Sources of Tibetan Tradition

The first Tibetan writings were set down during the seventh century, when English was only beginning to take shape among Anglo-Saxon tongues and Beowulf had not yet been written. Tibetan, in the thirteen hundred years of its existence as a literary language, has been employed for administrative and diplomatic documents; for recording history, biography, and autobiography; for texts on medicine, the arts, and crafts; for epic poetry and popular narrative; and for much else besides the copious Buddhist religious and philosophical literature that are its best known expressions. Many thousands of Tibetan-language works are now available to scholarship, and Tibetan must be counted among the major vehicles of Asian civilizations. Its rich heritage, however, remains poorly represented outside of specialized research, and hence largely inaccessible to students and general readers, and even to scholars in Asian Studies who focus on areas besides Tibet. Sources of Tibetan Tradition offers, for the first time, more than 180 selections drawn from the broad range of Tibetan writings, illustrating all periods of Tibetan history from the medieval Tibetan empire to the beginnings of Tibetan modernity and stemming from most regions where Tibetan has traditionally been employed, from the borders of Kashmir to Beijing and from Mongolia to Bhutan.

Tibetan civilization, as a transforming force that has been adopted by a range of other peoples and cultures, has spread even more broadly than its core region on the Tibetan plateau and the grasslands of Mongolia. In the early seventeenth century, for example, Tibetan Buddhist culture and literature reached as far east as Manchuria and west into Europe, where the Kalmyk Mongols settled on the banks of the Volga River in Russia. The Tibetan literary language became a powerful medium for intellectual life far beyond Tibetan ethnolinguistic boundaries. By the mid-twentieth century, nearly every large city in China had Tibetan Buddhist centers, and devoted Chinese followers attended events in the thousands. With the post–1959 diaspora, Tibetans have moved all over the globe, bringing their culture with them; in the 35 years from 1959 to 1994, over 450 Tibetan Buddhist institutions were founded outside Tibet. While over 150 served Tibetan communities in exile in India, the majority were founded in the West (over 250 in Europe and North America, and just over a dozen in South America). Among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, some two dozen groups were established as well. Since 1994, growth has accelerated to such a degree that no effort has been made to record all the Tibetan Buddhist centers that have now opened. By 2012, there were 300 in Taiwan alone. The flourishing of Tibetan civilization—which has expanded globally even while troubled in its homeland—from the seventeenth century to today is just one reason a book such as this is needed. Anyone who wishes to enrich her or his appreciation of the wealth of world cultures must be able to access a broad range of Tibetan culture.

The plan of Sources of Tibetan Tradition is historical, following the periodization often adopted by Tibetan historians (and, with small modifications, by contemporary historians as well). Part 1, “Political Expansion and the Beginnings of Tibetan Buddhist Culture,” introduces sources for our knowledge of early medieval Tibet, up to the fall of the old Tibetan empire during the mid-ninth century and its immediate aftermath. Tibetan documents dating to this period include inscriptions from Central Tibet and manuscripts discovered in the famous Silk Road “Library Cave” at Dunhuang. The first chapter, the only one in the volume not based on Tibetan texts, introduces Tibet in the broader context of the medieval world, presenting a selection of pertinent Chinese, Islamic, and European works concerning Tibet as it was known within these three civilizational spheres. Subsequent chapters present imperial annals, political edicts, and the early iterations of Tibetan law, medicine, and divinatory arts. Religious developments are taken up in this part’s final chapter.

Part 2, “Tibet in Fragments: From Empire to Monastic Principalities,” focuses on the period of cultural revival during the early second millennium, in what Tibetan writers refer to as the “age of fragmentation,” when the country was without a unifying political center. During this time our sources, at least so far as they are known to current scholarship, are predominantly religious in character. Nevertheless, this was also the age in which important Tibetan medical traditions were redacted, and the writings of the Bön religion provide evidence that forms of divination and other parascientific disciplines were being codified as well. These developments are introduced in the final two chapters of this part.

From the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries Tibet achieved a measure of political unity, initially under the pressure of Mongol conquest, but subsequently owing to the rise of hegemonic powers within Tibet that sought to fill the vacuum left when the Mongol-supported Sakyapa administration began to erode. It also reached new levels of economic prosperity, due in great part again to Mongol involvement in Central Tibetan affairs. Though this was a time of political turmoil, it was also the age in which the classical culture of Tibet assumed its enduring forms, producing remarkable achievements in philosophy, religion, literature, architecture, and the arts. New ways of social and institutional life developed, and monasteries came to play an increasingly central role in culture, politics, and economics. Part 3, “The Age of Monastic and Aristocratic Hegemonies: The Florescence of Tibetan Culture,” explores this complex period, with chapters devoted to legendary and historical narrative, religious and literary developments, mortuary writings, and the growth of the arts and sciences.

The hegemonic rivalries in Central Tibet reached a resolution of sorts in the seventeenth century, with the victory, supported by the Khoshud Mongols, of factions united under the banner of the Dalai Lama. The so-called Ganden Palace government that henceforth ruled Tibet from Lhasa is sometimes presented as a unified Tibetan regime headed by the successive Dalai Lamas. However, the true state of affairs was far less clear than such a description suggests. The Dalai Lamas themselves rarely exercised actual power; more often, they merely served as the spiritual figurehead of the Tibetan state, while many parts of the Tibetan world remained effectively outside Lhasa’s sphere of authority. In part 4, “The Age of Centralization: The Rise of the Ganden Government and Its Bid for Cultural Hegemony,” we trace the emergence of the Dalai Lama’s regime, together with that of the Gelukpa order from which it sprang, alongside major cultural developments outside of Central Tibet. An additional important factor during this age was the extension of Tibet’s foreign contacts, thanks largely to its varied involvements with Mongol powers in north-central Asia and the Manchu, or Qing, dynasty that then governed China (1644–1911). Accordingly, we introduce a spectrum of writings that turn outward from Tibet to explore the neighboring peoples and lands. Part 4 ends with selections representing the late blossoming of religious movements in the eastern Tibetan regions of Kham and Amdo.

Part 5, “Expanding Horizons in the Early Twentieth Century,” concludes the volume with a selection of texts recording Tibetans’ initial assessments of and reactions to the modernizing world that would increasingly encroach upon them. Amid the tumultuous early decades of the twentieth century, Tibet began to participate in the new cosmopolitanism then developing in many parts of Asia. We must emphasize that here, given our primary concern with the culture of Tibet before its incorporation into the People’s Republic of China, we do not treat the complex and contested issues surrounding Tibetan political and cultural developments in very recent times. A separate volume of sources would be required to do justice to that history, a volume that we hope will eventually be prepared as a companion to this book.