythian tomb-ware, from the website of CAIS (see here).
2. Pelliot tibétain 1287 (The Old Tibetan Chronicles).

I think it might be fair to say that Tibetan Buddhism hasn’t often come into direct conflict with other religions. And although I’m all for the harmonious coexistence of religions, I find the few instances of head-on confrontation quite interesting. So let’s look at what happened once when Buddhism and Daoism came to blows.

It was in the cosmopolitan court of Kubilai Khan, during the height of Mongol power. There was a new, vigorous school of Daoists, called Quanzhen. The school had been founded in the eleventh century, and by the twelfth it already had 4,000 monasteries and 20,000 priests. The school advocated an inner alchemy which rejected the use of elixirs, previously popular with Daoists, in favour of cultivating one’s inner nature (xing) and life-force (ming). More to the point, they were quite enthusiastic, shall we say, about propogating their religion.

During the 1250s, Quanzhen monks were roaming around China taking over small Buddhist monasteries and converting them to Daoist ones. Even worse, they were piling up the sacred books of these monasteries and burning them. They were also hanging around at the Mongol court, like everybody else, looking for patronage. It was here that the Daoists and the Buddhists started to squabble. Kubilai’s predecessor Mongke Khan convened two debates in 1255 and ‘56 which the Buddhist side was represented by a mysterious monk called Namo. The second Karmapa, Karma Pakshi was at Mongke’s court at this time, and took part in the debate of ‘56.

These were opening skirmishes. It was in the reign of Kubilai that the decisive debates took place. The monastery-occupying and scripture-burning activities of the Daoists had not abated. And now, adding insult to injury, they were also circulating printed copies of the Laozi huahu jing, a polemical text telling the story of how the found of Daoism, Laozi, travelled to India and invented Buddhism there as a lesser doctrine for the barbarians.

Kubilai’s imperial preceptor at this time was Chögyal Phagpa, the head of the Sakya school, and by the Khan’s command, ruler of Tibet. Phagpa was upset by the Daoists’ activities and asked the Khan to convene another debate. This time, the stakes would be higher – the losers would surrender their own scriptures to be burned.

We know that this debate really took place in the summer of 1258, thanks to Chinese and Tibetan historians. We also have Phagpa’s own account of it – “Verses on the Defeat of the Quanzhen Teachers” -  preserved in his collected works….

Urged by the Lord of Men himself,
Who possesses a great analytical mind
And increases merit and well-being everywhere,
The arrow transmitting the authentic scriptures,
Tipped with the vajra arrowhead of logic,
Was placed on the bow of analysis
And shot by the archer of inspired speech.

The Lord of Men is Kubilai, the secular parallel to the Lord of Sages, the Buddha. After offering his patron suitable praise, Phagpa characterizes himself as a sacred archer with an impressive extended metaphor. But did Phagpa’s arrow hit its target? He doesn’t tell us straight away, but instead goes on to desribe his Daoist opponent:

By striving on the path of the seer,
He has gained eyes of clairvoyance
And the powers of magic,
But due to the imprints of his countless previous lives,
He believes that the self exists in the material aggregates.
Thus he will never be a vessel
For the path to liberation.

This supreme teacher of the Quanzhen school,
Followers of the one they call Lao Jun,
Is well-versed in the texts of his tradition,
But has become completely intoxicated
By pride in his considerable fame,
And has looted and burned
Our books of scripture.

The name of the Daoist who went head to head with Phagpa is not preserved in any of the histories. A pity, since he was obviously well-known at the time. For Phagpa his first crime is philosophical: since he believes in the existence of a self, he will never understand Buddhism, the philosophy of nonself. His second crime is the pride that has led him to burning Buddhist books. So, who won?

Applying the elixir that transforms
The iron of a sound intellect
Into the golden teachings of the authentic scriptures,
I turned him into an upholder of the vows
Of the excellent yogic conduct of the Sage.

Ah, Phagpa won, and it seems his opponent, in the traditional way, converted to Buddhism. In fact, in the colophon Phagpa states that seventeen Daoist monks converted to Buddhism. By the way, did you see what Phagpa did with the metaphors in this verse? Rather sarcastically turning the Daoist tradition of alchemy against his opponent, Phagpa characterises his own Buddhist logical arguments as a kind of alchemy, transforming his opponents iron-like intellect into the golden Buddhist teachings. From archer to alchemist.

Phagpa ends by hoping the the news of his victory helps others turn to the Buddha’s path:

The learned enjoyed this very much,
And because of their enjoyment, news of this
Spread to the limits of the sky through the realms of men.
May this help all beings on the wrong path,
Or with no path, to enter the teachings.

What he doesn’t mention is that the after the debate, 45 Daoist scriptures were burned. Presumably these were the Daoist books kept at the Mongol court. That wasn’t the end of the problem. Another debate was convened in some decades larer, in 1281 (after Phagpa’s death). The Buddhists won again, and this time the entire Daoist canon (except for the Daodejing) was burned. And though that does seem to have been the end of Daoist influence at the Mongol court, it wasn’t the end of the Quanzhen school. They survived and remain to this day the largest school of monastic Daoism.

*  *  *

Colophon

For the sake of completeness, here’s the colophon to Phagpa’s verses:

In the past in China, the one called Tawo Shang Lao Jun was born after 82 years in his mother’s womb, and delighted in solitude. Striving for meditative absorption, he attained clairvoyance and magical powers. He gave advice on this path of his to students, and a religious system similar to the Śāṃkhya arose. His followers grew very numerous and came to be known as the Quanzhen school. Seeing that they were doing harm to the teachings of the Sūgatas, the Lord of Men Kubilai commanded a refutation this false system. On the 23rd day of the midsummer month of the male earth horse year (1258), Phagpa, having studied for a long time to achieve expertise in our own philosophical system, defeated seventeen [teachers] who became monks. This has been written as a commemoration.

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References
1. Drogön Chögyal Phagpa. “Verses on the Defeat of the Quanzhen Teachers.” Sa skya bka’ ‘bum: 7.304.
2. Eskilden, Stephen. 2004. The Teachings and Practices of the Early Quanzhen Masters. New York: SUNY.
3. Tao-Chung Yao. 2004. “Quanzhen—Complete Perfection.” In Kohn, Livia (ed.), Daoism Handbook. (2 vols.) Leiden: Brill. II.567–593.

Images
1. Kubilai Khan, portrait (13th c?), National Palace Museum, Taipei.
2. Chögyal Phagpa, 18th century painting. Rubin Collection, HimalayanArt.com.