One Thousand Years of War Magic
History demonstrates that there have been very few examples of non-violent rule by religious leaders. Crusading popes, kings, and caliphs have left much destruction in their paths. Considering the admirable moral codes of the world religions, one would have expected a better performance. The millions who rightly admire the current Dalai Lama would offer him as a glowing exception and many would make the assumption that Tibetan Buddhism has always produced such saints. Sadly, this is not, as we just saw with Bhutan’s Shabdrung, the case. Hugh Richardson comments that the “rivalry and bitter fighting” among the monasteries “is a blot on the Tibetan Middle Ages.” Each of the monasteries had a “private army commanded often by a reliable family member of the original religious founder and head of the monastery.”[1] In the fourteenth century the warrior-lama Changchub Gyaltsen was able to rule Tibet with the aid of an army led by a monk general.[2]
It is significant that Tsepon Shakabpa, writing with the approval of the current Dalai Lama, describes Gushri Khan’s western Mongols’ campaign on behalf of the Gelugpas against the Tsang King and his Kagyupa allies as a “religious war,” and in turn the Tsang King directed his own eastern Mongol troops to “wipe out the Gelug sect.”[3] Shakabpa submits that “religious zeal . . . cannot be ignored as a prime motivation for the [Gushri] Khan’s actions.”[4] We will see that the Fifth Dalai Lama instructed his monks to perform elaborate tantric rituals to harm the enemies of the Gelug sect. Over the centuries high lamas have used tantric “war” magic with devastating effect against their enemies, primarily other Tibetan Buddhist sects.
After the decline of Indian Buddhism due to Muslim invasions, Alexander Norman observes that the Tibetan “Kālachakra tantric teachings are replete with references to a coming conflagration in which the followers of Buddha will emerge victorious in a final battle with the followers of the Prophet [Muhammad].”[5] I was unable to verify if any Tibetans consider the following victory as a fulfillment of this prophecy; but in 1206, a force of 10,000 cavalry led by the Turkish general Ikhtiyar-ud-din moving up from Northeast India was soundly defeated. More specifically and accurately, this army was most likely turned back by Bhutanese forces in the south of their country. Muslim accounts of this failed expedition recognized Bhutan as a separate nation, which was capable of putting 10,000 cavalry and 10,000 infantry in the field.[6]
In the first section I will discuss recent sectarian violence and the status of Muslims in Tibetan history. In the second section I find it problematic that the Dalai Lama, in his conversations with Thomas Laird, believes that the Chenrezig, who is incarnate in His Holiness, has a “divine plan” and works directly in historical events. At the same time, he tells Laird he has strong reservations about political rule by high lamas, who, as incarnations of Chenrezig, have initiated these plans. His Holiness even proposes that the Fifth Dalai Lama intended that the Sixth, having indeed rejected his vows, should have set up a royal line as was finally done in Bhutan. He also states that each of the Dalai Lamas have/had their own plans, and it is unclear from his statements whether they are the same as Chenrezig’s “divine” goals. (More on this shortly.) The implications of these speculative wanderings are problematic for a religious leader who has recently been unguarded in his pronouncements, especially, as we will see, in those regarding his immediate future.
The third section is a summary history of the Dharma Kings and the little-known Tibetan empire of the eighth and ninth centuries CE, which at its height was as large as the Roman Empire. There is very little evidence that the extensive military campaigns during this period were done in the name of the Buddha. Tibetan Buddhist devotees were few in number even in the time of Songzen Gampo, who allegedly was converted to Buddhism by his Nepali and Chinese wives, who were said to be incarnations of the wrathful and blissful goddess Tārā. (The Hindu equivalents are Durgā/Kālī and Pārvatī/Uma.) The current Dalai Lama believes that Gampo was an incarnation of Chenrezig, and therefore he was at work in everything that happened, including the extensive violence and the alleged anti-Buddhist campaign of King Lang Darma.
The fourth section is a discussion of Jacob Dalton’s book Taming of the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism. Dalton offers a new perspective on the so-called “Dark Ages” of Tibetan Buddhism between Lang Darma and the coming of Atiśa from India in 1042. Dalton argues that, contrary to previous views, this period was a time of religious innovation and experimentation. Dalton’s translation of a ninth-century tantric text The Great Compendium of Intentions Sūtra contains the longest version of the taming of Rudra/Śiva by wrathful Buddhas and the description of what appears to be ritual human sacrifice. Later Tibetan and Bhutanese lamas used black (“warring”) magic with devastating effect against their enemies, just as Voodoo practitioners have done in Haiti and elsewhere in the West Indies. As Dalton states: “The modern Tibetan state was . . . founded on violent rituals, practices that were rooted . . . in the ancient themes of darkness [and] demon taming.”[7]
In the same way that the conquest of Canaan was primarily executed by “Yahweh the Warrior” not by Israelite armies, Tibetan Buddhists have used sympathetic magic as a means to call on protector deities to defeat their opponents, who were killed indirectly by weather catastrophes or directly by specific Buddhist deities. (The walls of Jericho came “tumbling down” by the blast of trumpets, not by battering rams.) As opposed to the strong Abrahamic dualism of good and evil, in which the indigenous (mundane) deities are destroyed or disabled, the Asian preference is for a morally subtle dialectical relationship between the two. The “taming” and then conversion of the demons is the norm rather than, for example, throwing Satan and his angels into eternal “fire and brimstone” along with those who are unredeemed.[8]
The fifth section covers the coming of Atiśa in 1042 to the rise of the Gelugpas in the fifteenth century. The powerful Pugyal Dynasty was established by the Sakyapas, who were accomplished tantric yogis. During the thirteenth century, they initially turned back Mongol invasions with a combination of military skill and war magic, but then forged powerful alliances with the early Mongol Khans. The Sakyapas were then supplanted by the Karma-Kagyupas, who, by means of warrior-monk Changchub Gyaltsen’s brutal military campaigns, were able to maintain the Phamo Drupa regime until its demise in 1434. Changchub was said to be an incarnation of Vajrapāṇi, and as such he became the “tamer” of competing sects and rival Mongols. Under the leadership of Tsangkhapa, the Gelugpas eventually grew in prestige and power. Early on they insisted on a symbolic interpretation of the battles in the Kālachakra Tantra, and war magic, as far as I could ascertain, was not used by Gelugpa lamas until the Second Dalai Lama.
The sixth section covers the history of the First Dalai Lama through the Fourth, and we learn that tantric magic was used against enemies by the Second and the Fourth Dalai Lamas. I also discuss the successful alliance between the Mongols and the Gelug sect and how it became dominant primarily through military action. The seventh section features the Fifth Dalai Lama and his doubts about being a legitimate incarnation, his use of “war magic,” and his doubts about whether this was the best way to advance the cause of the Gelugpas. The eighth section summarizes the lives and actions of Dalai Lamas Six and Seven. Until the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, the office was occupied by weak lamas who were dominated by the Manchus.
In the ninth section I analyze the life and actions of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, focusing on his use of war magic and his failed attempts to modernize Tibet. The final three sections are devoted to the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s Kālachakra Tantra initiations; the “excommunication” of Dorjé Shugden because of murders committed by his magic; and the controversy over the successor to the Tenth Panchen Lama, an office first recognized by the Fifth Dalai Lama. Although the Chinese, beginning with the Manchus, have always wanted to politicize this office, the Tibetans always insisted that the Panchen Lama was strictly a spiritual leader, while the Dalai Lama, while of course spiritual, would also be the head of state. The ultimate failure of incarnational succession is clearly seen in the current situation. The Communist government now has its own Panchen Lama, and it will be a position to enthrone its own Dalai Lama when Tenzin Gaytso dies.
The Kālachakra Tantra is still performed today by the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, and most of those in the huge crowds are unaware of the tantric magic and violent language against the Abrahamic religions and the prophet Mani, from whom Manicheanism arose. I will dispute the claim that these violent actions should be interpreted, as the war in the Bhagavad-gītā frequently is, as symbolizing internal battles within human souls. I will refrain, however, from assuming that the Fourteenth Dalai Lama has any violent intentions when he recites the Kālachakra Tantra. Millions of Christians read or sing the Psalms without ever realizing that many of them are imprecatory hymns asking God to destroy his enemies. Unfortunately, there are conservative Christians in my own town who are charged by their minister to chant them against opponents of his divisive church. Later Tibetan and Bhutanese lamas used black (“warring”) magic with devastating effects against their enemies, just as Voodoo practitioners have done in Haiti and elsewhere in the West Indies.
Religiously motivated violence among Tibetan Buddhists has happened as recently as February 1997, when Lobsang Gyatso and two of his students were murdered only a hundred yards from the Dalai Lama’s compound. This lama, who was named after the Fifth Dalai Lama, spoke out against the followers of Dorjé Shugden, a powerful protector deity who was dominant in the seventeenth century. Going back 355 years, these fundamentalist Gelugpas have always opposed any adulteration of Gelug practice and doctrine by other sects, especially the tantric Nyingmapas. Today there are a large number of Shugden followers who condemn the Dalai Lama for “excommunicating” their sect and declaring that Dorjé Shugden is an “evil spirit.”
“Liberation” rites are still practiced today at the Namdroling monastery in South India, where an effigy of Rudra is destroyed in the traditional cham dances. The enemy here is of course the Lord Śiva, and it may be permissible to view this as an ancient religious war against Hinduism, most likely during the time in which Hindu and Buddhist tantrics competed in North India. As Dalton suggests: “The destruction of an effigy by fearsome Buddhist dancers may be a simultaneous reenactment of the liberation of Rudra, the ancient apostate king Lang Darma, the local spirits, and even the specter of Chinese occupation,”[9] all of the Tibetans’ historical enemies strung together. These dances and recent assassinations in the name of Gelug orthodoxy support Dalton’s claim that violence still plays a “crucial role in Tibetan Buddhism.”[10]
It is significant to note that, while Tibetan Buddhist sects warred on one another over the centuries, they lived in relative harmony with Muslim traders in their midst. This is quite remarkable considering the fact that in 1546 a Muslim army under Haydar Mirzā slaughtered Tibetan Buddhists in Ladakh. According to Haydar himself, “not one of these bewildered people escaped,” and the Tibetan chief Burkāpa “was slain together with all his men; their heads formed a lofty minaret—and the vapour from the brains of the infidels of that country ascended to the heavens.”[11] During the reign of the Fifth Dalai Lama, only a century after this massacre, Muslims traders from Kashmir and Ladakh received a land grant for a mosque and a cemetery. They were allowed to govern themselves and settle their disputes according to shar’iah law. Many of them married Tibetan women (who converted to Islam), learned to speak Tibetan, and not only followed, but contributed to Tibetan culture. The distinctive high-pitched lilting Nangma songs of Tibet are said to have originated with Muslim immigrants. Before the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959 there were about 3,000 Muslims living there, and they attended seven mosques and their children went to two Islamic schools. After 1959 most of Tibet’s Muslims left together with Buddhist refugees, and many of them have resettled in Kashmir and been given Indian citizenship. According to the Islamic Research Council International, Muslim Tibetan Masood Butt now works in the Dalai Lama’s office in Dharamsala.
There are moral problems with the theory of reincarnated kings and lamas. In his extended dialogues with Thomas Laird in The Story of Tibet, the Dalai Lama claims that Chenrezig’s “master plan” started with Songzen Gampo, the first historical king of Tibet. As we will see in the third section, Gampo and his successors established by military force an empire as large as ancient Rome. Even though statues of the Vairocana Buddha were erected everywhere in the empire, there is very little evidence that the violence involved was done in the name of the Buddhist religion. Constantly using Nāgārjuna’s doctrine of two truths, the Dalai Lama claims that conventional empirical truths obscure the real truth of Chenrezig’s actions in the world. Presumably this means that Chenrezig was also acting in the reign of Lang Darma, when Buddhism was, according to traditional accounts, violently suppressed, as well as in all the later battles between the various sects of Tibetan Buddhism. The Kagyu and Gelug schools both claim that their lamas are incarnations of Chenrezig, so we have the same paradox of Christian armies fighting each other to the death, while at the same time insisting on guidance and blessings from the same deity.
Complicating these issues even more is the Dalai Lama’s claim that each of the Dalai Lamas had their own plans, which, if they are incarnations of Chenrezig, should be identical to the divine Bodhisattava’s, but evidently they are not. If they are not the same, then the Dalai Lamas, unlike Jesus as the incarnate Christ, would have two wills rather than one. In a conversation with Glenn Mullin, the Dalai Lama contends that “these Dalai Lamas seem to have had three master plans: the first involving the First to Fifth; the second involving the Sixth, which failed [because he did not become a king]; and then third, which involves the Thirteenth Dalai Lama and myself.”[12] Tradition has it that the Thirteenth deliberately shortened his life-span so that the conflict he foresaw with Communist China would be handled by his young and vigorous successor.
Yet another moral problem is the Dalai Lama’s support for preemptive retribution, which he uses to justify the assassination of ninth-century lama Lang Darma. He explains: “Theoretically speaking, in order to achieve greater benefit for a greater number of people, you can use a violent method.”[13] Significantly, the Dalai Lama states that this concept of “compassionate” violence does not appear in Theravāda Buddhism, which I believe does a much better job of adhering to the law of karma. His Holiness somehow forgets the Pāli story of the Buddha as the brahmin Lomaskassapa, who killed hundreds of animals as blood sacrifices in the Milindapaṅha. Exoneration here appears to conform to the Vedic and ethical consequentialist stipulation that the animals are not harmed if they are used for spiritual purposes. The Mahāyāna Skill-in-Means Sūtra tells the story of a ship’s captain who discovers that one of his 500 passengers plans to kill everyone on board and take all the ship’s goods. Taking the karmic debt upon himself, the captain, acting as a Bodhisattva would, kills the would-be murderer. The passengers are saved and the killer is saved from a far worse karmic fate than the captain. Indeed, the thief is sent to one of the Buddhist heavens in his next life.
Critics of utilitarianism, which is the theory implicit in these stories, claim that our general moral intuitions resist the killing of one person (or many if the number of hedons [units of pleasure] outweigh the dolors [units of pain]) to promote the general good. Critics would say that such acts violate Kant’s categorical imperative, which, in its second formulation, holds that one may not use another person merely as means to a putative good. For Kant the end can never justify the means, especially if persons are used to seek that end. A Kantian would concede that in some instances, such as in the story above, it might be prudent to kill or lie, but it would never be moral to do so, as utilitarianism necessarily dictates. The Bodhisattva’s vow—do everything in your power to save all sentient beings—appears to trump all conventional moral precepts. Just as Nietzsche’s Übermensch is beyond good and evil, so is the Bodhisattva, according to the third-century Buddhist philosopher Āryadeva: “Because of his or her intention both virtue and sin are entirely virtuous for the bodhisattva.”[14] The end of liberating all sentient beings justifies any possible means.
It is only fair to point out that Buddhist ethics has also placed equal weight on intentions. It is also important to remember that the ship’s captain in the story above is acting as a Bodhisattva, who can commit acts of violence with impunity only if he or she is not part of, as James Stroble phrases it, “the causality of violence (sans karma).” Only then “the actor (not victor in any sense) would have no thought of enmity, no concern over victory or loss, no attachment to the outcome.”[15] But once again this violates the principle of codependent coorigination, absolutely fundamental to the Buddha’s philosophy. As we saw in the previous chapter, the Buddha believed that Bodhisattvas are still “liable to birth,” and therefore still part of the cosmic web of cause and effect.
It is difficult to separate fact from legend in the stories of King Tsenpo Songtsen Gampo. Gampo is an honorific meaning “wise,” primarily because he is said to be the founder of Tibetan civilization. In addition to allegedly establishing Buddhism as the state religion, he promulgated laws for the proper administration of the empire. An alternative view, according to Mathew Kapstein, is that “even Tibetan Buddhist historians often prefer to side step the issue [of a Buddhist state religion], insisting that Songtsen’s religious commitment was largely confined to the inner court and so kept secret.”[16] It is also believed that Gampo, for the first time, introduced a written Tibetan script, with which Buddhist texts were translated from Sanskrit. Kapstein describes the remarkable benefits of this project: “The result, ultimately, was to enrich the growing Tibetan literary language, to create within it a medium for the exact expression of ideas in a wide range of fields of learning.”[17]
Songtsen Gampo acquired two Buddhist wives through his imperial conquests—a Chinese princess from the Tang Dynasty and a Nepalese princess from the southern borders of his expanded empire. In 649 Songtsen, after his troops threatened the imperial capital Chang’an (present day Xian), was honored by Chinese emperor Kaozong with the title paowang (lit. “king of jewels”), which meant the ruler of the West, more specifically the Amitābha Buddha.[18] Songtsen died soon thereafter, but his successors managed to dominate (with occasional setbacks) the Tibetan Plateau and much of Central Asia for the next two centuries. Although statues of the Vairocana (Ādi) Buddha were erected all over this vast region, there is no evidence that the motivation for these campaigns was religious. (No alliance with Muslim armies would have been possible had this been the case.) Furthermore, Buddhism—initially as Hināyāna—was already firmly established there and these Buddhists usually became allies of the Tibetans against the Arabs and the Chinese. Kapstein states: “Ironically, war and booty were among the conditions that facilitated the eventual Tibetan adoption of Buddhism.”[19] As Tibetan Buddhism advanced in influence and sophistication, Central Asian Buddhism went into decline because of Muslim conquests. Even so, the Tibetan manuscripts discovered at the Dunhuang Caves on the old Silk Road have become an invaluable source by which scholars have enhanced our knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism.
Songtsen Gampo is now known as the first Dharma King of Tibet, and Trisong Detsen (755–804) has been honored as the second. The native Bön religion was still a powerful influence in Tibet, and Buddhism had not yet planted deep roots. At the end of the turbulent years between Songsten and Trisong Detsen, Bön priests and their warlord allies had succeeded in suppressing Buddhist practice. In 762 Trisong Detsen proclaimed that he “had heard the Dharma” and that Buddhism was now the religion of Tibet.[20] Trisong is credited with founding the Samyé monastery and inviting Indian Buddhists—Padmasambhava foremost among them—to Tibet. The first Tibetan Buddhist monks were ordained by the Indian philosopher Śāntārākṣita, and for first time Tibetans were obligated to provide for the monks from their families. In an attempt to evaluate all the Buddhist schools, Trisong Detsen invited Moheyan, a Zen master from China, to debate the Indian scholar Kamalaśīla. It is said that the Tibetans preferred the gradual approach to enlightenment over the Zen concept of satori, and, according to one account, the Zen monk was sent home in disgrace, after exposing himself as a metaphor for instant satori. Sources from the Dunhuang Caves indicate that Zen Buddhism was still practiced by some Tibetan monks for many years afterward. The continuing influence of Bön, however, is seen in the fact that their priests still had sufficient power to force a debate about whether Trisong Detsen’s funeral rites should follow Bön practices. Trisong’s eldest son Muné Tsenpo decided in favor of a Buddhist ceremony.
Tritsu Detsen (815–838) was considered the third and last of the Dharma kings of Tibet, and during his reign the empire grew to its largest extent ever. At this point Kapstein proposes that Tibetan Central Asia had indeed become a “holy empire,” where “the Buddhist religion brought to it an ethos of learning and ethical refinement that to some degree leavened the harsh means whereby it had been won.” Again, as most of the Central Asians and Chinese were Buddhists and there were no forced conversions of non-Buddhists, no holy war was fought to establish this empire. Better known as Ralpacan, Tritsu Detsen continued the patronage of Buddhism—building monasteries, stupas, and translating Sanskrit texts. Battles with the Chinese continued, but Ralpacan managed to establish two decades of peace with his powerful northern neighbor. As a sign of this ancient religion’s continued influence, the celebration of the peace treaty of 821 included Bön priests performing animal sacrifices. According to traditional accounts, Ralpacan died at the hands of two pro-Bön ministers who were allied with Ralpacan’s brother Lang Darma. This violence may have been the result of Ralpacan’s expending huge funds on the monasteries and persecuting non-Buddhists with harsh punishments.
Lang Darma’s short reign (838–42) saw a dramatic decline of the empire and its central authority (with a simultaneous reduction in the imperial treasury), and, according to traditional accounts, violent campaigns against Buddhism. According to Réne de Nebesky-Wojkowitz, Lang Darma “commanded all Buddhist priests and Bön magicians to invoke . . . all protective deities of the Land of Snows.”[21] This has become an annual festival practiced to this day in which all the oracles of Tibet enter a trance and channel their own deities. (We will return to the chief Nechung Oracle later in the chapter.) All the deities are said to be feasting together and throwing dice to win the souls of human beings. On the day of the first celebration of this festival, lightning struck the Samyé Monastery, which Lang Darma took to mean that the deities were displeased with Buddhism. Tradition holds that this is one of many excuses that he offered to begin his persecution of Buddhist devotees.
Recent attempts to clear Lang Darma’s name have been met with considerable skepticism. Japanese scholar Zuihō Yamaguchi argues that not only did the persecution of Buddhism come late in his short tenure, but that Lang Darma was actually a devout Buddhist. Yamaguchi claims to have found evidence that Lang Darma worshipped the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra and wrote a long philosophical analysis of Madhyamaka philosophy. Yamaguchi, however, may have mistranslated the reference to the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra (it was most likely lamas, not Lang Darma, who recited the text), and he may have overlooked the possibility that the philosophical treatise may have been simply credited to him, as was done with the preceding Dharma kings.
Kapstein speculates that the alleged persecution of Buddhism might have been simply “a withdrawal of funding, no doubt due to a poor current-accounts balance rather than to anti-Buddhist sentiment.”[22] (It is significant to note that Lang Darma’s son Osung was a Buddhist and he supported temple construction.) There is evidence that Lang Darma may have only resisted tantric practices, which of course should have led to praise by later Gelugpas, but he backed down when a Nyingma lama threatened him with deadly sorcery, about which we have already learned from the last chapter.[23] Whatever the actual details may have been, Lang Darma was assassinated by the head lama Lhalung Palgye Dorjé, who, allegedly in the disguise of a Bön priest, gained an audience with the king in 842. Unless this is also legend, we have, in addition to Padmasambhava’s earlier demon “taming,” another example of religiously motivated violence by a highly respected Tibetan Buddhist. One of the most incredible claims of Bhutanese Buddhists is that Palgye Dorjé was the incarnation of their great Shabdrung, a great protector of Buddhism, not only during his actual reign but during this crucial point in Buddhist history.[24]
The 212 years between the death of Lang Darma and the coming of Atiśa in 1042 have been traditionally considered the Tibetan Dark Ages. In his book Taming of the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism, Jacob Dalton acknowledges that this was indeed a time of political and religious fragmentation, but not theological degeneration. Dalton argues that, contrary to previous views, this period was a time of religious innovation and experimentation. Indeed, Dalton contends that this was a time in which the Tibetans made Buddhism truly their own religion.
Access to tantric texts were restricted under imperial central authority, and tantric practices emerged with great vigor after the empire’s decline. According to later Tibetan authorities, the most disturbing aspects of this new popular Buddhism were rituals that included both sexual relations with yoginis and violent acts of liberation or demon taming. In one text Dalton found that the liberation rites could cause the victim to have “serious illness,” cause “destruction or torment,” or end in the death of a live human sacrifice.[25] (In chapter 2 we saw that human sacrifices were involved in early medieval goddess worship in South India.) Living human offerings were eventually replaced by animals and effigies, and the same rites continue to be performed by Tibetan Buddhists of all sects today. A transition from living sacrifice to effigy can be seen in this ambiguous instruction: “Having led forth the evil one, take the effigy. . . .”[26]
Dalton’s translation of a ninth-century tantric text The Great Compendium of Intentions Sūtra contains the longest version of the taming of Rudra/Śiva by wrathful Buddhas and the description of what appears to be ritual human sacrifice. Rudra of course is a Hindu deity and tantric Buddhists appropriated a long Hindu tradition of demon taming and ritual sacrifice. The concept itself is found as early as the Puruṣa Hymn of the Ṛg-veda in which a primal man is dismembered in the creation of the physical and social world. With the demise of the Gupta Empire (320–550 CE) the Tantras came to prominence and Hindu kings were more inclined to employ tantric priests as a way of protecting their domains in more chaotic times. With their transgressive actions and their siddhi powers, tantric yogis, as Dalton states, gained “the respect and patronage of kings.”[27]
One could easily imagine the primal Vedic puruṣa “staked out” as the founding demoness of Tibet was, as well as the sacrificial victims/effigies that were offered in tantric liberation rites. One Buddhist Tantra contains the language of “pressing” harmful demons, which refers to an ancient practice of “staking out” a living human body for its “compassionate” liberation from evil, for example, holding anti-Buddhist beliefs.[28] Tibetan stupas and temples also serve to “press” and tame indigenous deities, and the twelve stakes that hold down the original Tibetan demoness mark the places where major monasteries would eventually arise. In some practices the officiating lama uses a ritual dagger and stabs in ten different directions in order to secure a sacred domain protected on all sides. The lama might have recited the following prayer that Dalton discovered: “The time has come for violence against these evil ones who cannot be tamed peacefully, who have violated the teachings and broken their vows.”[29]
In Hinduism the appropriate word is also “taming,” not an Abrahamic total destruction of evil. Dalton cites the Vedic myth of Indrakīla, “a god who pins and stabilizes the serpent Vṛtra with a mythic ‘peg’ or ‘dagger’ (kīla).”[30] Following the Vedic tradition that the sacrificial victim is rewarded,[31] Kṛṣṇa defeats his demon nursemaid Pūtanā and is immediately sent to heaven. Similarly, the Tibetan “mundane” gods are brought over from the dark side to become wrathful protector deities. Even in their violent dispatch the demons are treated with “compassion”—saved for their own good and for the sake of sentient beings that they might have harmed in the future.
The ethical model of the Bodhisattva saving both the premeditating killer and his 500 potential victims in the Mahāyāna Skill-in-Means Sūtra stands prominently behind the justification of “compassionate” violence made by nineteenth-century Gelug Lama Rigdzin Garwang. Eager to distinguish his liberation rites from actual blood sacrifices, he explains that the lama must be “beyond anger” and must be able to “liberate [the victim] from suffering with great compassion . . . and restore quickly the sentient being who is killed.”[32] Please note that there is no effigy in this liberation rite, and even more telling is his confession that “sacrificial killing has been widespread” and “even today there are those who follow that evil tradition.”[33] Here the reference is to animal, not human, sacrifices.
The Hindu myths feature Śiva-Rudra slaying the asuras (older gods like the Greek Titans but now demonized),[34] but the Buddhist texts have Vajrapāṇi in violent engagement with not only Rudra, but other Hindu deities, such as the seven mother goddesses who have been overlaid, as early as Padmasambhava, on indigenous demonesses. This was essentially a religious war against both Hindu and indigenous deities. In one version of the Rudra Myth, Śiva-Rudra and his consort Uma-Pārvartī are “crushed underfoot by Vajrapāṇi,” but then “reborn in purified form” as a protector deity at the edges of the Tibetan Buddhist maṇḍala.[35]
Demon taming in Buddhism goes all the way back to the Buddha’s night of enlightenment, when Siddhartha Gautama, immune from attack by means of his yogic trance, defeated the forces of the chief demon Māra. Māra appears as a Bodhisattva in the tantric Compendium of Principles, where he is “produced out the violence and firmness” of the meditative power of the tantric Buddha Vajrasattva.[36] As we shall see in the next section, the Mongol Khans alternated between being depicted as Rudra or Vajrapāṇi, depending on whether they were friend or foe of the Tibetan Buddhist sect in question. Kaju Akyak, an old Buddhist philosopher living during the time of the Fourth Dalai Lama, noted the difference between the Buddha’s non-violent taming of demons, “generating a meditative stabilization on love,” and this alien tantric practice, “which is like a nomad praying to gods,” presumably seeking revenge.[37]
In the Madhyamaka philosophy of nondualism, Rudra is not conceived as an autonomous being, but as an emanation from the Dharmakāya. Furthermore, the only difference between demonic and Buddhist violence is that the former has evil ends and latter is compassionate and directed to the liberation of all beings. A rough parallel is found in the recitation of Bardo Thödol for a soul in transition from one body to another. The chanting lama reminds that spiritual pilgrim that the wrathful deities who attack her are not real, but simply the projection of her own evil deeds, as the later blissful deities are actually her good deeds. The closest Abrahamic theology comes to this dialectic of good and evil is Martin Luther’s provocative idea that Satan is a “mask of God,” not a separate power as the Manichees, Gnostics, and far too many Christians still believe. To unrepentant sinners, and including the troubled anded the young Luther himself, God always appeared to them as Satan, the embodiment of God’s wrath.
The story of Balaam gives support for this Lutheran divine dialectic of good and evil. When Balaam disobeys Yahweh “his Lord,” the “angel of the Lord” stands in his way as satan, literally the “adversary.”[38] Balaam is an oracle and Balak, king of the Moabites, demands that Balaam perform war magic against the Israelites by cursing them. It is also significant that the “Angel of the Lord” leads Yahweh’s heavenly hosts (armies) into battle. Finding the city of Jericho impregnable, Joshua receives instructions from the “Angel of the Lord” to circle the city for six days blowing trumpets. On the seventh day Joshua’s army was instructed to give a great shout. Carefully following these rituals, the walls of Jericho “came tumbling down” and all the inhabitants and their animals, except for the prostitute Rahab who had helped the Israelites, were killed.[39] Joshua curses the site and warns that anyone who rebuilds the city will lose his firstborn son. Much later when the Israelites are threatened by the Assyrians, the “Angel of the Lord set out and struck down one hundred eighty-five thousand in the camp of the Assyrians.”[40] If we now return to Kaju Akyak, the old Buddhist philosopher mentioned above, he condemns Central Asian nomads praying to a vengeful God and resorting to magic and, and he praises the Buddha’s non-violent taming of his enemies by unconditional love.
With the arrival of Atiśa Dipankara in 1042 from Vikramaśila, the great monastic university in Northeast India, Tibet gradually returned to centralized political and religious authority. At first Atiśa declined the invitation to travel to Tibet, but the goddess Tārā, his constant spiritual guide, is said to have convinced him to go. Legend has it that he was also guided in his perilous journey through the mountains by none other than Chenrezig himself. Although Atiśa would attempt to control the excesses of the tantric tradition, the tantric Sakyapas continued to gain favor with Tibetan aristocratic families. Two sons of Sachen Kunga Nyingpo (1092–1158), Sonam Tsemo (1142–82) and Drakpa Gyeltsen (1147–1261), dominated the late twelfth century with their voluminous writings on the tantric tradition.
One critic of tantric practices during this time charged that “the ‘many means’ of the ordinary siddhi, such as the means for killing beings and attracting consorts, . . . represent animosity towards sentient beings.”[41] This of course is a direct rebuttal to the view that antinomian practices are justified because they are done out of compassion and for the liberation of all sentient beings. In his reply Sönam Tsemo called on the authority of the great Mahāyāna philosopher Asaṅga, who argued that one would be justified to kill evil persons who threaten the lives of many innocents. He also referred to what most Tibetans claim was the compassionate killing of King Lang Darma by a famous lama so that Buddhism could be saved from his persecutions. Interestingly enough, Sönam’s critic charged that to claim that a yogi could remain pure while enacting great sins is Indian saṃkhya philosophy not Buddhism. In contrast to Buddhism, where the self is made up of contingent constituent parts (skandhas), the pure puruṣa soul of the radical saṃkhya dualism is totally separate from the material world, and only ignorance and illusion allows the empirical self to believe that it is not. One could argue that Sönam’s critic had won an important philosophical point.
After his brother’s early demise, Drakpa Gyeltsen took over the scholarly reigns of the Sakyapas. At his father’s funeral the participants watched in astonishment as the young eleven-year-old recited the Hevajra Tantra from memory. As he grew in stature and prestige, Drakpa became a magnet for Indian scholars and tantric yogis, who were fleeing Northeast India after the Turkish warrior Ikhtiyar-ud-din conquered Bengal and destroyed the great Buddhist universities in Nalanda, Odantapuri, and Vikramaśila, the academic home of Atiśa. (This deadly blow to Indian Buddhism became a boon for the development of Tibetan Buddhism.) With a force of 10,000 cavalry, Ikhtiyar-ud-din invaded Tibet in 1206, but he was soundly defeated. When he returned from Tibet (the Tibetans boast that only one horse survived), Ikhtiyar-ud-din was assassinated by one of his own officers in the same year.
Drakpa Gyeltsen was responsible for introducing the Kālachakra Tantra to Tibetan Buddhism, becoming one of its most popular texts, and the Dalai Lama has recited this scripture thirty-two times to huge audiences since 1954. It was composed in the early eleventh century when Central Asia and Northwest India were threatened by Muslim incursions. The main theme of the Kālachakra Tantra is a prophecy about an invasion of Tibet by peoples of an asuric nature (from the Sanskrit asura meaning “demons”): “The chakravartin shall come out at the end of the age, from the city the gods fashioned on Mount Kailasa. He shall smite the barbarians in battle with his own four-division army, on the entire surface of the earth.”[42] The text explains that Hindus and Buddhists will unite on the condition that the former reject the caste system, and then high lamas will initiate them by reciting the Kālachakra Tantra and building the appropriate mandala. Forming one vajra caste (from the Vajrayāna of Tibetan Buddhism), a Buddhist king will lead the combined armies and will defeat the asuric warriors.
The identity of these evil ones has remained a mystery, and according to the internal chronology of the text, the battle will not occur until 3,304 years after the death of the Buddha. As I wrote above, the prophecy may have been fulfilled in the defeat of the Turkish army in 1206 in southeast Tibet, present day Bhutan. Alexander Kerzin believes that those threatened were not initially Tibetans, but Central Asian Buddhists who were attacked by Sunni Ghaznavids in the early eleventh century. Berzin contends that the violence of the Kālachakra Tantra is symbolic only, and just as in a widely held interpretation of the Bhagāvad-gītā, the battle is one between warring factions in the human self. Later in this chapter, I will offer reasons why this interpretation may be incorrect.
Sakya political and religious power was consolidated under Kunga Gyaltsen (1182–1251), also known as the Sakya Pandita, an honorific referring to his Buddhist school and his status as a scholar. The Mongols were in the process of conquering most of Asia at the time, and Kunga Gyaltsen was able to stop a full invasion of Tibet, which had already led to the destruction of two monasteries and the death of 500 monks and civilians. Kunga’s tantric Sakya lamas were skilled in magic and they used it to full effect against the Mongols. In the thirteenth century elaborate war magic rituals were performed on a large-scale basis on the fourteenth day of the fourth month of every year. Taklung Sangye Yarjön (1203–72) used these tantric rites to defeat a large scale Mongol invasion.[43] We shall see this magic allegedly produced storms and/or pestilence that caused the enemy to retreat.
Later, however, Tibetan Buddhists forged various alliances with the Mongols. Godan Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan, sought out the most spiritual of Tibet’s lamas, and in 1244 he wrote a letter to Kunga Gyaltsen requesting that he “advise my ignorant people on how to conduct themselves morally and spiritually.”[44] There is a scholarly consensus that the Mongols, from Godan in the thirteenth century to Gushri Khan in the seventeenth century, combined sincere religious intentions with the political intention of unifying their conquered territories under a faith with universal appeal. The Sakya Pandita agreed to instruct Godan and his troops in the Buddhist faith, and one of the most immediate results was that the Mongols stopped the practice of throwing Chinese into their rivers to reduce their population.[45] In a book entitled The Buddha’s Intention the Sakya Pandita explained that the Mongol-Tibetan alliance had allowed him to “preach [our] religion without fear” and “we will be able to “spread [it] far and wide.”[46] Both Kunga Gyaltsen and Godan Khan died one after the other, so it was the former’s son, Phagpa Lotro Gyaltsen (1235–80), and Kublai Khan, Genghis’s most famous grandson, who continued to forge the Mongol-Tibetan friendship. David Morgan explains that Phagpa cleverly incorporated the Mongol Khans “into the line of Buddhist universal emperors, the Chakravartin kings, and he produced a Buddhist religio-political theory of world rule.”[47]
It was Kublai Khan’s preference that only Phagpa’s Sakya sect be tolerated, but the lama insisted that all schools be accepted as equals. Apparently learning the advantages of religious diversity, the Great Khan underwent tantric initiation. Kublai found the Nyingma rites so fascinating and their “water of life” cure so promising that the sect was exempt from taxation.[48] Kublai also developed close relations with the tantric Karma-Kagyu school and one of their lamas, Karma Pakshi, wowed Kublai with his miraculous feats. He was also convinced that the spiritual power derived from the Tantras would help him in his military conquests. With Mahākāla, the wrathful form of Chenrezig, “on his side,” as Norman explains, Kublai was sure that the “campaign against Ta-li [in southeast Yunnan province] was bound to be successful.”[49] Kublai’s firm alliance with Buddhism was key to his ability to outmaneuver his brother Arigh Borke in a battle for leadership of the Mongol Empire.
In 1254 Kublai Khan declared that he would sponsor and protect Tibetan Buddhism, and he granted Phagpa full spiritual and temporal authority over Tibet. Just as Godan Khan apologized to Phagpa for his people’s moral and spiritual deficiencies, so did Kublai beg him not to think the “Mongols incapable of learning your religion. We will learn it gradually.”[50] Phagpa gave Kublai the highest honor that a Buddhist layman could achieve: he was crowned chakravartin, a Dharma “wheel-turning universal monarch.” As such Kublai proclaimed that he and Phagpa were like “the sun and the moon in the sky,” which were considered deities directly under Shangdi, the Chinese Lord on High. During a visit to Mongolia in 1268, Phagpa was declared the “Prince of Indian deities, Miraculous Divine Lord under the Sky and above the Earth.”[51] Kublai agreed to prostrate himself at Phagpa’s feet when receiving instruction, but in public they occupied seats of equal height when considering political matters. Phagpa’s reputation remained so great that 400 years later the Fifth Dalai Lama, officially a Gelugpa, wrote in his autobiography “I am Phagpa,” and this identification makes perfect sense if they were both emanations of Chenrezig.
Kublai Khan was concerned that the Quanzhen Daoists had taken over 237 Buddhist temples, had remodeled them as their own, and had burned Buddhist scriptures. In 1255 and 1258 the Great Khan arranged two debates between the Daoists and the Buddhists, and, according to ancient Indian rules of debate, the losers and their devotees were obligated to convert to the winners’ faith. The seventeen Daoist monks were no match for the Buddhists trained in sophisticated dialectical methods and the twenty-three-year-old Phagpa landed the deciding blows. Using an archery metaphor, Phagpa describes his performance as the “arrow transmitting the authentic scriptures/tipped with the vajra arrowhead of logic/ . . . placed on the bow of analysis/and shot by the archer of inspired speech.”[52] Submitting to the traditional rules of debate, the Daoist clergy became Buddhists and the temples were restored to their rightful owners. After another debate in 1281, Sam van Schaik reports that “the Buddhists won again, and this time the entire Daoist canon (except for the Daodejing ) was burned.”[53] As far as I could ascertain, no one was killed in these incidents, but I have defined religiously motivated violence to include forced conversion and banning/destroying of scripture.
Although Phagpa persuaded Kublai to respect all Buddhist sects, the Great Khan did not tolerate outright rebellion. After Phagpa’s death in 1280, and when the Kagyupas in Drikhung schemed against the Sakyapas, Mongolian troops were key to putting down the insurgents in 1290. The Kagyu Drikhung monastery was razed and many monks were murdered with the death toll estimated at 10,000. According to Tibetan accounts, Kublai Khan’s troops were eventually driven out by war magic. Bön priests joined Kagyu lamas in making thousands of effigies from barley dough, so many that it was said that they were as high as the mountains.[54] In order to consummate the rite, the Kagyu lama Gyalwa Yang Gönpa meditated for seven days and the Mongols were forced to retreat.
The power of the Sakyas waned in the next century, and the Karmapas, a subsect of the tantric Kagyupas, gained in strength. In 1331 the Mongol-Chinese emperor Togon Temur bestowed on Karmapa Lama Rangjung Dorjé the title “All-knower of Religion, the Buddha Karmapa.” It was under the Karmapas that incarnate lamas became the norm and every sect, except for the Sakyapas, adopted the principle of incarnational succession by means of male children. The preference for the Karmapas continued under the Ming Dynasty, even though the Kadampas, Atiśa inspired forerunners of the Gelugpas, were invited to the imperial court as well.
Under the warrior-monk Changchub Gyaltsen (1302–64) the Kagyupa were able to wrest political control from the Sakyapas, and by means of brutal military campaigns, his Phamo Drupa regime remained strong until its demise in 1434. The Fifth Dalai Lama, who admired Changchub very much, wrote that “the heads of the [Sakyapas] and their banners were handed over like symbols of victory,”[55] and in another battle the eyes of 464 prisoners were gouged out. A new biography of Padmasambhava was written during the fourteenth century and in it the Great Guru prophesized that Genghis Khan “will cut the earth between his upper and lower teeth,” and he also predicts that some renegade lamas will “act like Mongol generals.”[56] The rise of Changchub was also foreseen by Padmasambhava, who declared that “there will come from the interior of Yarlung an incarnation of Vajrapāṇi,”[57] the tamer of Hindu Rudra/Śiva. Under Changchub’s reign both the Sakyapas and the Mongols were declared to be Rudra/Śiva, and tantric war magic was used to drive the Mongols out of central Tibet during his reign.
By the end of his life, Changchub had brought central Tibet back to the unified rule that occurred under Phagpa’s Pugyal dynasty. In contrast to many Karma-Kagyu and Sakya lamas (Sakya Pandit Danyi took seven wives), Changchub Gyaltsen was fervent in keeping his monastic vows and took no food after noon. He also banned alcohol and women from his palace. He is also recognized as a great nationalist and traditionalist, bringing back the dress, customs, and laws of the early Tibetan Empire and eliminating many of the Mongolian influences of his predecessors. He was also responsible for reorganizing the districts of Tibet, constructing roads, bridges, fortresses, improving agriculture, and strengthening public security.
During this period, the Gelugpas were gaining ground, primarily because of the monastic reforms of Tsangkhapa, their founding father. Interestingly enough, Tsangkhapa was not a Chenrezig incarnation but was an emanation of Mañjuśrī, the Bodhisattva of Wisdom. This was a later attribution because Tsangkhapa, as an expert on monastic discipline, did not believe that lamas should inherit either property or titles. Atiśa was brought to Tibet to mitigate the excesses of tantric practices, but, as we have seen, they still continued unabated. To counter these influences, the teaching of the Tantras comes late a Gelug lama’s education, and the male-female polarity was given symbolic, not physical, meaning. Still, it is significant to point out that all the Dalai Lamas were themselves familiar with or even initiated as tantric yogis.
With Tsangkhapa’s success came the resources to build three great Gelug monasteries: Ganden (1409), Drepung (1416), and Sera (1419). The abbots were always key players in wielding religious and political power as the Gelugpas, fighting constantly (sometimes in armed battle) with the Karma-Kagyupas, gradually gained control of Tibet with the constant aid of their Mongolian allies. The early Gelugpas were loath to use tantric rituals against their enemies. The First Panchen Lama Khedrubje Gelek Pelzang (1385–1438), a principal disciple of Tsangkhapa, wrote a commentary on the Kālachakra Tantra in which he interprets the battle against the “barbarians” as a symbolic conflict within the human soul. The Fourteenth Dalai Lama has relied heavily on this text for his many performances of the Kālachakra Tantra. War magic, along with the perception that their opponents were very real and external, was used by the Second, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, Tenth, Thirteenth, and many other high lamas.
Although not recognized as the First Dalai Lama until the rule of the Third, Gendun Drub (1391–1475) was considered special already at birth. Indeed, the literature tells us that all the great lamas had miraculous births. It is said that after being hid from bandits as an infant, Gendun was found being guarded by a raven, a symbol for Mahākāla, the wrathful form of Chenrezig. Gendun Drub also became attached to the goddess Palden Lhamo, who became one of the protector deities of the Gelugpas and who resided at the Lake of Visions. He also had visitations from the goddess Tārā, Chenrezig’s tantric consort.
Although he was to become a great Gelug lama, Gendun Drub had a passionate interest in tantricism and he studied under great Nyingma lamas. The Nyingma lama Bodong Namgyal was so impressed with him that he called him the “All-Knowing One.”[58] Gendun Drub was not only a consummate monk and scholar but also a builder, and his greatest achievement was the construction of the Tashilhunpo Monastery in 1447, which became the residence of the Panchen Lamas. The Panchen Lamas were the Dalai Lamas’ right-hand men (as long as they had friendly relations), and they were said to be the emanation of the mind of Chenrezig while the Dalai Lamas were Chenrezig’s body. Significant for the current study, the long-lived Gendun Drub (he died at the age of eighty-four) apparently did not have any connections with religiously motivated violence.
Posthumously recognized as the Second Dalai Lama, Gendun Gyatso (1475–1542) was a precocious child who claimed that he was the incarnation of Gendun Drub, and early on he expressed a strong desire to go to the Tashihunpo monastery. His father was an accomplished Nyingma yogi and his mother and paternal grandmother were famous Nyingma yoginis. It was natural then that he was initiated into this tradition before going joining the Gelugpas at Tashihunpo. Even so, Gendun Gyatso was, just as his predecessor, praised for his spiritual feats by Nyingma lamas, and, following their tradition, kept his mother’s skull as a chalice. It was said that all the Tibetan lamas received tantric initiation by the Second Dalai Lama.[59] As opposed to the other tantric sects, the Nyingmapas were generally tolerated, if not highly respected, by the Gelugpas.
Generally speaking, Gedun Gyatso was friendly to all sects, as exemplified in his refusal to intervene in a debate about a Karma-Kagyu interpretation of the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra. As Glenn Mullin states: “[the Second Dalai Lama] made it known that he himself greatly enjoyed the Karmapa’s philosophical text and was amused by the passionate controversy it had aroused in the Sera [a Gelug monastery] community.”[60] Everywhere he went in his extensive travels he was warmly welcomed by all the Buddhist schools. As biographer Yangpa Chojey wrote: “His attentions were not demanded merely by lamas of one particular sect or region; all schools without exception invited him to teach, and he gave equal care and attention to them all.”[61]
In 1498 the Kagyupas took over control of Lhasa and a general persecution of the Gelugpas began. As Kapstein explains: “Gelug monks were now forbidden to take part in the Great Prayer Festival marking the Lhasa New Year that had been [Gelug founder] Tsangkhapa’s innovation, and they were ordered to substitute red ceremonial head ware for the customary yellow hats of their order.”[62] In retaliation the Gelugpas tore down a new monastery that the Kagyupas had built in Lhasa. Kapstein attributes this sectarian conflict primarily to political maneuverings, and not to the doctrinal differences that later led to religious warfare.
The Second Dalai Lama reestablished Gelugpa control over the Great Prayer Festival and Kapstein, using Gedun Gyatso’s own statements, demonstrates that even the great Gelug leader admitted that Kagyupa control over the festival was due to their political power. Religiously motivated war did break out later in Gedun Gyatso’s tenure, when in 1537 the Kagyupas of Drikung monastery commenced battles that led to the loss of eighteen Gelugpa monasteries. Unlike his predecessor the Second Dalai Lama may not have “kept himself entirely aloof from the turmoil in which his contemporaries were involved,”[63] as Norman claims. Biographer Yangpa Chojey reports that the Second pacified the warring Gelugpas and Kagyupas “through ritual invocation and mantra recitation of the [wrathful] Dharmapalas, mostly the protector Dharmarāja.”[64]
In 1537 unidentified armies attacked the Gyal monastery, which the Second Dalai Lama had planned and built, but not without help of “tamed” indigenous gods aiding the construction every night. Retreating to the sacred Lake of Visions, the Second called on the wrathful Palden Lhamo to subdue these enemies. The tantric rites he performed caused a great storm and deafening sounds, and a friendly army appeared out of nowhere. The invading soldiers fled in great disarray and carried disease back to their home country.[65] Assuming that the Second did not consider the Kagyupas as enemies, he practiced war magic only against external enemies. Previous and later lamas of course used it in internal and religiously motivated battles as well. At the close of his life the Second Dalai Lama sang tantric songs and urged others to worship tantric deities.
At his death the Second Dalai Lama sent forth 100 emanations of Chenrezig (the First had sent out only three), but only one, presumably, hit the right target. Sonam Gyatso (1543–1588) had a miraculous birth: “Emerging from the womb untarnished, clear as crystal, and adorned with countless marks of perfection.”[66] A delegation of lamas to his parent’s home were amazed that Sonam Gyatso knew their names, and his eminent status was confirmed by a rainbow and a celestial fall of flowers. Recognized as the reincarnation of Gendun Gyatso, Sonam was taken to Drepung monastery where he was later installed as the abbot. The other Buddhist sects acknowledged the brilliance of the young Third Dalai Lama, who at the age of twenty-one was chosen to officiate at the funeral of a famous lama. Sonam Gyatso proved himself as a successful mediator of conflicts between the Gelugpas and the Kagyupas. In 1560 he was able to stop the fighting between the two sects in Lhasa.
At the invitation of Altan Khan of the Tumet Mongols, Sonam Gyatso traveled 1,500 miles to Mongolia in 1577–78. He so impressed the Khan that he converted to Buddhism. Norman is convinced that Altan’s turn to Buddhism actually came earlier in the 1570s when he began chanting, on the encouragement of a lama in northeastern Tibet, Chenrezig’s sacred mantra: om mani padme hum. There was a political motivation as well: Altan, as Norman states, “could use the Buddhists of Tibet to advance his cause” of uniting all the Mongols.[67]
Altan Khan gave Sonam Gyatso the title “Dalai,” “ocean” in Mongolian, and the tradition has it that this was a unique title. The fact is, however, that the Tibetan word gyatso also means “ocean,” and Altan mistook it for a family name that he translated into Mongolian. The current Dalai Lama supports this correction: “So I don’t really agree that the Mongols actually conferred a title. It was just a translation.”[68] As a return favor, Sonam Gyatso crowned Altan Khan “Religious King, Brahmā of the Gods.” The Hindu Brahmā is the creator of the gods or God of gods, but in Buddhism these gods were definitely subordinate to the Buddha himself. Together Altan Khan and Sonam Gyatso embodied not only the doctrine of reincarnated lamas, but also reincarnated kings. Sonam Gyatso extended his incarnational lineage back to Phagpa, and he also declared that Altan Khan was the reincarnation of Kublai Khan.
Altan Khan, noting that his country had once been Buddhist but had since regressed, ordered that all Mongolians, on the threat of death, had to convert to the Gelug sect. As Thomas Laird explains: “The Mongols’ loyalty to their princes, and the military structure of Mongol society, made mass conversion possible. When the princes converted, the people followed.”[69] (This of course was roughly the same policy in Reformation Europe after the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648.) Altan Khan banned all blood sacrifices and the practice of burying wives and slaves alive with their dead masters. He also ordered the execution of all shamans and their shrines. The Great Khan had said that the result of Buddhism’s earlier demise was that “an ocean of blood had flooded the land,”[70] but now, ironically, even more blood-letting was done in the name of Buddhism.
Knowing that Genghis Khan had insisted on complete religious tolerance, we can savor the irony of the Mongolians committing these acts of religious violence. The suppression of shamanism is also ironic given the fact that Tibetan Buddhism was partially but significantly shamanistic (e.g., the oracle priests and cham dancing). Both shamanism and Buddhism would experience a great renaissance after the demise of the Mongolian Communists in 1989. During my trip to Mongolia in the summer of 2005, I noticed that for every hill that had a colored stone arrangement of om mani padme hum, there was another hill with a shamanistic oovo, a large rock cairn with many blue Mongolian hospitality scarves flying. Tibetan scarves are white, but the Mongolians prefer to honor Genghis Khan’s worship of the great blue sky.
Altan Khan financed the printing of Buddhist texts and the construction of the first Buddhist monasteries in Mongolia. With this firm anchor in Mongolia, the Gelugpas created a Buddhist renaissance in Central Asia, where the first Buddhist missionaries and translators had had great success a millennium before. In the far southeast in present day Yunan province Sonam Gyatso was successful in converting the King of Lithang from the Kagyu sect to the Gelug order in 1580. Sonam Gyatso’s alliance with the Mongolians was viewed with great apprehension by the non-Gelugpas.
Although the retrospective recognition of the First and Second Dalai Lamas appears politically expedient on its face, the current Dalai Lama insists on legitimizing them according to Chenrezig’s “master plan,” as discussed previously. The Great Fourteenth believes that the Second Dalai Lama, “formalized the system of recognizing another Gelug incarnate, including the vision lake of Palden Lhamo.”[71] For every Dalai Lama search to the present day, the quest begins at the sacred lake where Palden Lhamo, the wrathful protector deity of the Gelugpas, resides. By the use of tantric ceremonies she can be called upon at any time to defend the Gelugpas. The Fourteenth Dalai Lama believes that it was Chenrezig’s plan that Sonam Gyatso spread the Gelug order and convert the Mongolians to Buddhism.
When Sonam Gyatso died in 1588, two Tibetan oracles predicted that his reincarnation would be found in Mongolia; and, in 1589, a child, a descendant of Genghis Khan and the great grandson of Altan Khan, was born in the Kokonor region, present day Qinghai Province. As Norman described it, “a rainbow clothed the tent in which [his mother] conceived him . . . [and] others clearly heard the six-syllable mantra of Chenrezig emanating from her womb.”[72] According to Gelug authorities, the child, recognizing the possessions of Sonam Gyatson, passed the requisite spiritual exams as a tulku. The Mongolian child, given the name Yonten Gyatso, remained in the Kokonor region until he was twelve when, in 1601, he undertook the long journey to Tibet, visiting Gelug monasteries on the way and impressing everyone with his preternatural wisdom. Escorted by 1,000 Mongolian cavalry, he arrived in Lhasa in 1603 to start his formal education. In that year Yonten Gyatso was installed as the Fourth Dalai Lama and was made abbot of both Drepung and Sera monasteries.
Some Tibetan princes were convinced of the choice, but the Kagyupa were suspicious. They viewed the alliance with Altan Khan with great anxiety, so they found it politically expedient to join forces with the Khalkha and Chahar Mongols, who followed the Kagyu school and had escaped Altan’s dominance. Very little time elapsed before conflict broke out between the Altan Khan’s troops and the Karma-Kagyupas. In 1604 Karmapa monks visited the Jokhang monastery and left as an offering a scarf on which a poem had been written in an archaic language. A year later, a prayer, allegedly written on a hospitality scarf by the Sixth Sharmapa, was found draped on the Jokhang Temple’s most precious Buddha, the one donated by Songtsen Gampo’s Chinese wife. Both incidents were interpreted as grave insults to the Dalai Lama, and Mongolian troops were dispatched to the Sharmapa’s residence to punish the offenders. In 1605 the Karmapas retaliated and troops led by the King of Tsang drove the foreign troops out of Lhasa. In 1607 the Fourth Dalai Lama received a letter from the Sixth Sharmapa, who offered an opportunity for reconciliation. Gelug officials advised the Fourth Dalai Lama against any negotiations and the result was that in 1610 he was forced to flee Drepung monastery.
The Nyingma lama Lodrö Gyaltsen (1552–1624) wrote a book entitled A History of How the Mongols were Repelled. He was an expert in tantric magic, and as Dalton states, he become “so proficient in these large-scale war rites that he became known simply as Sokdokpa, the ‘Mongol Repeller.’”[73] As many as 250,000 paper effigies of warriors and horses would be set up in a ritual battlefield “staked out” as a mandala, and in 1608 the war magic allegedly caused the death of most of the Mongol’s sheep and cattle. In 1614 Sokdokpa led fourteen lamas in a tantric ritual that brought a great snow storm, and “the Mongols were buried in the snow, men along with their horses and pack animals. Not even one escaped death.”[74] The sectarian war continued for years and in 1618 the Tsang army attacked Lhasa. Shakabpa writes that “the hill on which Drepung monastery stood was littered with the bodies of slaughtered monks.”[75] The monks of several Gelug monasteries were forced to convert to the Kagyu sect. In Shigatse a new Kagyu monastery (named Tashi Zilnon, which means “Suppressor of Tashilhunpo”) was built above Tashilhunpo monastery, the home of the abbot who would become the Panchen Lama. The monks at Tashi Zilnon enjoyed rolling huge boulders down on the Gelugpas below.
There was constant conflict between the two warring sects, and it was now clear that sectarian motivations and religiously motivated violence were now dominant. The Fourth Dalai Lama ordered all the monasteries of central Tibet to perform tantric rites against the Kagyu Tsangpas, and his efforts were so successful that he earned the titled “Yonten Gyatso the Great Shaman.” Afterward he said that “if I claim to be like Padmasambhava, this would be boastful. However, I am able say that I am a little like him.”[76] (Siddhartha Gautama would have most likely judged the Fourth Dalai Lama as much too boastful.) Tibetan Buddhist tradition holds that a lama who has not yet taken monastic vows is free from the injunction against violence, and it is therefore significant to note that the Fourth Dalai Lama did not take his vows until 1614. In 1616 the Ming emperor Unzhu Wang bestowed upon him the tantric title “Pervasive Lord, Dorjé Wang.”[77]
When the Fourth Dalai Lama died in 1616 at the young age of twenty-eight, the King of Tsang banned any search for a new incarnation. The Gelug lamas at Drepung monastery secretly went ahead with their own plans and eventually found three possible candidates. (Interestingly enough, the children were chosen by lots, a procedure later instituted by Manchu authorities, who drew the names of some of the Dalai and Panchen Lamas from a golden urn.) The favored child, later named Lobsang Gyatso, came from the powerful Zahor family, and he was chosen primarily because he had been selected as a successor in two other lama lineages.
One of the three candidates was Drakpa Gyaltsen (1617–54), who was allegedly reincarnated as the wrathful protector deity Dorjé Shugden. In 1654 Drakpa died under mysterious circumstances that some believe to have been an assassination ordered by Sonam Rapten, the Fifth Dalai Lama’s regent.[78] (As I related above, purist Gelugpas who worship Dorjé Shugden were responsible for the death of the Gelug lama Lobsang Gyatso [namesake of the Fifth] in 1997.) Norman reports that one version of events was that Lobsang and Drakpa were involved in a debate in which Lobsang lost. It is said that the white scarf Lobsang gave to Drakpa as a gracious gesture of defeat was found stuffed down Drakpa’s throat. But Drakpa, as a “hungry ghost,” frequently haunted the Great Fifth during his reign.[79] Mills writes that in the seventeenth century “Shugden is said to have laid waste to Central Tibet until . . . his power forced the Tibetan Government . . . to seek reconciliation.”[80] Dorjé Shugden was finally tamed, ritually “pinned down” in a Nyingma temple near Drepung Monastery, where he promised to be a protector deity of the Gelugpas. But resentment among purist monks and lamas continued, primarily because of the Fifth’s openness to other Buddhist schools and his practice of Nyingma sexual yoga.
It must be stressed that non-Gelug sects had recognized the spiritual authority of reincarnated lamas for centuries. (The only exception was the Sakya school, whose married lamas maintained a hereditary line of succession.) Until the retrospective awarding of Dalai Lama status to the first two, Gelug abbots were chosen by merit, which was the position of Gelug founder Tsangkhapa. Most Tibetan monasteries were led by tulkus, and the Gelugpas were simply following a long-venerated tradition, one that may have, in the end, caused many more political problems than it was intended to solve. In choosing Lobsang Gyatso as the Fifth Dalai Lama the politically astute Gelugpas saw a chance to preempt the other schools and unite the people around their candidate. The child’s father, Dudul Rabten, favored the Gelugpas and refused offers from the other sects to consecrate his son. The Tsang government imprisoned Rabten for his obstinacy, but the mother was able to return home safely with her child to Nakartse castle in Yardrog. Rabten died in 1622 without seeing his son ever again.
In 1620 Mongolian troops, sneaking back into Lhasa disguised as pilgrims, were successful in driving the Tsang army out of Lhasa. With the Fourth Panchen Lama mediating, the Mongols agreed to leave only after (1) exacting a promise that the monasteries forced to convert to the Kagyupas be returned to the Gelugpas; and (2) that Tsang troops also withdraw from Lhasa. After the ban on searching for the Fourth Dalai Lama’s successor was officially lifted, the Gelugpas brought Lobsang Gyatso to Drepung monastery. His enthronement as the Fifth Dalai Lama was delayed for many years because of constant sectarian strife and religiously motivated violence.
The most amazing aspect of the life of the Great Fifth and his spiritual legitimacy is that he confessed that he failed a crucial test as a child candidate. In his autobiography, he states:
The official . . . of the Ganden Palace showed me statues and rosaries (that belonged to the Fourth Dalai Lama and other lamas), but I was unable to distinguish between them! When he left the room I heard him tell the people outside that I had successfully passed the tests. Later, when he became my tutor, he would often admonish me and say: “You must work hard, since you were unable to recognize the objects.”[81]
In the twentieth century at least one high lama has announced that the Fifth was not properly chosen, and that is the current Dalai Lama’s own brother.[82] One wonders if the contemporary followers of Dorjé Shugden have made use of this evidence to claim that Drakpa Gyaltsen was the true successor to the Fourth Dalai Lama? Lobsang’s enthusiastic embrace of Nyingma ritual led some people to suspect that he was not a true follower of Tsangkhapa.
Lobsang’s family had affiliations with all the major Buddhist sects, including the Kagyupas, the Nyingmapas, and his mother’s own tantric Jonangpas, a sect banned under her son’s rule. In 1633 Lobsang Gyatso was initiated by a Nyingma lama named Konchog Lhundrup. Samten Karmay describes this as “a turning point in his life. He learned about mystical practices and tantric rituals entirely unknown to him and realized that his philosophical training at the monastery alone was not sufficient to attain spiritual enlightenment.”[83] In his own private Lukhang temple it is said that he continued the Dzogchen practice, the sexual yoga of the Nyingma school. Lobsang’s free and independent spirit is revealed in the following statement: “When I finished the Oral Teachings of Manjuśrī [in 1658], I had to leave the ranks of the Gelug. Today [in 1674], having completed the Oral teachings of the Knowledge-Holders [Dzogchen scripture], I will probably have to withdraw from the Nyingma ranks as well!”[84]
The use of the Nechung Oracle was institutionalized under the Great Fifth. (He was featured, falling into trances and “speaking in tongues,” in the movie Kundun.) One half mile south of the Drepung Monastery one finds the Nechung Gompa, one of the most beautiful and ornate Tibetan Buddhist temples. The Nyingma monks there attend to the oracle, who channels Pehar, the Dalai Lama’s protector deity. Weapons, such as spears, swords, bows and arrows, and snares are typical instruments of Tibetan oracles, and they are also found, including a matchlock gun, as decoration inside the temple. A statue of Padmasambhava stands near the Oracle’s throne in order to ensure that Pehar, whom the Great Guru tamed in the eighth century, remains committed to protecting Buddhism. Significantly enough, the south gate of the temple is closed awaiting the coming of Dorjé Shugden, who, according to de Nebesky-Wojkowitz, will enter there to “succeed Pehar as the chief dharmapāla of Tibet after the former . . . has vacated the temple.”[85] These facts must both excite and alarm contemporary followers of Dorjé Shugden. With supreme irony they would proscribe Nyingma practices, but their protector deity, now declared an “evil spirit” by the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, is intimately associated with that heretical sect.
Under the rule of the Great Fifth the doctrine of dual sovereignty was essentially put aside, and the lama king became the single most powerful and most successful Tibetan ruler since Songzen Gampo. The Great Fifth regularized customs, clothing, and festivals, but he also introduced serfdom, an evil that was not abolished until the 1950s. He made Lhasa his capital and started building the Potala Palace on a hill considered to be sacred to Chenrezig, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. The word “Potala” comes from the name of a mountain in southern India, which was held as the sacred mountain of Avalokīteśvara (Chenrezig in Tibetan). The current Dalai Lama believes that Songzen Gampo built a palace there, but there is no evidence for this, and it must be taken as yet another indication of the theological overlay of Chenrezig’s master plan for Tibet as the chosen Buddhist nation.
In 1636 the King of Tsang moved an army of 10,000 in position to attack Gushri Khan’s Mongolian troops. Karma Kagyu and Nyingma lamas from Tsang performed tantric rites that, as Shakabpa explained, “were magically able to bind the eight classes of violent deities as servants. They brought lightning and thunder down onto the Mongolian camp.”[86] In addition Arsalang Taiji, a Tsang commander who had gone over to the side of the Gelugpas, mysteriously came down with a mental disorder. Because of the effects of war magic, the Mongolians refused to fight, and Arsalang’s father sent out a team to assassinate his treasonous son and two of his generals. Readers may recall from the previous chapter that in negotiations with the Bhutanese, the Tibetans insisted that the Shabdrung cease and desist with regard to his powerful magic.
In 1639 the Great Fifth refused to sign a letter authorizing Gushri Khan’s attack on the King of Beri, a follower of the Bön religion and an ally of the Kagyupas. He had allied himself with the eastern Mongols, who, ironically, were initially the Third Dalai Lama’s allies. His reason was that “too many people have suffered in the past and even been killed because of this kind of political activity.”[87] Sonam Rapten forged the Fifth’s signature and the campaign went forward. Gushri Khan was able to intercept a message from the King of Beri, which contained a plan ordering his eastern Mongol troops to destroy Gelug statues and “completely eliminate the Gelug sect, so that no trace of it will ever be found.”[88] After defeating his forces, Gushri Khan took an entire year to pursue the King of Beri and finally killed him in 1640.
It was only because of the military forces of the western Mongol Gushri Khan that the Great Fifth was able to dominate Tibet as he did. Moving out from his base in Kokonor in 1640, Gushri Khan’s 40,000 troops defeated the defenders of Kagyu monasteries in Kham and Amdo, the Tsang King’s allies in eastern Tibet. On April 13, 1642, Gushri defeated the King of Tsang, which made way for the dominance of the Gelug school until the present day. Gushri Khan was sincere in his Buddhist devotions, and his motivations for coming to Tibet, according to Lobsang’s own history of Tibet, “were purely religious . . . so great was the devotion born in Gushri . . . that the chieftain bruised his forehead making protestations in the direction of Lhasa.”[89]
As we have seen above, it was Lobsang Gyatso’s regent, the monk Sonam Rapten, not the Great Fifth himself, who ordered Gushri’s troops to march on Lhasa and dislodge the Tsang king. Lobsang was initially very alarmed about using foreign troops in this way. In fact, he resisted the use of violence against the other sects. When the Regent wanted Gushri to initiate the final campaign against the King of Tsang, the Great Fifth once again rejected the idea: “Did I not tell you a number of times that it would be unwise to engage in a war with the Tsang ruler?”[90] Nevertheless, Sonam Rapten ordered the Mongolian troops to attack, sometimes joining Gushri at the head of the cavalry along with his monk militiamen. The young Dalai Lama relented in despair: “We now must go through with this war, which you have so carelessly begun.”[91]
While Gushri was making the final assault on the Kagyu forts in Shigatse in 1642, the Great Fifth, evidently no longer reluctant about religious warfare, gathered his monks in Lhasa to perform tantric war magic against his enemies. As he said with a poetic flourish: “The tune of the flute changed to the song of the arrow.”[92] Norman reports that, in addition to Pehar, originally tamed by Padmasambhava, Lobsang “was particularly close to three other wrathful protectors”: Palden Lhamo, Begtse (a Mongolian war god), and Gonpo Dramzey—the raven-headed emanation of Mahākāla who protected the First Dalai Lama as a baby.[93] (He also led the first Shabdrung to his new home in Bhutan.) The Great Fifth already performed pūjā to Begtse at the end of every month, and Palden Lhamo, protector of the Sacred Lake where the search for some Dalai Lamas began, was at the center of every New Year’s festival.
The Great Fifth ordered a mass ritual in which monks at two monasteries constructed thousands of paper effigies for enemy soldiers and their horses. Gushri Khan was depicted as Vajrapāṇi in the violent Rudra Myth, which Dalton has explained above as originally an anti-Hindu ritual. Conducting one of the rites himself, the Fifth, according to Norman, had a vision
in which a large human head with macabre face rose up, its mouth opened wide, and into which a cascade of smaller heads fell “like grain poured into a sack.” This the Dalai Lama took as a sign of the success of the rite he was conducting to implore the deities to grant a favorable outcome of the war on Tsang.[94]
In another vision the Fifth saw Palden Lhamo, the Tibetan equivalent of the Hindu Kālī as a “tamed” protector deity, doing a victory dance in the sky. (Just as Kālī empowered the swords of her armies to decapitate her enemies in India, so does Vajrapāṇi for the Mongol troops.) The people of Lhasa heard Paden Lhamo’s blood-curdling scream in the far distance just as Gushri’s troops attained their goal.[95]
It is worth noting the iconography of the thangka of Palden Lhamo (pictured on the front cover), which I photographed (with permission) at the Asian Art Museum in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia in 2005. The museum features art work collected by Altangerel Ayurzana, who in the 1990s started a sacred mission to preserve the religious artifacts of Mongolian Buddhism. In a catalogue of these works, Palden Lhamo is called Śri Devī (Lord Goddess), who, dark blue in color, is depicted seated sideways on a mule, galloping through a sea of blood. The catalogue continues the details: “In her right hand she holds a club with a vajra on the end, and in her left hand, she holds a blood filled skull cap. The flayed skin of a human with its head attached acts as a saddle blanket.”[96] Alternative depictions have Palden Lhamo wearing—Kālī-like—a necklace of freshly severed human heads. The catalogue also notes that “Mongolians believe that Shri Devi visits every family on New Year’s Eve and [they] put some ice near the door . . . to water her thirsty mule.”
Gushri Khan imprisoned the Tsang king and his officials in Lhasa and thought that his military campaign was over. The Fifth Dalai Lama, however, was right: his enemies would continue to plot against him and then he would be forced to retaliate. The Karmapas incited rebellion in the Northwest and Southeast, where they burned down a Gelug monastery. Gushri Khan and Sonam Rapten unleashed a furious counter attack and killed 7,000 rebels in the Kongpo region. They found papers with Karmapa plans that called for the destruction of the Gelugpas, and Gushri was so angry that he sent orders for the immediate execution of the Tsang king. As Shakabpa states: “This situation might be compared to the execution of [Catholic] Mary, Queen of Scots, which finally brought an end to the many plots against the throne of [Protestant] Queen Elizabeth.”[97] Religiously motivated violence in Tibet was just as bad as it was in Europe.
The Great Fifth describes the tantric rites that he performed during this time: “First, I performed the suppression ritual of the Lord of Death’s Hunt, the Angry Sun. Thinking of how the previous year large-scale violent rites were needed against [the King of ] Beri, I made a great imprecation stūpa . . . and accomplished the violent acts of sorcery.”[98] Dalton explains that “the Dalai Lama conquered his own demonic enemies by pinning them under a ritual stūpa, thereby creating the modern Buddhist state of the Ganden Podrang.”[99] Ganden Podrang means “victorious everywhere” and it describes the hegemonic Gelug theocracy under the all the Dalai Lamas.
As a reward for his efforts, Gushri Khan was publicly declared King of Tibet. At a secret meeting in Lhasa in 1637, the Fifth had already conferred upon him the titles “Dharma King” and “Holder of Doctrine.” But at this public ceremony in 1642, it was the Fifth who actually sat on the throne, effectively undermining the doctrine of dual sovereignty. As Samten Karmay states: “For the first time in Tibetan history, a Dalai Lama, previously merely the abbot of a monastery and leader of one religious order, became the country’s leader.”[100] Making Gushri’s position even more marginal, Karmay believes that the royal title referred only to the territories that Gushri had conquered in eastern Tibet. Norman agrees with scholars who believe that the Great Fifth’s status had been elevated to a transcendent being operating as a full-fledged Bodhisattva: “An object of worship and means by which merit was obtained [for all sentient beings].”[101]
Lee Feigon describes the extent of the Great Fifth’s new Tibetan Empire: “In battle after battle, the Fifth Dalai Lama and his armies captured territory from Ladakh [far west] . . . to the Burmese border [far southeast].”[102] Thomas Laird elaborates: “[The Great Fifth] sat on a throne beside the first Manchu emperor of China, received in Beijing on equal terms. Marauding Mongol bands from one end of Asia to the other fought, or stood down, on his orders.”[103] With his Five Point Plan the King of Tsang’s goal, together with his Kagyu religious allies, was to restore the Songzen Gampo’s empire, but it was Lobsang Gyatso, the Gelugpas, and the western Mongols, who achieved the most extensive military, political, and religious expansion since the ninth century.
Even though he was the spiritual leader of the Gelugpas, the Great Fifth was, as indicated above, initiated as a Nyingma yogi and he also instituted a dramatic innovation with regard to the Bön religion. This ancient faith shares many rituals with the Nyingmapas, and Lobsang established it as the fifth school of Tibetan Buddhism. In 1674 Lobsang reached out to the Karmapas and invited Karmapa Choying Dorjé to the Potala Palace, where they found ways to reduce the violence of decades of religious warfare. On the other hand, in his conversations with the current Dalai Lama, Laird and he discussed of forced conversions of Kagyupas and Sakyapas under the Great Fifth, which the current Dalai Lama does not believe were just political actions.[104] As we will see below, resentment from this period still lingered into the twentieth century.
One group of tantrics, who suffered heavily under the rule of the Great Fifth, was the Jonang, the sect to which the Second Dalai Lama’s mother belonged. They were members of a branch of the Kagyu sect and they trace their lineage back to Indian yogis who practiced the Kālachakra Tantra. As Karmay reports, Lobsang banished “the Jonang from Central Tibet to Amdo, and forc[ed] some Jonpo monasteries to convert to the Gelug tradition,”[105] but he clarifies that the persecution was because of political not religious reasons. The Jonangpas survive today in monasteries in northeastern Amdo Province.
Even though the Nyingmapa were generally tolerated and not always persecuted, many of them nevertheless moved south and settled in Nepal during the seventeenth century. The 1643 invasion of Bhutan was motivated in part by pursuing and punishing Nyingma refugees who had sought safety there. Today’s Sherpas are Nyingmapas, and in 1999 I witnessed a tantric healing (accompanied by a huge cloud of marijuana smoke) by a married lama while on a trek with some students in the Langtang Valley north of Kathmandu. Thomas Laird lived among these Tibetan Buddhists, and they told him that their ancestors “worried that if they stayed in Tibet, they might have to fight the Gelugpa, or face conversion. As Buddhists, they did not want to kill anyone.”[106]
The Fourteenth Dalai Lama admits that there is still much resentment about the persecution of other sects during the time of the Great Fifth. He tells the story about a ninety-year-old Kagyu monk from Kham who refused to attend any of the Dalai Lama’s festivals or meet with any of his people. Describing the Kagyupas’ persecution as “three hundred years of pain,” [107] the Dalai Lama was pleased to inform Laird that at the end of his life the monk finally realized that the Great Fifth was personally non-sectarian, practicing what was later known as Rimey, the unifying movement in Tibetan Buddhism the current Dalai Lama promotes. The monk was now convinced that the Fifth and the current Dalai Lama did not condone violence or act out of religious motivation.
The Fifth Dalai Lama always wanted to spread Buddhism to China, so he was very glad to accept, after many delays, an invitation from the fourteen-year-old Shunzhi Emperor of the newly established Qing dynasty. During the two imperial audiences Lobsang was seated just a little lower than Shunzhi, but he allowed his guest to drink tea simultaneously with him. In his autobiography, the Fifth Dalai Lama described Shunzhi, after remarking about his young age, as “a fearless lion roaming without a bridle.”[108] The emperor conferred upon him the title “Overseer of the Buddhist Faith on Earth under the Great Benevolent Self-Subsisting Buddha of the Western Paradise,” and from then on Tibetan Buddhism played a significant role in both the spiritual and political functions of the Qing dynasty.
Contrary to current Communist propaganda, which has always tried to portray Tibet as a dependent state, the Qing emperors viewed the Tibetans as equals and saw that they could use them to pacify the Mongols, who were always intruding on their northwestern borders. As Laird states: “The Manchus did not invite [the Fifth Dalai Lama] as a vassal; they invited him because of his power, not his servility.”[109] In dialogue with the current Dalai Lama, Laird also recorded him saying that the reason Lobsang Gyatso went to China “was simply to propagate Buddhist Dharma” not to show obeisance to Manchu authorities.[110] Only under the Eighth to the Twelfth Dalai Lamas did Chinese intervention undermine Tibetan sovereignty.
News of Fifth Dalai Lama’s death in 1682 was kept from the public for fifteen years. His regent Sangye Gyatso was very adept at deceiving even the most prying visitors. When dignitaries demanded an audience, Sangye dressed up a monk who looked like the Fifth and led them in for their visits. When the Khalka Mongols and the Manchu army defeated Galten Khan, still King of Tibet, the Qing Emperor Kangzi demanded that the Tibetan government submit to the terms of Galden’s surrender. Significantly enough for one of the main themes of this chapter, Kangzi’s edict was protected by “8 classes of demons,”[111] who might well have been the same wrathful Tibetan deities that the Chinese government summoned to confront the equally wrathful Kṣetrapāla, whom the Tibetans sent against Chinese militia in 1940.
The first section of Kangzi’s edict contained a demand to know whether the Fifth Dalai Lama was still alive, because he suspected that they had been deceived for years. The Tibetans were forced to concede that the Great Fifth was indeed dead that that his successor had already been chosen. As was the case with Bhutan’s First Shabdrung, Sangye told everyone that the Great Fifth had gone into an extended spiritual retreat. Once again the vulnerabilities of the doctrine of incarnational procession were made evident. Delicate political relations both internal and external (especially with cantankerous Mongol warlords) would have been upset by an immediate search for Lobsang Gyatso’s child successor.
Sangye Gyatso secretly went ahead and found the Fifth’s successor using the traditional means of identifying his child reincarnation. In 1688 a boy born in 1683 with definite characteristics of a tulku was found in Mon, and he was brought to Lhasa, where he was secretly educated. The boy, named Tsangzang Gyatso, was enthroned as the Sixth Dalai Lama in 1697. The gods were so delighted by the event that it was reported that huge crowds heard their laughter in the skies. Significantly enough, in addition to being introduced to Gelug doctrine by the Fifth Panchen Lama, the young lama was also initiated by the Nyingma yogis who had been mentors to the Great Fifth, a fact from which, as we shall see, the current Dalai Lama draws special meaning.
The young lama demonstrated very little interest in his studies, preferring archery and spending time with young aristocrats. The twenty-year-old Tsangzang renounced his monastic vows in the presence of the Panchen Lama, and he started to frequent Lhasa’s beer halls and make love with many women. Naturally there was deep and growing concern, especially among the Mongols and the Manchus, who had stricter views of how reincarnated lamas should behave. Among the Tibetans the consensus was that there was no question that Tsangzang was the true incarnation of the Great Fifth, and they blamed the regent Sangye Gyatso for not educating the young man properly.
The Mongol chieftain Lazang Khan, the grandson of Gushri Khan, was especially troubled by the Sixth’s behavior. As a strict Gelugpa, he saw the corrupting influence of the Nyingma sect already in Lobsang Gyatso and continuing on in his successor. After negotiations with Sangye Gyatso failed, Lazang raised an army, executed the regent, and assumed power in Lhasa as the new Tibetan king in 1705. Together with Manchu authorities, Lazang plotted to get rid of Tsangyang and to install his own candidate for Tibet’s highest spiritual office. Lazang pressured the abbots of the three main Drepung monasteries to admit that the “Buddha-mind” no longer resided in Tsangyang Gyatso.
In 1706 the Manchu emperor ordered that Tsangyang be brought to his court, but on the way out of Lhasa Drepung monks were successful in overwhelming his escort, and they spirited him away to their monastery. Lazang threatened to annihilate the monks and bombard their famous buildings with his artillery; and in order to prevent this, Tsangyang gave himself up to the Mongol forces. The Sixth Dalai Lama died under mysterious circumstances in Lithang in the Kokonor region. In a note to one of his lovers, Tsangyang wrote: “I go no farther than Lithang and thence return again.”[112] The child who is now recognized as the Seventh Dalai Lama was born in Lithang. The Mongol-Manchu substitute for Tsangyang was never accepted by the Tibetan people, who honored the reincarnation procedures despite the unusual behavior of the tulku. As we shall see, the current Dalai Lama does not find Tsangyang’s behavior out of line, because this is how a tantric yogi should behave.
As the current Dalai Lama read the Fifth’s autobiography, he noted a preference given to hereditary succession in the Sakya order. He now believes that it was therefore part of Chenrezig’s “master plan” that Tsangyang renounce his celibacy and continue as a heredity head of state. According to the Fourteenth’s reading, the Great Fifth admitted that incarnational succession was “unstable” and “risky,” and that the hereditary system was “much stronger.”[113] The current Dalai Lama speculates that “the Sixth Dalai Lama disrobed according to some [divine] plan. If he had disrobed and still remained the Dalai Lama, and the popular support for the Dalai Lama remained, then he would have had a son who would have become king. That would have been better.”[114]
Curiously, the fact that Tsangyang did not become king is, according to the Fourteenth, a sign that Chenrezig’s master plan failed. As I have speculated in the first section, this is most likely because the great Bodhisattva is not omnipotent; and, while able to guide human affairs, cannot control them completely. Still more curious is the Fourteenth’s generosity toward Lazang and the Manchus: he blames the sectarian religious fighting for this blemish on Tibetan history and praises the Sixth for giving up himself up at Drepung to avoid even greater violence. He also believes that the Sixth used his yogic powers to survive and to prepare for his reincarnation as Kelsang Gyatso, the Seventh Dalai Lama.[115] According to the Mahāyāna philosopher Nāgārjuna’s “two truths” doctrine, the conventional truth is that Tsangyang died on the way to China, but the real truth was that he survived to fulfill the prophecy contained in the poem quoted above.
Legend has it that Tsangyang attained the status of a siddhi, a tantric yogi who lives forever as a transcendent being.[116] Another account, The Tune from the Notes of the Divine Lute, recognized as authentic only until recently, gives details of Tsangyang’s life from 1706 to his “actual” death in 1748. According to this book, he wandered in disguise from place to place giving teachings. In 1714 the Nechung Oracle in Lhasa recognized him and “brandished his sword in salutation.”[117] In 1716 he returned to Amdo where he took the name Dakpo Lama and, ironically, as Norman says, “corresponded with the Panchen Lama on the subject of the vinaya, the code of monastic discipline,”[118] which Tsangyang had of course systematically violated.
The current Dalai Lama believes that we should not discount the fact that both the Fifth and the Sixth were trained in the sexual yoga of the Nyingma school. Therefore, Tsangyang’s outwardly dissolute behavior was consistent with the ideal of a tantric yogi who remains pure even in the throes of sensual pleasure. The current Dalai Lama uses Nāgārjuna’s distinction between conventional and real truth to explain that while conventionally he looked like a young man who “just liked girls,” when in reality he was perfected tantric yogi. The Tibetan people’s intense devotion to the Tsangyang may have been due to an intuitive awareness that this must have been the real reason for his unconventional behavior. As Kapstein explains:
The Tibetans tended to be more tolerant of [Tsangyang’s] excesses, perhaps in part because the tantric ethos of “pure vision” with respect to one revered as a lama had long been normative in Tibetan culture overall. From such a perspective, even the guru’s transgressions are regarded as evidence of the “play” of spiritual perfection and so are seldom condemned.[119]
A similar spiritual dynamic operates among Hindu devotees of Kṛṣṇa, whose practical jokes as a child and sexual dalliances as a youth are celebrated as spiritual “play” (līlā), a word that Kapstein may be referring to in the Tibetan translation.
Lazang tried to install his own choice as Tsangyang’s reincarnation, a young boy whose lama name was Yeshe Gyatso, and even managed to get the Panchen Lama’s blessing. Yeshe was widely rejected as an imposter, not only by the people and the Gelugpas, but also by a great many Mongols. Dissident Mongol lobbying forced Manchu officials to wait three years, but after realizing that Lazang had them over a barrel, they, too, recognized Yeshe Gyatso as the Sixth Dalai Lama. When news of an unusual child born in Lithang according to Tsangyang’s prophecy reached the Manchus, they moved gradually in the direction of favoring this boy, later known as Kelsang Gyatso, as the correct choice. The Dzungar Mongols also took this opportunity to undermine Lazang’s authority in Tibet. After many battles they stormed Lhasa, killed Lazang, and even desecrated the tomb of the Great Fifth, whom they thought had betrayed the Buddhist faith.
The Dzungar Mongols quickly lost credibility with the Tibetan people for at least three reasons: (1) they were brutal in their occupation of the country; (2) they began a suppression, which the Manchus supported, of the Nyingma and Bön sects, destroying two Nyingma monasteries and killing their lamas; and (3) they could not make good on their promise that they would bring Kelsang Gyatso to Lhasa. The young lama was under the protection of the Manchu emperor Kangxi, who continued to insist that Kelsang was the true Sixth, not the new Seventh Dalai Lama. Manchu armies marched on Tibet and they were able to dislodge the Dzungar Mongols, and their victory was so great that only 500 of their troops made it back to their homeland.
The Manchus then brought Kelsang Gyatso to Lhasa in 1720 and installed him as the Seventh Dalai Lama. The Tibetans’ devotion to Tsangyang Gyatso was too strong for the Manchus to prevail in their initial belief he was illegitimate. For the first time in Tibetan history China now dominated the country and the power of the Dalai Lamas declined dramatically until the reign of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. Even the Seventh was tightly controlled by the Manchus and by strong man Polhané, who ruled Tibet from 1728 until his death in 1747. Although ruthless, Polhané brought peace and prosperity, and he focused on the preservation of Tibetan culture. He financed the publication of a new edition of Tibetan scripture: the Tanjur (the Buddha’s teachings) and the Kanjur (philosophical commentaries and medical treatises). The texts were meticulously carved on wood blocks, and in Beijing the Kanjur published in 1732 followed by the Tanjur in 1742.
Despite the restrictions placed on him by the Manchu authorities and Polhané, the Seventh Dalai Lama was popular with his people, becoming a prolific writer and great spiritual leader. Norman relates that the Seventh was “responsible for the restoration of the Kālachakra Tantra to a central place within the Tibetan tradition,”[120] one to which the current Dalai Lama is much devoted. One might say that he was able to do this because he neither had the distractions nor the temptations of temporal rule, which continued to be violent and chaotic in secular hands. Political conflict arose between Chinese and anti-Chinese factions, the former led by Polhané. The Seventh’s father was anti-Manchu, and he sent a letter to Emperor Yongzhen requesting that his recent letter denouncing the Nyingmapas be rescinded. It is significant to note that when one abbot refused to join Polhané’s group, he was murdered by means of black magic.[121]
Polhané was pushed out of the Lhasa government by the anti-Manchu faction, and, even though his family was Nyingma, he believed that he could convince Manchu authorities to call off the proscription of his sect. He organized an army and marched on Lhasa, but he was soundly defeated by the Lhasa government and their Mongol mercenaries. Using his own Mongol allies, Polhané regrouped and eventually took control of Lhasa. Even though he sincerely attempted mediation between the two factions, the Seventh was exiled to his home province for seven years. His father, fully implicated as anti-Manchu, was taken all the way to Beijing where he, chained between his two wives, was publicly reprimanded by Emperor Yongzhen and banned forever from Tibetan politics.
The Seventh Dalai Lama was allowed to return to Lhasa in 1736, but Polhané, called “The Invincible One” by his Mongol allies, remained firmly in control of the government. When Polhané died in 1747, he had already designated his dissolute son as his successor. Gyurmé Namgyal sought out the Dzungzar Mongols to help him drive out the Manchus. Chinese officials (ambans) were swift in their reaction, and they assassinated him during a visit to their embassy. The Seventh, who did not hide is disgust for Polhané, urged calm and gave 200 imperial staff members refuge in the Potala. Tibetan nationalists, however, stormed the Chinese embassy and one amban was killed and the other committed suicide. The rebellion soon dissipated and the Seventh was able to bring peace to Lhasa even before the imperial army reached the capital. As a reward the new Emperor Qianlong allowed the Seventh to appoint his own cabinet (kashag), but he still had to answer to the new appointed ambans.
When the Seventh Dalai Lama died in 1757, three candidates for his reincarnation arose. Five oracles could not decide on the right boy, and many Tibetans believed that they should heed the prophecy from The Book of Kham that “an incarnation of Chenrezig will work for seven lifetimes to benefit the black-haired peoples of Tibet.”[122] Nevertheless, the Panchen Lama intervened and chose Jamphel Gyatso as the Eighth Dalai Lama. The Eighth was a reluctant ruler—“neither Buddha nor king,” as Norman contends—and even when he was finally enthroned in 1781 at the age of twenty-four, Jamphel deferred constantly to his regent.
The Eighth Dalai Lama did show some leadership during Tibet’s war with Nepal. The Nepalese army launched an invasion of Tibet in 1788, and by 1791 they were within striking distance of Lhasa. Many in the capital were preparing to flee but, as Shakabpa describes it, “the Dalai Lama was compelled to address a large gathering of people from the balcony of the Jokhang temple, assuring them . . . that he himself had no intention of leaving the city.”[123] The Tibetan army rallied, and with the aid of Qing troops, it was able to drive the Nepalese back to their homeland.
During this time, the abbot of the Nyingma Mindrolling Monastery led a rarely used tantric ritual in which four “thread crosses” eighteen feet high were erected. Padmasambhava introduced this rite and the lamas began the ceremony with a prayer to the Great Guru. The crosses, known world-wide among priests and shamans, are essentially “demon catchers,” set up to attract the protector deities. Each of them represent the four Hindu-Buddhist continents and each were filled, as de Nebesky-Wojkowitz explains, with “skulls, bones, flesh, blood of various animals,” and many other exotic and repulsive ingredients.[124] The Mindrolling abbot meditated for seven days “requesting one of the [protective deities] to dispatch the army of the btsan demons against” the Nepalese armies.”[125] The day that thread crosses were ceremonially burned there was a great earthquake in the Kathmandu Valley and the Nepalese general in charge of the invasion died mysteriously.
The Gurkha king of Nepal, Prithvi Narayan Shah, had formed an alliance with the Tenth Shamarpa (Chosdup Gyamtso), a Karma-Kagyu lama, and one of his servants guided Nepalese troops on their invasion of Tibet. He was hoping that the victorious Nepalese king would intercede in a property dispute with his half-brother, the recently deceased Dalai Lama. The primary cause of the war was a dispute over Nepal’s minting of Tibetan currency and Tibet’s export of adulterated salt. The Shamarpa had offered himself as ransom to force a resolution of the conflicts. This was a major miscalculation on the Shamarpa’s part, because the Tibetans had very little concern for him.
When the combined Tibetan-Manchu army invaded Nepal, the Shamarpa’s hosts blamed him and he committed suicide by poisoning himself. The Tibetan troops recovered his ceremonial hat and it was taken back to Lhasa and buried in front of the Jokhang Monastery. As Norman explains: “No greater insult could be imagined. This meant that for all time every visitor to Tibet’s holiest shrine would be compelled to symbolically to tread on it.”[126] The Tibetan government, presumably with the agreement and pleasure of the Gelug hierarchy, converted the Shamarpa’s monastery to the Gelugpas and also forbade the investiture of any future lamas in the Shamarpa’s line. In 1963 the Tibetan Government in Exile finally lifted this ban, although the lineage had been continued in secret for 200 years. Even under the Great Fourteenth sectarian strife continued to the present times.
When the Eighth Dalai Lama died in 1804, Norman speculates that there were “members of the Gelug hierarchy who regretted not having ended the Dalai Lama institution half a century ago. The outcome could hardly have been worse.”[127] The Eighth to the Twelfth Dalai Lamas were consistently weak—some dying very young (poison suspected in some instances)—and the country was ruled by regents. The regents and religious authorities were committed to closing Tibet to outsiders, and the result was that, as Shakabpa phrases it, “this propaganda [against foreigners] had such an effect on the minds of the Tibetans that even in later years it was believed that one’s faith would be endangered by eating sweets or using soap imported from India.”[128] After the death of the Eleventh Dalai Lama in 1856, Nepal again invaded Tibet. Large numbers of monks volunteered for battle, but the Nepalese offered peace terms before they reached the battlefield. It was common practice for the monasteries to have armories, and the monks fought in both sectarian and non-sectarian battles. During the short reign of the Twelfth Dalai Lama, armed monks from Ganden and Drepung Monasteries fought with monks from the Sera Monastery, the former taking the side of Dondup Shatra in his successful overthrow of Regent Rating Rinpoché. Tibetan monasteries had always been heavily armed. In 1947 it was said that there were 2,000 rifles in the Sera Monastery alone.
In 1792 the Qianlong Emperor chastised the Tibetans for the corruption he found in the process of choosing all high lamas. He was especially concerned about the fact that certain clans were dominant in the selection of the Dalai Lamas. He argued that “if the dignity of the tulkus were transmitted for generations within the same clan that would be egoism. What has the Buddha to do with egoism? This [practice] must therefore terminated.”[129] His solution was a golden urn, which arrived in Tibet in 1793, from which the tulkus would be chosen by lottery. Although he admitted that “I cannot entirely eliminate abuses,” the emperor explained that “the names of all eligible persons shall be written and placed in the urn. The person to be appointed shall be determined by lot.”[130]
The Tibetans fiercely resisted the emperor’s new plan, and their officials were successful in getting a waiver for choosing the Ninth, but the Tenth, Eleventh, Twelfth, and Fourteenth Dalai Lamas, and the Tenth Panchen Lama were confirmed by the new imperial procedure. (Tibetans were at least relieved in those instances where the lottery agreed with the result of the traditional procedures.) Conveniently citing these precedents, the current Beijing government chose their own eleventh Panchen Lama by this method, and will no doubt appoint the future Fifteenth Dalai Lama by use of the golden urn.
When the Twelfth Dalai Lama died in 1875, foul play was again suspected, and newly appointed Regent Kundeling Rinpoché was chosen to find Chenrezig’s incarnation. Tibetan authorities were confident in using the traditional procedure, because, as Norman explains, the Qing Dynasty was “in terminal decline [and] was not in any position to enforce [the urn’s] use.”[131] Thupten Gyatso, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, was enthroned in 1879 at the age of nineteen. Black magic played a role in an early threat to the Thirteenth’s life. Seeking the cause of an illness the Thirteenth was experiencing, officials discovered that former regent Demo Rinpoché had placed a note with an occult symbol in the Thirteenth’s boots. The Dalai Lama was lenient with the conspirators and he refused to sanction the death penalty. In addition to lashings, public exposure in stocks, and exile, the Thirteenth ordered that there would be no further incarnations in Demo Rinpoché’s lineage. I must continue to press the logical complications of Chenrezig’s “plan.” Can a Dalai Lama actually stop Chenrezig’s emanations by his own will, or is this Chenrezig’s choice, or do both act with a single will?
The black magic of this sort was commonly used among Tibetans for personal revenge, and no special skill was involved in preparing the spells and their instruments. Tibetan warriors also used magic charms “against bullets and weapons,”[132] and those who thought they were thereby immune from People’s Liberation Army were sorely disappointed when they did not work. It is not the sophisticated tantric war magic performed by high lamas that we have seen in other instances, and the one that follows. In 1904 the Thirteenth Dalai Lama performed a tantric ritual from The Razor of the Dagger’s Ultimate Essence (a Nyingma document) as a means to repel the Youngsblood invasion of Tibet.[133] The Nechung Oracle also predicted that “the magic powers radiating from this mountain [on the border with Sikkim] would be strong enough to check all future movements of the British should they try to enter Tibet.”[134] The British marched over the mountain with little resistance, and the wrathful deities were not successful in their counter attack. The Oracle was later dismissed for his false prophecy, which was actually a common occurrence with Tibetan mediums through the centuries.
The Thirteenth was forced to flee to Mongolia and then to China, where he was stripped of all of titles given to him by the Gaungxu Emperor. The young ruler, completely controlled by the Dowager Cixi, was addicted to opium and he could not even feed himself at imperial banquets. During the Dalai Lama’s visit, the emperor fell ill and then the Dowager as well, and the Thirteenth performed “long-life” rituals for them. It is widely believed that the Dowager actually poisoned her son and she then died mysteriously soon thereafter. There were some Chinese, however, who accused the Thirteenth of using tantric magic to kill both of them.
The Dalai Lama returned to Lhasa in December 1909, but two months later the Chinese launched another invasion. The Dalai Lama, once again, was forced to flee, this time to Sikkim and then on to Darjeeling, where he consulted with the British. Back home, however, the monks performed the liberation rituals, and this time tantric war magic appeared to work, as least from the Tibetan perspective. As the Thirteenth explained: “Due to our unrelenting performance of rituals for the preservation of religion and state. . ., the Chinese armies . . . were gradually driven back to the borders.”[135] Again, as in many other instances, it was snow and ice that blocked the Chinese advance, not superior military power.
Please note that the Thirteenth states that the liberation rituals were used, once again, to destroy an enemy. It was a purely defensive move, and there is no mention of liberating anyone from the cycles of death and rebirth. It is doubtful that the Chinese were treated with compassion and saved for their own sake (like the thief in the Mahāyāna Skill-in-Means Sūtra) to preempt the violence that they would commit in the future. The only exception appears to have been nineteenth-century lama Rigdzin Garwang, who as noted above, insists that the lama must be “beyond anger” and must be able to “liberate [the victim] from suffering with great compassion . . . and restore quickly the sentient being who is killed.”[136] As far as it can be determined, there is no record that the victims of war magic were helped in any way. If they were simply natural events, as it appears to a scientific mind, then this is a moot point.
With the outbreak of World War I the Thirteenth Dalai Lama volunteered 1,000 of his own soldiers for the British war effort. In addition, as Norman explains, the he “mobilized the monasteries, at considerable expense, to obtain supernatural assistance for the British.”[137] This can only indicate the same tantric war magic that been used throughout the centuries against Tibet’s enemies. Although it did not make sense during the Youngsblood invasion, many Tibetans had for many years identified Queen Victoria with the wrathful Palden Lhamo, the Dalai Lama’s protector goddess.[138] There is no record of the British response to the offer of Tibetan war magic.
Using the Kālachakra Tantra as his text, Agvan Dorjiev, a Mongolian monk and tutor to the Thirteenth, offered very different advice. As the Thirteenth’s envoy to Russia, Dorjiev came to believe that Russia was Shambala, the ideal Buddhist state mentioned in this scripture, and the Czar was its future ruler.[139] For over a century Russian Buddhists had considered the czars to be the incarnation of the White Tārā, Chenrezig’s consort and a feminine version of the Hindu goddess Pārvartī/Uma. The British believed that Dorjiev was a Russian spy and their suspicions were confirmed when they found Russian weapons in Lhasa during the Youngsblood expedition. Therefore, Dorjiev recommended that the Dalai Lama aligned Tibet against the British instead.
The Thirteenth of course sided with the British and one could assume that the Tibetan lamas were vindicated in their use of tantric magic when the Allies won the war. The British did turn down the earlier offer of troops, but instead they gave the Tibetans thirty artillery pieces and 10,000 rifles (with ammunition) and sent officers to train the Tibetan army. Not all the lamas were happy with the idea of a standing army, and their fears were soon realized when the Thirteenth used his troops to quell a revolt by dissident monks from Drepung’s Loseling College. The Dalai Lama ceased his military build-up when he heard rumors that his own army, in collusion with British, intended to unseat him.[140] For those who believe in it, karma works, though infrequently, in very predictable ways.
The Thirteenth Dalai Lama’s attempts to modernize Tibet were thwarted by another development: the rise of fundamentalist Gelugpas who worshipped the wrathful deity Dorjé Shugden. Readers will recall that fundamentalist Gelugpas wished to see Tibetan Buddhism purged of any influence from other schools, particularly the Nyingma. During the early twentieth century the worship of Shugden was promoted by Pabongkha Rinpoché (1878–1944). From his power base in eastern Tibet, Pabongkha ordered the destruction of “religious artifacts associated with Padmasambhava . . . and non-Gelug, and particularly Nyingma, monasteries were forcibly converted to the Gelug position.”[141] We will soon return to the troubles caused by the Shugden sectarians during the reign of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.
When the Thirteenth Dalai Lama died in 1933, his most trusted adviser Kumbela was outmaneuvered by Lungshar, a member of the National Assembly and the leader of the secret Reform Party. In early 1934 Lungshar had taken four Tibetan students on a European tour and he was keen to modernize his country and make it a democratic republic. The members of the Dalai Lama’s cabinet feared that Lungshar and his allies would lead a Communist rebellion of the sort that had just occurred in Mongolia, which resulted in a brutal suppression of Buddhism. The chief minister Trimön had Lungshar arrested, and pieces of paper with occult symbols and Trimön’s name were found in his boots. Previously, treason was a capital crime, but under the Thirteenth Dalai Lama the death penalty had been suspended. Langshar’s punishment was blinding by the application of yak knuckles at each temple tightened with a tourniquet. Only one eye was blinded by this gruesome procedure, and the well-meaning but luckless Lungshar died within a year.
The Fourteenth Dalai Lama was discovered in 1938 in Admo Province, but his travel to Lhasa was delayed because of objections from the Muslim warlord of the area. Finally, in February of 1940, Tenzin Gyatso, the spiritual name of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, was permitted to depart and he was greeted jubilantly by the Tibetan people and enthroned in Lhasa. The regent during this time of transition was Reting Rinpoché, a popular but controversial figure who led the expedition that discovered Tenzin in Northeast Tibet. Rumors of Reting’s bisexual escapades and drinking parties forced him to resign his post at the end of 1940. Curiously, Reting approved his replacement, Taktra Rinpoché, when he should have known Taktra was very conservative and would resist the modernizing programs of the previous Dalai Lama.
Reting realized his error and plotted to assassinate Taktra, but his plot was discovered. Tibetan authorities found incriminating documents that proved that Reting had been secretly negotiating with the Chinese Nationalist government for help in overthrowing Taktra. When Reting was arrested on April 16, 1947, his monastic allies at Sera Monastery initiated an armed rebellion in his support. Government troops counter attacked and in the end they surrounded the Jé College at the Sera Monastery. Between 200 and 300 monks were killed when Tibetan troops broke down the barricades. Reting died in the Potala Palace prison under mysterious circumstances.
There were at least two incidents in which tantric war magic was used in the 1940s and early 1950s. During one incursion by the Chinese militia, Kṣetrapāla, originally a son of Śiva and now a dark blue emanation of Mahākāla, was called on to thwart the invaders. Kṣetrapāla is protector deity who “cuts the life-thread” of enemies (with a spinning chakra?) and also executes those who have broken their monastic vows. In paintings he is accompanied by Mahāśakti, a Kālī-like goddess who, “terrifying, wildly laughing, . . . reduc[es] the enemies and obstacle-creating demons to dust.”[142] (The consort of the “four-handed wise” Mahākāla is in fact Mahākālī.) In this particular battle Kṣetrapāla is sent against a Chinese “nine-headed demon,”[143] which indicates that the Chinese were most likely using their Tibetan allies to perform reciprocal tantric magic. In 1950 the ritual involving the eighteen-foot-high “thread crosses” (described above) was performed against the People’s Liberation Army, and, unlike the perceived success of this magic against the Nepalese, it was a great failure.[144]
Since 1954 the Dalai Lama has performed at least thirty-two Kālachakra Tantra initiations with a total audience, according to his own website, of 1.7 million people. According to explanations on the Fourteenth’s website, those who are initiated must have achieved “renunciation of saṃsara, bodichitta, and understanding of emptiness.”[145] One must assume that the Dalai Lama has waived these requirements for a large majority of his audiences. There are eleven levels of initiation and the Dalai Lama performs only the first seven, reserving the rest for higher adepts. Four of the first seven stages use the metaphor of a child to symbolically wash, tie the hair, pierce the ears, and name the initiate. The last three “exalted” initiations involve interaction with a consort: “touching her breasts” and “engaging in union.”[146] Here one assumes that very few qualify for this level of tantric practice, even if the yogi and his consort are only symbols of cosmic male and female energies, an interpretation upon which the Gelugpas insist.
The tangka (Tibetan religious painting) that hangs above the Dalai Lama when he is performing the Kālachakra initiation features the tantric “God of Time” in sexual union with his consort. They are both holding, among other things, weapons, skulls, and severed heads. As we have seen in other tantric rituals discussed above, these weapons are used by the protective deities—themselves previously “tamed” enemies—to attack opponents of Buddhism and the Tibetan state. The fact that previous Dalai Lamas, Bhutan’s Shabdrung, and other high lamas claimed to have actually defeated external enemies, not their own internal demons, does not support the symbolic interpretation.
In his commentary on the Kālachakra Tantra, the current Dalai Lama offers two interpretations of the following antinomian and provocative imperatives: “Those of the vajra lineage definitely should take life; those of the sword [should speak] untrue words. Those of jewel should steal others’ wealth; those of the lotus lineage should steal others’ mates.” The Dalai Lama explains that
in its provisional sense this means that those of the Akṣhobhya lineage [the Dhyāni Buddha of the East] motivated by compassion could—under special circumstances—kill person who are harmful to the teaching or who hate sentient beings and are about to commit hideous non-virtues but cannot be restrained by other means. In its definitive sense this means that those of the Akṣhobhya lineage should bind the white mind of enlightenment, which is the basis of bliss, in the crown protrusion and should take the life of the winds that brings about emission.[147]
Here we have the “dual truth” doctrine of Mahāyāna Buddhism, made most famous by Nāgārjuna. The “higher” truth is the symbolic interpretation of Tantras, namely, that any appearance of violence means only the destruction of ignorance and the achievement of bliss. It is significant, however, that the Dalai Lama does not reject the provisional or conventional interpretation, because, as we have seen above, he defends that assassination of Lang Darma and states that “theoretically speaking, in order to achieve greater benefit for a greater number of people, you can use a violent method.”[148]
In support of the symbolic interpretation, Alexander Berzin quotes from the Kālachakra Tantra itself: “The battle with the lord of the non-Indic invaders is definitely inside the body of embodied beings . On the other hand, the external (level of the battle) is, in fact, an illusory form. [Thus,] the battle with the non-Indic invaders in the case of Mecca is not (actually) a battle.”[149] When the Tibetans and Bhutanese did use war magic against their enemies, they boasted about their victories in ways that do not support the contention that these battles were illusory. Yogācāra idealism and other mentalistic forms of Buddhism cannot accurately describe the Thirteenth Dalai Lama’s claim that “due to our unrelenting performance of rituals for the preservation of religion and state, . . . the Chinese armies . . . were gradually driven back to the borders.”[150]
It is significant to note that the Thirteenth Dalai Lama did not say that the Chinese—or the Germans in the case of his tantric attack on them—symbolize the Tibetans’ own internal demons. Therefore, Berzin’s claim that no rites were performed against external enemies is simply not supported. It must also be pointed out that when those who support the symbolic interpretation state that the Dharma King conquers “without stick or sword,” the meaning is taken literally, but if he breaks the rule of nonviolence, then the symbolic reading is inconsistently preferred. Finally, it is baffling that while insisting on a symbolic interpretation of the invaders, Berzin, at the same time, goes to great lengths to identify them as real external armies in history.[151]
The symbolic and psychological interpretation of enemies reminds one of the forty-nine wrathful deities in the Bardo Thödöl, better known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. As the appointed lama reads the text over the corpse of the departed soul, he reminds the spiritual pilgrim that these are not real demons but simply emanations of his own evil deeds, as the forty-nine blissful deities are projections of his good actions. The person is encouraged to embrace both sets of deities in what I call a “Last Judgment as Self Judgment,”[152] a process of making one’s self whole and purified of sin. Although somewhat similar regarding the principle of mental projections, the Kālachakra Tantra says something very different. The “enemies of Dharma” are the Abrahamic religions and they are explicitly described as a “family of demonic snakes.”[153] Islam is particularly mentioned and Mecca is where “demonic incarnation” (Muhammad?) lives.[154] Again, it makes no sense to say that these “non-believers” are the initiates’ own internal enemies, unless they themselves are actually not Buddhists and are in fact enemies of the Dharma. This of course is absurd.
Before we resume our focus on the moral and political problems with reincarnated lamas, let us summarize and conclude our analysis of the use of war magic in Tibetan Buddhism. For over a thousand years in Tibet and Bhutan lamas have used tantric rituals to bring harm to their Buddhist enemies and their allies. The intention for these acts was for the most part religiously motivated, and even though we moderns would say that violent results were simply natural events coincident with the ritual performance, good or evil intentions, not consequences, are the principal foci of Buddhist ethics. The claim that the intentions were good because they were directed at saving their opponents from horrible karmic destinies violates basic moral intuitions and the Kantian imperative that persons may not be used as merely means to a putative good end. Finally, as intentions are what have primary moral worth in Buddhism, the truth of fanciful stories of swarms of ravens or bees killing the Shabdrung’s enemies has no ethical relevance.
Although some Mahāyānist philosophy support the claim that all material things and historical events are nothing but psychological projections, we have also maintained that this is not the conceptual context of very explicit intentions of defeating the enemies of the Dharma in what the lamas appear to take as a very real world. (The metaphysics of “all is mind” is very difficult to live by; in kicking a rock on a walk with George Berkeley, Samuel Johnson is said to have exclaimed: “Thus I refute you!”) Our own internal demons—certainly creations of our own minds—are very different entities than perceived enemies in the external world. We have seen that the Fourteenth Dalai Lama has explicitly supported the principle of “compassionate violence” based on Mahāyānist texts,[155] but I have no reason to believe that he intends any violence against anyone when he performs the Kālachakra Tantra. Other recent acts of “compassionate” killing have been reported in connection with other lamas and disputes over incarnational succession. We now turn to murders committed in the name of Dorjé Shugden, who was reincarnated as the main contender to the child who became the Fifth Dalai Lama.
One of the two other children who were candidates for replacement of the Fourth Dalai Lama was Drakpa Gyaltsen (1617–54), who was allegedly reincarnated as the wrathful protector deity Dorjé Shugden. As was related above, the Fifth Dalai Lama admitted that he did not pass one crucial test for incarnational succession, and this fact could be used to validate the choice of Drakpa Gyaltsen and give credence to the preeminence of Dorjé Shugden. It is significant to point out that the current Dalai Lama’s junior tutor, Trijang Rinpoché (1901–83), was a disciple of Pabongkha Rinpoché (1878–1944), the most prominent twentieth-century promoter of the worship of Dorjé Shugden. Ling Rinpoché, the Fourteenth’s senior tutor, was also a Shugden devotee. Helmut Gassner, the Dalai Lama’s German translator for seventeen years, reports that Dorjé Shugden’s oracle in the Panlung Monastery predicated everything that happened during the Dalai Lama’s flight from Tibet in 1959.[156] In fact, it was Shugden’s oracle who gave the Dalai Lama instructions as he left on the night of March 17, 1959. The Fourteenth relates that the oracle said “Go tonight!” and he “wrote down, quite clearly and explicitly, the route I should take out of the Norbulingka [his summer palace], down to the last town on the Indian border.”[157]
The Dalai Lama now admits that he “propitiated the fierce spirit [Dorjé] Shugden]” until 1975, when he then discovered “the profound historical, social and religious problems associated with [the deity].”[158] As a sign of his personal integrity and honor, the Dalai Lama initially thought that his worship of Dorjé Shugden invalidated his sacred office, but in 1977 he changed his mind about abdication and began to speak out against public celebrations of Dorjé Shugden. (Private worship could continue.) In the spring of 1996, under pressure from the Nyingma school, the Dalai Lama went much further and declared that Dorjé Shugden was an “evil spirit,” and said that his followers “promoted [Shugden] as more important than the Buddha himself.”[159] For centuries Tibetan Buddhists have debated the difference between buddhas and demons, and the Dalai Lama was forced to confirm the growing consensus that Dorjé Shugden is a demon, or more accurately, a “mundane” deity. A similar relationship holds in Hinduism between the devas and the asuras, and Buddhists of all sects carry over this prejudice against what were the indigenous gods of the Indian Subcontinent.
It is puzzling to observe that after serving the Gelug sect so well since the rule of the Great Fifth, and after taking such meticulous care of the Fourteenth, Dorjé Shugden could be so easily and quickly anathemized. One would think that protector deities who are shunned might well prove to be dangerous, and this is precisely what has happened. In the 1970s Martin Mills reports that, because they mixed Nyingma with Gelugpa beliefs, “23 [Tibetan-in-exile] government officials and lamas [were] assassinated using [Shugden’s magic] powers.”[160] Then, on February 4, 1997, Lobsang Gyatso and two of his students were brutally murdered only a hundred yards from the Dalai Lama’s compound. Fifteen to twenty knife wounds were found in each of their bodies. Lobsang, who was named after the Fifth Dalai Lama and head of the School of Dialectics at Dharamsala, had spoken out against the followers of Dorjé Shugden.
Evidence found at the scene of the crime pointed to the Dorjé Shugden Supporters Society in New Delhi. Officials of this group deny that they were behind the murders, but they have now started a well-orchestrated campaign against the Dalai Lama. They claim that he has denied religious freedom to their Buddhist sect, the only one to stand for the pure form of Gelug teachings, which Dorjé Shugden has vowed to protect. Drawing on a Roman Catholic parallel, Norman aptly describes him as a “heavenly Grand Inquisitor.”[161] I have not done a thorough reading of his devotees’ literature, but I would conjecture that some of them must reference the contested transition from the Fourth to the Fifth Dalai Lama as evidence in their favor. I would assume that they would insist that Tibet would have fared far better under a strict Gelug theocracy. I am certain that there would be many detractors from this view, one that has all the potential for the religiously motivated violence detailed in this book.
The perennial problems with incarnated lamas arose again when Choekyi Gyalsten, the Tenth Panchen Lama, died in 1989. The Panchen Lamas were considered the Chenrezig’s “mind” while Dalai Lama was his “body,” but that did not mean that they always agreed, especially with regard to politics. The Tenth Panchen Lama was a controversial figure in twentieth Tibetan history because, at least early on, he sympathized with the Chinese Communists. For example, he sent a telegram to Beijing encouraging Mao to suppress the rebellion against the 1959 invasion. Soon he turned against Mao and wrote “The 70 Thousand Character Petition,” naively hoping that the Chinese Communists would listen to his complaints that their programs were destroying Tibetan culture and religion. In 1966 Choekyi Gyalsten was arrested and spent twelve years in prison. During his rehabilitation and against his Gelug vows, he married a Chinese woman and had a daughter with her. He eventually made it back to Tibet, but started to repeat his criticisms of Chinese Communism. In 1989 he died under mysterious circumstances at the Panchen Lama’s residence, the Tashilhunpo monastery in Shigatse. The Tenth Panchen Lama’s daughter, widely known in China as Renji, is very guarded in her comments; but, in a conversation with Beijing correspondent Tim Johnson, she said that she is not sure that the Chinese have chosen the right person as her father’s successor.[162]
The Dalai Lama commenced the traditional proceedings to find the correct child incarnation. When the Dalai Lama announced that then eight-year-old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima was the true Eleventh Panchen Lama on May 14, 1995, the Chinese government arrested him and his family and has kept them under house arrest to this day. The abbot who conducted the search was imprisoned for seven years and he is still under house arrest. Using the 290-year-old tradition of choosing both the Panchen and Dalai Lamas from the Golden Urn, Beijing officials set up their own version of the Lama Lottery. On November 29, 1995, it was announced that Gyaltsen Norbu was the rightful Eleventh Panchen Lama and the true incarnation of the Amitābha Buddha. It was no surprise that his parents’ political credentials were approved by the Chinese Communist Party. In March of 2010, the Beijing government announced that their Panchen Lama, now twenty years old, is among the thirteen new members of the powerful National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. Gyeltsen Norbu now lives in a Beijing monastery where all the monks have to swear that he is the true Panchen Lama.
It is therefore inevitable that upon the death of Dalai Lama, Beijing officials will ask Gyeltsen Norbu, as it is the Panchen Lama’s duty, to search for and choose candidates for the Golden Urn, and to make sure that the most politically correct candidate wins. The Tibetans-in-exile will no doubt find their own child as the true incarnation of Chenrezig, and unfortunately the controversy will drag on indefinitely. The Dalai Lama says that if he returns to Tibet, he will step down as head of state and continue his life as a “simple monk.” He has already begun to undermine the principle of dual sovereignty by ceding all political power to the Tibetan Parliament in Dharamsala. Significantly enough, the Dalai Lama persuaded those writing its constitution that there be a provision for the impeachment of the Dalai Lama and his removal from office. Does life as a “simple monk” actually mean that he will, like Pope Benedict XIV, resign his post before he dies? That of course would be very unwise, as it would give the Chinese far more advantages than they already have.
In his book Tragedy in Crimson: How the Dalai Lama Conquered the World but Lost the Battle with China, Tim Johnson predicts that Tibet will evolve into another Inner Mongolia, where the Han Chinese population has grown to 83 percent. Vajrayāna Buddhist culture will inevitably decline in Tibet itself, and more monks and nuns will protest, immolate themselves, and be imprisoned. The only hope for Tibetan Buddhism lies in the vibrant communities in American and Europe, as well as in Ladakh, Sikkim, Dharamsala, Bhutan, and the Republic of Mongolia. During a trip to Mongolia in 2005, I was amazed to witness the revival of Buddhist religion and culture there. The monasteries are accessible and the monks and lamas are approachable, the art works are some of the finest in the Buddhist world, and life in the monasteries and nunneries appeared to be vibrant.
On November 21, 2013, the Dalai Lama did in fact announce that he would resign in “the next few months.”[163] He also said that if he did retire, a “deputy” Dalai Lama might be chosen to take his place. Even more intriguing and provocative was his pronouncement that if he dies while traveling (which he does very frequently), his successor would be from the country where he was. Curiously, he said that this would be only “logical,” but the Tibetan tradition appears to have another logic, namely, that Chenrezig chose the Tibetan people as the vehicle for the Buddhist transformation of the world. Finally, the Dalai Lama did not foreclose the possibility that a woman could be his successor. He said that he already predicted this twenty years ago, and if a “female reincarnated person is more effective, more useful for serving Buddha dharma, [then] why not?”[164]
With regard to the idea of a hereditary king for Tibet, why did Chenrezig choose such a poor candidate as the Sixth Dalai Lama, and why did this divine plan fail? One implication, based on the three plans of the Dalai Lamas (see first section above), is that it was the Sixth’s will and not Chenrezig’s. In this conversation with Glenn Mullin, Mullin proposed that, as the Thirteenth Dalai Lama willed that his life be shortened so that his successor could do his great work, why does not the Fourteenth extend his life so that it can continue to benefit all sentient beings? Even though he suggested that “perhaps I will have to come up with a fourth master plan,” His Holiness did not respond to Mullin’s proposal.[165] Sadly, there are too many “perhaps” and idle speculation in his pronouncements. Adding to the mystery and frustration is the troublesome implication that, if Tibet had returned to a hereditary monarchy, which the Dalai Lama himself maintains would have been better, then humankind would have lost the great benefit of his compassionate and charismatic leadership. Even more questions can be raised about the implications of the Dalai Lama’s many off-hand comments for basic Buddhist philosophy and the relationship of this great Bodhisattva to the Tibetan people and the rest of the world.
There is some speculation that the Tibetans-in-exile could possibly choose the seventeenth Karmapa Lama Ogyen Trinley Dorjé, whose lineage is 900-years-old. One would think that this option would be rejected outright by the Gelugpas, but, “in the minds of many Tibetans,” according to Jonathan Mirsky, “[Trinley Dorjé] has taken the place of the Panchen as their favored successor to the Dalai Lama.”[166] The problem, however, is that Trinley Dorjé’s succession has been disputed at the highest level of Karmapa authority. Just as with the Dalai Lamas, there have been disputes in the past about this oldest line of incarnate lamas; indeed, the succession to the Eighth, Tenth, and Twelfth took some time to resolve. Interestingly enough, the Chinese government supported the selection of Trinley Dorjé, as well as a substantial majority of the Karmapas.
The Dalai Lama played an unprecedented role in Trinley Dorjé’s discovery in Lhasa, and he held “long life” rituals for him. However, in a February 1997 letter to the Dalai Lama, Shamar Rinpoché, the principal supporter of Thaye Dorjé, states: “This amounts to a medieval dictatorial command. . . . This is completely unacceptable to me. . . . With respect to our lineage it is up to us, who are a part of that lineage, to achieve its aims.”[167] Others have suggested a peaceful solution noting that Chenrezig can choose to manifest himself in any way that he wishes, as we saw with the three candidates to succeed the Bhutan’s First Shabdrung. As his emanations are allegedly many, Chenrezig can incarnate himself within lineages but also across them, and if we are to believe the Dalai Lama, outside of Tibet, Bhutan, Mongolia, or India.
Evidently, the Dalai Lama has taken back his comments about retiring, but no one can deny the damage these and other comments have done to his sacred office. It must have made the Tibetan people wince when, on May 21, 2010, they heard their beloved saint laugh and say: “I have come to feel that the Dalai Lama system is no longer important. . . . The Chinese government cares more about this than I do.”[168] Perhaps this is the “fourth master plan” to which His Holiness hinted in his conversation with Mullin discussed above. Many are convinced that the Beijing government is ready to instruct Gyalsten Norbu to search for candidates for the Fourteenth’s successor, and the Tibetans-in-exile, even the pure republicans among them, will have lost all the leverage that this significant but flawed religious office retains. One could say that the Bhutanese have made more deliberate and wise decisions by preserving the doctrine of dual sovereignty with a strong Dharma King and a democratically elected National Assembly. It is easy to check the DNA of a crown prince, but it is empirically impossible to identify the correct incarnate lama.
Hugh E. Richardson, Tibet and its History (Boston: Shambhala, 2nd ed., 1984), 39.
Ibid., 35.
Shakabpa, Tibet: A Political History, 103.
Ibid., 124.
Alexander Norman, Secret Lives of the Dalai Lamas: The Untold Story of the Holy Men Who Shaped Tibet, from Pre-history to the Present Day (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 124fn.
Ram Rahul, Modern Bhutan (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1972), 18.
Dalton, Taming the Demons, 142.
The Book of Revelation 20:10 (RSV).
Dalton, Taming the Demons, 18
Ibid., 2.
See Haydar Mirzā, The Tarikh-i-Rashidi of Mirza Muhammad Haidar, trans. E. Denison Ross (London: SampsonLow, Marston & Co., 1895), 418.
Glenn H. Mullin, The Second Dalai Lama: His Life and Teachings (Ithaca, New York: Snow Lion Publications, 1994), 15.
Laird, The Story of Tibet, 70.
Dalton, Taming of the Demons, 26.
James A. Stroble, “Buddhism and War: A Study of the Status of Violence in Early Buddhism,” accessed at www2.hawaii.edu/~stroble/Buddhism_and_War.html on July 10, 2013.
Matthew T. Kapstein, The Tibetans (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 59.
Ibid., 72.
See Christopher I. Beckwith, The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 25–26.
Kapstein, The Tibetans, 65.
Ibid., 67.
Réne de Nebesky-Wojkowitz, Oracles and Demons in Tibet (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1956), 422.
Kapstein, The Tibetans, 80–81.
Dalton, Taming the Demons, 53.
Aris, Bhutan: The Early History of a Himalayan Kingdom, 231.
Dalton, Taming the Demons, 31.
Ibid., 33.
Ibid., 35.
Ibid., 80.
Quoted in Dalton, Taming the Demons, 55.
Ibid., 118.
Ibid., 92
Ibid., 149.
Ibid., 148.
For a comparative analysis of asuras and Greek Titans see Gier, Spiritual Titanism, chap. 3.
Dalton, Taming the Demons, 32.
Ibid., 36.
Quoted in Shakabpa, A Hundred Thousand Moons, 314.
Numbers 23; see also 1 Chronicles 21:1, where satan objects to David and his census.
Joshua 5:15–6:27.
2 Kings 19:35.
Ronald M. Davidson, Tibetan Renaissance: Tantric Buddhism in the Rebirth of Tibetan Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 363.
Tenzin Gyatso, Kālachakra Tantra Rite of Initiation (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 199) 1:161.
Ibid., 134.
Shakabpa, Tibet: A Political History, 62.
Ibid., 63.
Ibid.
Lee Feigon, Demystifying Tibet: Unlocking the Secrets of the Land of the Snows (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1966), 60–61.
Kaptstein, The Tibetans,114.
Norman, Secret Lives of the Dalai Lamas, 118.
Shakabpa, Tibet: A Political History, 66
Ibid., 68.
Sam van Schaik, “Phagpa’s Arrow, or Buddhists vs. Daoist,” at http://earlytibet.com/2008/09/30/phagpas-arrow/, accessed on January 6, 2014.
Ibid.
Dalton, Taming the Demons, 134.
Quoted in Norman, Secret Lives of the Dalai Lamas, 147.
Quoted in ibid., 129.
Dalton, Taming the Demons, 132.
Norman, Secret Lives of the Dalai Lamas, 163.
Mullin, The Second Dalai Lama, 11.
Ibid., 104.
Quoted in ibid., 76–77.
Kapstein, The Tibetans, 129.
Norman, Secret Lives of the Dalai Lamas, 179.
Quoted in Mullin, The Second Dalai Lama, 98.
Ibid., 103–4.
Norman, Secret Lives of the Dalai Lamas, 181.
Ibid., 185.
Laird, The Story of Tibet, 143.
Ibid., 144.
Shakabpa, Tibet: A Political History, 94.
Laird, The Story of Tibet, 139.
Norman, Secret Lives of the Dalai Lamas, 193.
Ibid., 133.
Sokdokpa, A History of How the Mongols were Repelled, quoted in Dalton, Taming of the Demons, 135.
Skakabpa, Tibet: A Political History, 100.
Shakabpa, One Hundred Thousand Moons, 315–316.
Ibid., 316.
Norman, Secret Lives of the Dalai Lamas, 233.
Ibid.
Ibid., 55.
Quoted in Samten G. Karmay, “The Great Fifth” IIAS Newsletter 39 (December 2005): 12.
See Norman, Secret Lives of the Dalai Lamas, 145 fn.
Karmay, “The Great Fifth,” 13.
Ibid.
René de Nebesky-Wojkowitz, Oracles and Demons in Tibet (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1956),445.
Shakabpa, One Hundred Thousand Moons, 337.
Shakabpa, Tibet: A Political History, 106.
Ibid., 105.
Norman, The Secret Lives of the Dalai Lamas, 220.
Shakabpa, Tibet: A Political History, 109.
Ibid., 110.
Quoted in Shakabpa, Tibet: A Political History, 107.
Norman, The Secret Lives of the Dalai Lamas, 219.
Ibid., 213.
Ibid.
Ts. Narantuya, Treasures of Mongolian Art: Collections of Altangerel Ayurzana, trans. Ts. Batkhuu and B. Sainbileg (Ulaabaatar: Asian Art Antique Gallery, 2005), 99.
Skakabpa, Tibet: A Political History, 112.
Quoted in Dalton, Taming of the Demons, 141–2.
Ibid., 142.
Karmay, “The Fifth Dalai Lama,”12.
Norman, The Secret Lives of the Dalai Lamas, 214.
Feigon, Demystifying Tibet, 79.
Laird, The Story of Tibet, 152.
Ibid., 166–67.
Karmay, “The Fifth Dalai Lama,” 12–13.
Laird, The Story of Tibet, 167.
Ibid., 19.
Ibid., 173.
Ibid., 170.
Ibid., 174.
Zahiruddin Ahmad, Sino-Tibetan Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Rome: Instituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estreme Oriente, 1970), 311.
Norman, The Secret Lives of the Dalai Lamas, 287.
Laird, The Story of Tibet, 184.
Ibid., 184–85.
Ibid., 191.
Norman, The Secret Lives of the Dalai Lamas, 283.
Ibid., 284.
Ibid., 285.
Kapstein, The Tibetans, 143.
Norman, The Secret Lives of the Dalai Lamas, 304.
Ibid., 297.
Ibid., 306.
Shakabpa, Tibet: A Political History,165.
de Nebesky-Wojkowitz, Oracles and Demons in Tibet, 494.
Ibid.
Norman, The Secret Lives of the Dalai Lamas, 314.
Ibid., 316.
Shakabpa, Tibet: A Political History, 173.
Quoted in Kapstein, The Tibetans, 159.
Ibid.
Norman, The Secret Lives of the Dalai Lamas, 332–33.
See L. Austine Waddell, The Buddhism of Tibet or Lamism (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons Limited, 2nd ed., 1939), 404.
Dalton, The Taming of the Demons, 155. Norman writes that “the full resources of the saṅgha [were] mobilized to invoke the protection of the wrathful deities” (Secret Lives of the Dalai Lamas, 339).
de Nebesky-Wojkowitz, Oracles and Demons in Tibet, 451.
Quoted in Dalton., The Taming of the Demons, 156.
Ibid., 149.
Norman, The Secret Lives of the Dalai Lamas, 148
Ibid., 346.
Alexandre Andreyev, “Soviet Russia and Tibet: A Debacle of Secret Diplomacy,” The Tibet Journal 21:3 (Autumn 1996): 4–34.
Ibid., 350.
David N. Kay, Tibetan and Zen Buddhism in Britain: Transplantation, Development and Adaptation (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 43.
de Nebesky-Wojkowitz, Oracles and Demons in Tibet, 40–41.
Robert Beér, The Encyclopedia of Tibetan Symbols and Motifs, 267. See also de Nebesky-Wojkowitz, Oracles and Demons of Tibet, 495.
de Nebesky-Wojkowitz, Oracles and Demons in Tibet, 495.
Quoted from the website of His Holiness the Foureenth Dalai Lama of Tibet at www.dalailama.com/messages/dolgyal-shugden/his-holiness-advice, accessed on December 22, 2012.
Ibid.
Kālachakra Tantra Rite of Initiation, 350–51.
Laird, The Story of Tibet, 70.
Quoted in Alexander Berzin, “The Kalachakra Presentation of the Prophets of the Non-Indic Invaders (full analysis),” at www.berzinarchives.com/web/en/archives/study/islam/ kalachakra_islam, accessed on April 1, 2013.
Quoted in Dalton, The Taming of the Demons, 156.
Berzin, “The Kalachakra Presentation of the Prophets of the Non-Indic Invaders (abridged edition),” accessed at www.berzinarchives.com/web/en/archives/study/islam/kalachakra _islam/ kalachakra_presentation_prophets_in/kc_pres_prophets_islam_abridged.html, accessed on September 26, 2013.
N. F. Gier, “Last Judgment as Self-Judgement: Kant, Autonomy, and Divine Power,” Indian Philosophical Quarterly 28:1 (January 2001): 15–32.
Kālachakra Tantra, 1.154.
Ibid.
Quoted in Laird, The Story of Tibet, 70.
Helmut Gassner, “Dalai Lama Dorje Shugden,” PDF file accessed at www.dorje shugden.com/articles/HelmutGassner01.pdf on February 28, 2013.
Quoted in Norman, The Secret Lives of the Dalai Lamas, 375.
Quoted from the Website of His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet at www.dalailama.com/messages/dolgyal-shugden/his-holiness-advice, accessed on December 22, 2012.
Ibid.
Martin A. Mills, “This Turbulent Priest: Contesting Religious Rights and the State in the Tibetan Shugden Controversy” in Human Rights in Global Perspective, eds., Richard Ashby Wilson and Jon Mitchell (London: Routledge, 2003), 56.
Norman, The Secret Lives of the Dalai Lamas, 8.
Johnson, Tragedy in Crimson, 165.
“Dalai Lama Talks of Early Retirement,” Asian Tribune (November, 22, 2012), accessed at www.asiantribune.com on April 7, 2013.
Ibid.
Mullin, The Second Dalai Lama, 16.
Jonathan Mirsky, “Will There be a ‘Duel of the Dalai Lamas’?” The New York Review of Books (May 26, 2011): 35.
Shamar Rinpoche, “Letter to the Private Office of the Dalai Lama” (February 7, 1997), cited in The Great Deception: The Ruling Lamas’ Policies (London: Western Shugden Society, PDF version, 2011), 209.
Perry Link, “Talking about Tibet: An Open Dialogue between Chinese Citizens and the Dalai Lama,” New York Review of Books Blog (May 24, 2010), accessed at www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/may/24/talking-about-tibet/ on April 9, 2013.