Buddhism in Bhutan

Located immediately to the south of Central Tibet and half the size of the state of Indiana, Bhutan today is an eminently peaceful constitutional monarchy. Bhutan was never dominated by the Gelugpas (popularly known as the Tibetan “Yellow Hat” sect), except for some monasteries in the Far East. It had, however, been early on the home of the Nyingma School (the original “Red Hats”), established by Indian guru Padmasambhava, and later it was dominated by a Kagyu Tantric sect called the Druk. The major non-Gelug tantric schools of Tibetan Buddhism are the Nyingma, the Karma-Kagyu, and the Sakya. The suffix “pa” indicates followers of each of these schools.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Bhutan’s twentieth-century monarchs were true Dharma Kings (chakravartins), the virtuous leaders envisioned by the Buddha himself. The same cannot be said, however, of major Bhutanese lamas, who waged sectarian war and supported expansionary military campaigns. The verdant landscape of Bhutan is sometimes broken with the appearance of dzongs, massive structures that serve as monasteries, administrative centers, and not too long ago, fortresses. They provided the main defense against invading Tibetan armies, the first wave sent by rival Kagyupas and the second by the Gelugpas, most often under the Fifth Dalai Lama. Internally, the first Shabdrung, the Bhutanese equivalent of the Dalai Lama, persecuted all Buddhist sects except the Nyingmapas.

During a three week trip to Tibet and Bhutan in 1999, I learned that the Bhutanese had bravely defended themselves against nine Tibetan invasions in the seventeenth century. My gracious Bhutanese hosts allowed me to assume that they as Drukpas were always the victims of religious violence by Tibetan armies. The first three conflicts, however, were between warring factions within the tantric Druk sect, some of whom had fled to Bhutan. Tibetan sources also indicate that at least three of these attacks may have been provoked by the Bhutanese themselves.^[1] The Bhutanese waged war against Hindus to the south in 1676, and in same year their military forces invaded Buddhist Sikkim because of an incarnational dispute. The Buddhists in Sikkim there were of the same Kagyu tantric sect as the Bhutanese, and Tibetan Kagyupas came to Sikkim’s aid. We will see that conflict over incarnational succession has been pervasive in Tibetan and Bhutanese Buddhism. The Bhutanese invaded Sikkim a second time in 1740, and again Tibet came to its aid, but the Bhutanese still occupied its Kālīmpong region until 1865.^[2] They never, however, submitted to the Tibetans original goal—namely, conversion to the Gelug sect.

The general justification for the Bhutanese Buddhist use of violence was the same as those found in the Abrahamic religions: it is God’s will as found in prophetic oracles and religious texts. The oracles, proclaimed from a trance state, were considered to be the prophetic words of the Buddha (Buddha-vacca). Commenting on Buddhism in Bhutan, John Ardussi notes the biblical parallel: “In the extreme were certain itinerant prophets who, like their biblical counterparts, sometimes described their visions in voices deemed too politically strident, becoming thereby the targets of imprisonment or assassination.”^[3] Bhutanese lamas—sometimes joining together in a mass ritual—used tantric “war magic” to subdue their enemies, both internal and external. The Shabdrung’s rituals were so powerful and destructive that the Tibetans made a moratorium on his war magic a condition for peace treaties with Bhutan.

Tibetan religious histories tell us that in the early seventh century CE the Tibetan “Dharma” King Songzen Gampo established two monasteries in Bhutan, two of twelve sacred sites laid out, according to an elaborate geomantic system, by Gampo’s Chinese wife Konjo. In addition to Chinese geomancy, there is also a more ancient version of the conquest of Tibet, which depicts the sacred geography of the country in the form of a giant ogress “pinned” down by twelve great Buddhist monasteries. (Tantric daggers or stakes are used in the “taming” or “liberation” rituals.) The preferred Tibetan view of Gampo’s theocratic rule would have Bhutan as the southeast extension of a great Buddhist empire, but there is no evidence that the native Bön religion lost its hold on this region during the early empire of the seventh and eighth centuries.

The first section will discuss the exploits of Padmasambhava, sometimes called the Second Buddha, who came from the Swat Valley in present-day Pakistan. Traveling in this area in the seventh century, Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang (602–664) reported visiting a center for Vajrayāna (tantric) Buddhism with 1,400 temples. There are so many legends surrounding the great saint that it is difficult to find a truly historical core. One of his many biographies reports that his career as a tantric yogi began with an act of violence. After having “karmically cause[d] the death of a minister’s wife and two infants,” he was exiled to do penance in the charnel grounds near Bodhgaya where he was introduced to the Tantras.^[4] After being discovered initiating tantric rites to Mandarava, daughter of King Vihardhara of Rewalsar, Padmasambhava and the daughter consort survived a trial by fire ordered by the king. The king was duly impressed and allowed Mandarava to become Padmasambhava’s first consort.

Beginning with some philosophical and theological issues, the second section will discuss similarities and differences between the Bodhisattva and the Abrahamic deity. The difference points to the ongoing dialogue between Mahāyāna Buddhism and process theology where common ground is found in a rejection of divine omnipotence and divine immutability. The first allows the possibility of free will and the second makes the idea of divine compassion intelligible. The second section also explains my concern that reincarnated lamas as Bodhisattvas or Buddhas undermine the law of karma. The Bodhisattva ideal has been taken as one of the greatest moral and spiritual achievements of Mahāyāna Buddhism. These “beings of enlightenment,” beneficent laypeople in many instances, have exhausted their karmic debt, but they choose not to enter Nīrvaṇa until all sentient beings are redeemed. The claim that transcendent beings without karma, seemingly working independently of the cause and effect, can nonetheless take on the karma of others raises serious logical, metaphysical, and moral questions.

In the third section I discuss the proposal that the lamas are more correctly viewed as emanations rather than incarnations. This raises the issue of docetism, the view that the Bodhisattva only appears to take on a human body and enter human history. Docetism was declared a heresy in Christianity, but is not taken as such in Mahāyāna Buddhism. Docetism, however, only exacerbates the problem of a transcendent deity operating apart from space, time, and causation. It also allows apologists to excuse the bad behavior of lamas with the explanation that that is only the human shell acting, not Chenrezig, the Tibetan name for the Indian Avaloketiśvara.

In the fourth section I argue that the Dalai Lama’s claim that Chenrezig has a divine plan for the Tibetan people undermines the through-going humanism found in the Pāli scriptures. This humanism, holding there are real non-substantial individuals within the interdependent web of existence, holds that the Buddha is not a divine being and this also implies that lamas are not divine beings either. This view is more consistent with the Dalai Lama’s suggestion that Tibet would have been better ruled by hereditary kings, or today by a parliamentary democracy.

The fifth section contains a summary of issues involved in Buddhist political philosophy, especially the doctrine of dual sovereignty. There is a long line of very successful Buddhist kings in ancient India, Sri Lanka, Burma, and Cambodia. In the twentieth century there have been exemplary Buddhist kings in Bhutan and Thailand. It is supremely ironic that the most religiously tolerant rulers of Hindu India were the Buddhist Aśoka the Great and the Muslim Akbar the Great; and the best kings that Buddhists of Sri Lanka ever had, as we saw in the previous chapter, were their Hindu kings from 1739 to 1815.

In the sixth section I discuss the reign of Ngawang Namgyal, who fled to Bhutan because of a dispute about succession in the Druk lineage. Called the “Shabdrung” (lit. “at whose feet one submits”), he quickly consolidated power not only through his charismatic personality, but also by magical and military means, and, as a result, the Drukpas became the dominant Buddhist school in Bhutan. The seventh section summarizes the reign of the regents after the Shabdrung and the installation of the Second Shabdrung. The eighth and final section deals with Bhutan’s encounter with the British and its decision to give up rule by incarnated lamas for hereditary kings. As we have learned, the current Dalai Lama now admits that this political regime would have been a better one for Tibet after the Fifth Dalai Lama.

Padmasambhava “Tames” Indigenous Deities

When the great saint Padmasambhava traveled up from India in the mid-eighth century, he first came to Bhutan and established a Nyingma school there. As he would do in Tibet, the Great Guru used tantric rituals and weapons to pacify native deities and committed “compassionate” violence to “save” the local spirits of Bhutan. (The most frequent phrases in the huge 666-page book Oracles and Demons of Tibet are indigenous spirits “subdued” or “conquered” by Padmasambhava.) After the Tibetan King Trisong Detsen deported the Buddhist monk Śāntārākṣita on the charge that he had brought smallpox to Tibet, the king invited Padmasambhava to Lhasa in 761. According to tradition, the great yogi received Trisong Detsen’s wife as his second consort. Padmasambhava then proceeded to “tame” all the indigenous deities of Tibet with war magic. Instead of being destroyed, these beings became the wrathful “protector” deities of Tibetan Buddhism.

Padmasambhava is said to have used a tantric “wheel” to destroy those who obstructed his missionary efforts. (As we learned in the introduction, Indian sādhus have also used this deadly weapon.) There is an entire collection of tantric texts entitled The Life-Wheel of Bumthang, which Shears the Lives of Enemies. Upon returning to India after his first sojourn in Bhutan, Padmasambhava used the tantric wheel to defeat Hindus who had taken over the Buddhist sanctuary at Bodhgaya.^[5] When he traveled to Bhutan again, he brought the “life-wheel” back to its home in Bumthang and used it to pacify native deities. Bhutanese sources indicate that Padmasambhava gave very explicit instructions about how to build Buddhist structures properly. Reference is constantly made to the great demoness whose “pinning down” was fundamental to location to all the sacred sites of Tibetan Buddhism.

In the war magic of The Secret Visions of the Fifth Dalai Lama, a tantric wheel (chakra) was used to seal an iron box in which effigies of enemies (dissident Buddhists or Mongols) were imprisoned.^[6] The supreme irony of course is that the dharmachakra—the Wheel of Dharma—is the ultimate symbol of the Buddha’s teaching of nonviolence and compassion. The “precious wheel” (chakraratna) of the wheel-turning king (chakravartin) is a disc-like cosmic ship (500 leagues in diameter) in which the great Buddhist King will conquer all “non-believers,” identified as the followers of the Abrahamic religions in the Kālachakra Tantra (“Wheel of Time” Tantra). (As we shall see in the next chapter, the current Dalai Lama, following a symbolic interpretation of this text, has initiated 1.7 million people in its practices.) One is reminded of Viṣṇu’s discus (brahmachakra), which was his weapon of choice in fighting enemies, and also for cutting up the body of the goddess Satī to pacify her grieving husband Śiva. Each of the principal goddess temples in India are located where each of her body parts fell to earth.

According to Bhutanese legend, Padmasambhava converted a Hindu king Sindhu Rāja, who was ruler of a country called Bumthang with its capital in present day Punakha.^[7] The Great Guru told Sindhu Rāja to construct a temple in Bumthang such that a local demoness was pinned down lying on her back. The Great Guru also commissioned the building of stupas all around the borders to serve as both reliquaries of Buddhist treasures and also to pacify the local spirits. As opposed to the Abrahamic goal of the total destruction of evil, the general Hindu/Buddhist strategy is to tame the demons and force them to serve you. The Lord Kṛṣṇa dispatched his demoness nursemaid Putāna directly to heaven, but lamas such as Padmasambhava compelled the local gods to become wrathful protector deities. Ngawang Namgyal, the future Shabdrung of Bhutan, learned all these tantric rites at Tibet’s Ralung monastery. When a dispute arose about his claim to reincarnation, a Tibetan Jonang tantric lama warned that supporters of the other candidate would risk retaliation from Bhutan, whose “protective deities were so ferocious.”^[8] These native gods had presumably been tamed by Padmasambhava a thousand years earlier.

Returning to Sindhu Rāja, it is said that he committed a number of grave sins that caused him to lose his soul. Padmasambhava offered to help him, but the cure required the services of one of his daughters, the one with twenty-one distinctive marks of a tantric dhakini, a minor goddess. After a week of meditation in a cave, the Great Guru and his newly acquired tantric consort were able to restore the king’s soul. The king’s daughter continued to play a major role in Padmasambhava’s exploits in Bhutan. She was said to embody, as Aris explains, the “wisdom latent in all beings but, given the ancient association of the country with tigers, she symbolizes in particular the inhabitants of Bhutan whose barbarism is transmuted by the wrathful activity of the Guru into spiritual awakening.”^[9]

In one version of the myth, the king’s daughter, in the form of a pregnant tiger that will give birth to wisdom, serves, as totemic animals do for the major Hindu deities, as the “vehicle” or “mount” for the Great Guru. Legend has it that Padmasambhava would fly with his favorite yogini to thirteen different “tiger’s nests” for tantric meditation and rituals. The most famous tourist attraction in Bhutan is one of these “nests,” a group of temples high on a cliff accessible by a steep and rugged trail. When I was in Bhutan in 1999, they were closed because of a fire caused by yak butter lamps.

Problems with the Spiritual Succession of
High Lamas

In early Tibetan history political and religious succession was hereditary. The Kagyu school, of which Bhutan’s Drukpas are a subsect, introduced the idea of reincarnated lamas, and the Gelugpas chose to continue that tradition. In Tibet, Ladakh, Bhutan, Sikkim, and Mongolia, reincarnated lamas (now numbering about 3,000, including some women) are called tulkus, Tibetan for nirmāṇakāya, the form of the Dharmakāya that expresses itself in human beings. Tulkus are Bodhisattvas (most often Chenrezig) or Buddhas, specifically Amitābha in the case of the Pachen Lamas. Congruent with the Bodhisattva ideal, Tibetan lamas choose not to enter Nīrvaṇa for the sake of the Tibetan people and by extension all sentient beings.

One could initially say that this theory of religio-political succession is a brilliant one. The government of fallible humans could now be perfected by the rule of compassionate Buddhas, or more precisely, the Ādi Buddha itself, from which all Buddhas and Bodhisattvas are plural manifestations. (The Ādi Buddha is another name for the Dharmakāya and even the Dalai Lamas are given the title Vajradhara, the tantric name of the Ādi Buddha.) Transition from one lama to another would be secured and harmonious rule would be preserved under the control of the same perfect soul from generation to generation. We will see that the Fourteenth Dalai Lama believes that Chenrezig has a “master plan” for the cosmos, and that the Tibetan people and their incarnated lamas have been chosen as the principal instruments of this divine mandate.

In what follows I will raise philosophical, moral, political, and practical objections to the tulku theory. The Dalai Lama actually agrees with those who say that the temptations to manipulate both the choice of the infant lama and his philosophical and political education are simply too great. As we will see in the next chapter, the Fifth Dalai Lama, considered to be the greatest Tibetan religious and political leader until the twentieth century, confessed that he could not recognize the sacred implements of his predecessor, and he realized that he was chosen essentially for political reasons. We will also see that the Great Fifth’s succession was clouded in controversy and violence, just as was Bhutan’s first Shabdrung.

Frequently, there were competing parties putting forth their candidates and the conflict over them sometimes led to war. The non-violent, theological solutions to the problem of plural candidates—declaring that two were the mind and body of Chenrezig—can be admired only for their ingenuity and their commitment to peaceful reconciliation. In the case of Bhutan’s Shabdrung there were three reincarnations—Chenrezig’s body, mouth, and mind. Such solutions, however ingenious, did not necessarily guarantee political stability. As we will see in the next chapter, there were two contenders after the death of the sixteenth Karmapa in 1981. Factions for the two lamas still argue about the correct choice, but there are some wise mediators who remind their colleagues that in the past Chenrezig has chosen to appear in two or more bodies without contradiction. Again these are clever, but not so coherent, solutions that wreak havoc with basic Buddhist doctrines.

Some claims of incarnational succession are patently absurd. In 1999 Penor Rinpoché, 11th Throne Holder of the Palyui Lineage of the Nyingmapas, defended his pronouncement that action movie actor Steven Seagal was the reincarnation of the Treasure Revealer Chungdrag Dorjé of Palyul Monastery.^[10] (He was quick to deny that he had received any money from Seagal.) The current Dalai Lama claims that it is “logical” to assume that his successor will be reincarnated outside of Tibet, but one would assume that the person would be from a family with deeper spiritual connections to Tibetan Buddhism. At least the Spaniard Ösel Hita Torres, known as Tenzin Ösel Rinpoché, undertook tulku training at Nepal’s Kopan Monastery. The late Thubten Yeshe (1935–1984), not an incarnate lama himself and controversial as the reputed “paisa (money) lama,” claimed that the then one-year-old Torres was his reincarnation. With Ösel Rinpoché one more tulku lineage has been added to the over 500 already in existence.

Bodhisattvas and Abrahamic Deities:
Compared and Contrasted

Bodhisattvas in the Mahāyāna tradition are like the Abrahamic deity in that they are persons with wills and emotional/mental lives, and they have a transcendent existence apart from time and space. Bodhisattvas are also like Christ in that they are incarnated in human bodies and operate in human history. Although the current Dalai Lama laughs off the claim, his official seal states that he is “worshipped by gods and men” and is “the unchangeable all-knowing one who [is] lord of the three worlds [heaven, earth, and the underworld].” Tibetan Buddhists have unwittingly made the Dalai Lamas into what I have called “spiritual Titans.” Spiritual Titanism is an extreme form of humanism in which human beings claim divine attributes and prerogatives.^[11]

Buddhas and Bodhisattvas are significantly different from the Abrahamic God in that they are not creators of the cosmos (which is eternal) nor are they omnipotent. This may be the reason why the Dalai Lama, in his conversations with Thomas Laird, says that Chenrezig’s plans for Tibet have failed on several occasions. The denial of omnipotence makes way, as it does in Christian “process” theology, for human free will and responsibility, but the mechanics of this divine-human interaction are unclear in all the Mahāyāna sutras that I have studied. Also like the process deity, Bodhisattvas are not impassive and immutable, even though the Dalai Lama’s seal says that he is so. The early Church declared the doctrine of patripassianism—the view that God the Father suffered in the Crucifixion—heretical, but Alfred North Whitehead, modern father of process theology, stated that “God is the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands.”^[12]

In the Pāli scriptures of Theravāda Buddhism, Gautama Buddha calls himself a Bodhisattva in each of his previous lives, but he uses the term “Buddha” to describe his last life as Prince Siddhartha Gautama. In these earlier lives he states that “I was still the bodhisatta, not fully awakened, being liable to birth. . . .”^[13] Although legends indicate that he knew he was a Buddha at birth, Gautama did not actually confirm this until his enlightenment at the age of thirty-five. It is significant to note that the Buddha describes the Bodhisattva as “not fully awake.” The implications of Gautama’s view of the Bodhisattva are rather momentous and most ironic: for Gautama Buddha the earlier Bodhisattvas, even though they are benevolent in every instance, are lesser beings because they are subject to rebirth. For Mahāyāna Buddhists, however, their Bodhisattvas are greater than Gautama, because they refused to enter Nirvāṇa as Gautama did, but choose to return to the world again and again until all beings are liberated. An outside observer could say that this makes Gautama Buddha a rather selfish saint, and Donald Lopez acknowledges that “Tibetans are fond of saying that the teacher [lama] is actually kinder than the Buddha, because the Buddha did not remain in the world to teach us benighted beings of this degenerate age.”^[14]

The Bodhisattva doctrine raises fundamental problems not only in the claim that a being with no karmic debt can still have effects on the world, but also the claim that the Bodhisattva, as Peter Harvey explains, “prays that the sufferings of the world should ripen in him: that he should take on the bad karma of others, not just give them his ‘merit.’”^[15] This appears to violate the basic the law of karma. What is the mechanism, other than one based on faith alone, by which a being with no karmic debt and presumably no real body, can nonetheless be reborn into a world of karma and then take on the karma of others? Gautama Buddha makes it clear that as the “asavas [defiling tendencies] in me are abandoned . . . not to arise again in future time.”^[16] Only possession of asavas can keep a being in the karmic cycle. This also implies that the Buddha believes that, as Bodhisattvas for him are subject to rebirth, they, too, possess some asavas. Furthermore, how can a lama choose to be reborn in an infant whose karmic line, presumably, is connected to another person? (Logically, the line for one who has no karmic debt has ended, as the Buddha affirmed above.) What happens to the karmic line that has now been miraculously interrupted? The fact that a commentator maintains that the “karmic proclivity” of the child chosen “will help determine his or her next mindstream emanation” indicates that the law of karma must count for something in this theory.^[17] A general view of Tibetan Buddhist ethics also maintains that ordinary humans are inextricably bound by the law of karma. There appears to be a theory of dual causation similar to that of Christian theology in which God, by means of supranatural causation, can make things happen in the world but remains causally unaffected in the process.

The following passage from Lopez demonstrates that Chenrezig and his emanations stand outside the law of karma. Contrary to ordinary humans, reincarnated lamas

The law of karma, usually admired for its flawless moral logic and followed faithfully by Gautama Buddha, has been rendered irrational. The interdependent web of causation, one of the greatest contributions of Buddhist philosophy, is broken by the tulku doctrine.

Harvey’s discussion of the Bodhisattvas’ “pure lands” indicates the basic problem vis-à-vis the law of karma: “Pure lands are outside the normal system of rebirth, according to personal karma. To be reborn in one requires a transfer of some of the huge stock of ‘merit’ of the Land’s presiding Buddha.”^[19] As far as I can determine, Mahāyānist philosophers have not been able to articulate how this is possible given the interdependent causal web that Gautama Buddha endorsed so strongly. At the sixth stage of their development, Mahāyāna Bodhisattvas, as Peter Harvey states, “gain full insight into conditioned arising,”^[20] but their independent status apart from it indicates a contradiction not illumination.

Returning to the notion of three lamas sharing the same soul, there are other problems that arise. The ancient Sāṃkhya-Yoga school assumed a one soul/one body axiom. Even in its final release from the body, the puruṣa soul still maintains its individuality. The absolute monism of some Mahāyānist schools, however, undermines the plurality of souls and also the fundamental metaphysical pluralism on which the law of karma is based. If individual souls and their suffering are ultimately illusory, then the basis for the Bodhisattva’s vow is rendered unintelligible. An interesting parallel is found in Advaita Vedānta, where the liberated jīvanmukta has the luxury of bliss, but Īśvara, the creator of the world of māyā, is bound to his richly differentiated but illusory world as long as souls are deluded in their thinking that they are suffering individuals. It seems as if a selfish Gautama Buddha, just like the selfish jīvanmukta, leaves all the work of universal salvation to the selfless Bodhisattvas.

Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, Emanation, and Docetism

Some commentators claim that “rebirth” and “incarnation” are the wrong words to describe and explain the appearance of a tulku. They say that the correct word to use is “emanation” or more precisely a “mindstream emanation,” indicating the strong influence of Yogācāra idealism on Tibetan Buddhism. In theological discussions “emanation” is usually a term used to describe the outpouring of divine reality into various forms. In neo-Platonism, for example, Nous, the divine mind, is the first emanation of the One, and from Nous there comes a World Soul, the third emanation.

In Tibetan Buddhism the five Dhyāni Buddhas, of which the Panchen Lama (second only to the Dali Lama) is the incarnation of the Amitābha Buddha, emanate from the Ādi Buddha (dharmakāya), and then from them there emanate five correlative Bodhisattvas, of which the Dalai Lama is the emanation of Chenrezig. (Chenrezig chooses to manifest Amitābha’s compassion and shows this by sporting an Amitābha image in his crown.) The Dhyāni Buddhas are purely spiritual while the Bodhisattvas take on bodily form, either celestial or earthly. If each “new” Panchen or Dalai Lama is a direct emanation of the Ādi Buddha in its various forms, the problems with the law of karma mentioned above are not solved. There is still an arbitrary break in the karmic line of the individual who is now declared to be the new emanation of the Ādi Buddha.

Another problem with the emanation theory is that Tibetan Buddhists would have the same challenge that confronted some early Christian thinkers. It was the heresy of docetism, the doctrine that God only appeared to live in Jesus’ human body. It was presumably an attempt to answer Jewish objections to, not to mention the basic logical problems, of a divine human being. Buddhist docetism can be found in the early Mahāyānist Māhavastu, where, even though the Buddha did not need to wash or eat food, he did so to “appear” as a normal human being. (In striking contrast are the Pāli scriptures in which the Buddha is subject to all the needs and ills of the mortal body.) Mahāyāna docetism is confirmed in the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra and the Mahāyāna-saṃgraha, whereas Peter Harvey explains, “[the Bodhisattva] does this by meditatively sending forth a seemingly physical ‘mind-made body’ in which he tunes into and perceives the apparent ‘world’ of those he is seeking to aid.”^[21] If the tulkus are direct emanations of the Ādi Buddha, independent from the causal web of karma, then they only appear to be reborn in a body.

There are, however, significant differences between Christian and Buddhist doceticism. First, many Mahāyāna Buddhists, unlike the Theravādins, would have no objections to making the Buddha divine, at least in his dharmakāya or saṃbodhyakāya manifestations. Second, given the almost universal commitment to a form of absolute monism, Tibetan Buddhists believe that bodies, and all individuals for that matter, are ultimately unreal. While the Bodhisattva appears in a “mind-made body” as well as all other individuals, God appeared, except for Christian Scientists, in the real blood and flesh of the historical Jesus. The “scandal” of Christ that the Apostle Paul said shocked the Jews and the pagans would be no problem for most Mahāyāna Buddhists.

There are at least two puzzles that the emanation theory may resolve. The first is the conundrum of when the child is discovered before the lama himself is deceased. In the case of both the Fifth Dalai Lama and Bhutan’s Shabdrung, candidates were chosen before either of them left their bodies. If the new tulku is a direct emanation of the Ādi Buddha outside any causal chain, then it may be possible that he is the Ādi Buddha from conception on. But we now have a different plurality problem. Above we had the example of the multiple incarnations—officially recognized in the case of the Shabdrung’s successor as the mind, body, and voice of Chenrezig. Now we have a situation in which one soul is in two bodies at the same time until the preceding tulku dies. Again, the Tibetan Buddhist answer may very well be that ultimately there is no plurality of souls. There is one undifferentiated Dharmakāya and the appearance of many individuals and many Buddhas is simply an illusion. The Bodhisattva’s efforts, however, are not in vain, because as other beings continue to perceive themselves as separate and suffering, the Bodhisattva is obligated to help liberate them.

The second puzzle is the apparent contradiction of Chenrezig appearing in the life of an outwardly sinful person, such as the Sixth Dalai Lama or Reting Rinpoché, the fourteenth’s first regent, who though a reincarnated lama, was an active bisexual and who bankrupted the Tibetan state treasury through corrupt business dealings. The monks and patron at Sera monastery supported him, but other Tibetans and the Manchus considered him too tainted to perform the enthronement rites for Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, in 1939. A docetic theory of reincarnation and Nāgārjuna’s doctrine of two levels of truth resolve this problem by maintaining that Chenrezig only appears to assume a human body and all of its failings. A corollary solution is the current Dalai Lama’s theory that the Sixth was a perfected tantric yogi who could visit the bars of Lhasa and sleep with both men and women without incurring any karmic debt.

Spiritual Titans, Chenrezig’s Divine Plan, and Buddhist Humanism

An emanation theory of creation and its ontological “fluidity” between the finite and the infinite sometimes leads to the deification of human beings. In my book Spiritual Titanism I define this view as an extreme form of humanism in which human beings take on divine attributes and prerogatives. There are obviously more destructive implications in technological Titanism than in the spiritual forms, which generally take on benign manifestations such as Jainism. As opposed to Jews and Muslims, who believe in an absolute qualitative difference between humans and God, the Tibetans hold that the Dalai Lamas are essentially Chenrezig on earth, though only appearing to live in human body. Claiming authority on the basis of one’s divine nature to act against your enemies would obviously be a great temptation, and perhaps the best candidate among our reincarnate lamas might be the Bhutanese Shabdrung. The deity yoga of Tibetan Buddhism, although initially appearing as a form of Spiritual Titanism, differs from the liberated Jain saint in a significant way: the Jina is an omniscient spiritual atom separated from all other souls while the tantric yogi has merged with the Ādi Buddha without remainder.

My own personal attraction to Buddhism rests in what I take to be the Gautama Buddha’s thorough-going humanism, namely, that humans are responsible for their own actions and cannot count on any divine aid in paying off their karmic debt. This humanism is also a form of philosophical realism in which individuals are assumed to have their own reality even within the interdependent web of existence. By some accounts, the Buddha’s last words were “I have taught you the Dharma; now work out your own salvation.” Just as the Buddha, as Narayan Champawat explains, “attributed all his realization, attainments, and achievements to human endeavour and intelligence,” he would also extend that capacity to all human beings.^[22]

Buddhist humanism would also reject the doctrine that Gautama Buddha was a divine being. The Buddha did not consider himself divine; in fact, for him the gods were inferior beings resting in their bliss in the various heavens and in no position to aid human beings. In his famous debate with Dona, when the Buddha was asked what sort of being he was, he answered that he was neither a god nor a gandhabba (heavenly being) nor a yakkha (demon) nor a human.^[23] For some Mahāyāna Buddhists this passage is proof that the Buddha definitely claimed to have a transcendental existence and he could legitimately be called a “god beyond the gods” (devatīdeva). I prefer an alternative reading that follows the logic of the law of karma: namely, that the Buddha, knowing that this was his last life, would not be reborn in any of the six realms of existence. At his enlightenment Siddhartha Gautama is neither merely human nor divine; rather, as the conclusion of the passage above states, “I am a Buddha,” a perfected being beyond all defiling tendencies. The non-existence of not being reborn is not a transcendental realm; rather, it has no ontological status at all.

In an unpublished paper entitled “Buddhism and Chinese Humanism,” David Kalupahana contends that Buddhism should be promoted, along with Confucianism, as an equally strong form of Asian humanism. He claims that Gautama’s rejection of transcendental knowledge, his declaration of moral freedom in the midst of karmic determinants, and his refusal to go beyond immediate experience all converge nicely with major elements of European humanism. Here is his summary statement:

I would add at least two important Buddhist correctives to European humanism: (1) a social-relational self that replaces the Euro-American atomistic, autonomous self; and (2) an interdependent world that serves as a welcomed substitute in our ecological age for atomism at the cosmic level.

I submit that the Dalai Lama’s master plan theory undermines Buddhist humanism. What should be attributed to individual human responsibility according karmic laws can now only be imputed to the cosmic Buddha itself. This is essentially no different from the problematic moral implications of divine omnipotence in the Abrahamic religions. Declaring that the Katrina hurricane and the Haitian earthquake are God’s will absolves all individual humans of their responsibility for substandard construction, the main cause of the loss of life and property in these examples.

With the Dalai Lama and other Mahāyāna Buddhists, I find a preference for the dissolution of the self in the dharmakāya, the cosmic body of the Buddha. I find the Hindu or Buddhist universal self (substantial or unsubstantial), promoted at the expense of an individual self, an unsatisfactory basis for moral responsibility and it fails to support a robust view of human rights. Gautama Buddha rejected the universal self (ātman) of his Hindu tradition because he found, following what we would call a strict empiricist method, no evidence for such a self. In place of the ātman the Buddha proposed a “bundle” theory of the self in which the self is constituted by feelings, perceptions, sensations, and thoughts in relation to the body and its social environment. This is an individual, not a universal, self, and can be a locus of moral responsibility just as easily as David Hume’s or William James’ non-substantial selves.

This social-relational self, along with the Buddha’s radical empiricism, is very much like William James’ philosophy, and such a notion of self is roughly similar to that of Confucius, Alfred North Whitehead, Martin Buber, Martin Heidegger, and Gabriel Marcel. Like process philosophy Pāli Buddhism is best interpreted as a metaphysical pluralism, which supports the existence of real, social-relational individuals within the interdependent web of existence. In contrast to some nihilist views of no-self in Mahāyāna, Pāli Buddhism supports a self that can be the bearer of the universal human rights that the Dalai Lama so strongly embraces. We now turn to articulating a Buddhist political philosophy that is commensurate with Gautama’s thorough-going humanism.

From Democratic Sangha to Buddhist Kingship

The original Buddhist Saṅgha was an egalitarian, proto-communistic, proto-democratic institution. The monks owned only a few personal items, and the Saṅgha, in contrast to later Buddhist institutions, owned no land or personal property. Gautama’s son Raula was given no special privileges—he was certainly not the Buddha’s Crown Prince—because all the monks were considered equals, although there were seniority rights. The monks made their own decisions by consensus, and, as Gail Omvedt explains: “elaborate procedures [were] laid down for determining whether a decision was correctly taken or not. In the voting procedure, the Saṅgha even approved the democratic appointment of a ‘returning officer.’”^[25] There of course would be no appeal to religious authority (textual or otherwise) in confirming the right decisions.

In the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta King Ajātasattu of Magadha declares that he wants to destroy the Vajjians, a neighboring people with a republican form of government, but he wanted to consult with the Buddha before he did. Exhibiting the most subtle and deft diplomatic skills, the Buddha answered the Hindu king’s representative in a dialogue with Ananda, the person who presumably remembered this sūtra and recited it to the First Council after the Buddha’s death. The Buddha asked Ananda if it were not true that the Vajjians “hold regular and frequent assemblies” and whether they “meet in harmony, break up in harmony, and carry on their business in harmony.” Ananda answered that the Vajjians did indeed do so, and because of that “they may be expected to prosper, and not decline.”^[26] The Buddha also gets Ananda to agree that the Vajjians have followed the seven political and moral principles for Buddhist laypeople. Ajātasattu’s ambassador admits that a people who follow even one of these principles would prosper. Furthermore, he confesses that his king will not succeed in conquering the Vajjians by force of arms. The pacifying force of countries that hold deliberative assemblies has been demonstrated by the fact that no secular, humanistic, liberal democracy has ever gone to war with any of its peers.

The Buddhist Saṅgha was a caste-less association, so the monks won their respective positions on the basis of both seniority and merit. As he was the most adept at following the rules of the Saṅgha, Upāli was elected master of the discipline (vinaya). As the one best at meditation, Mahākāśyapa was the only one to understand the Buddha’s gesture of holding up a flower as an answer to unedifying questions. This monk became a favorite for Zen Buddhists and their view that truth is beyond scripture and meaning. After Gautama’s death, Ananda was elected to recite the sūtras (“Thus I heard the Buddha say . . .”), because of his phenomenal memory and the fact that he had been the Buddha’s personal attendant for forty-five years. One of the principles of democratic polity is that people reach decisions by reasoned discourse. Ananda was able to persuade the Buddha, who was initially against the ordination of nuns, that women should be admitted to the Saṅgha. The former Hindu B. R. Ambedkar—a twentieth-century Buddhist convert, activist against British rule, and author of the Indian Constitution—correctly described groups of monks as “parliaments,” and the Buddha as a “torch-bearer of democracy and an ardent exponent of liberty, equality, and fraternity”^[27]

Saṅgha polity was an ideal, one which the monks themselves sometimes were unable to attain, so the Buddha realized that laypeople themselves could not give up their desires to marry, to pursue worldly pleasures, to trade, to accumulate wealth, or to otherwise make a living. Most of the lay devotees in the early days of Buddhism lived in cities, and many were tradesmen and professionals. Laksiri Jayasuriya contends that “the Buddha virtually became the spokesperson of a new urban based merchant class in rejecting brahmin orthodoxy, particularly the religious justification of social inequalities arising from the status of ordering human relations.”^[28] Buddhism also served to check the growing individualism among the northeast Indian republics that led to the claim that every assembly member was a king unto himself. Textual evidence indicates that the early Buddhist kings were elected and, in lieu of a constitution, they were checked in their actions by public opinion. Ultimately, however, it is the dharma that is “co-regent” with righteous kings and their “rule cannot be overthrown by any hostile creature in human form.”^[29]

Gautama disagreed with certain principles of Hindu political philosophy. First and foremost, the king was not a deity nor did he rule with divine authority. Second, the Buddha envisioned a caste-less society in which each and every person could realize his or her own dharma, not one dictated by caste. I interpret the Buddha’s dictum that “they who know causation know the dharma”^[30] as follows: if we know our causal web of existence, we know the truth (i.e., the true facts of our lives), then we will know what to do. The truths we discover by means of this formula will be very personal truths, as Aristotle says of moral virtues, “relative to us.” Third, the Buddha criticized the moral expediency (e.g., “might makes right”) reminiscent of Machiavelli that Hindu kings such as Ajātasattu were allowed on the authority of the Arthaśāstras. The Buddha’s theory of monarchy is epitomized in the doctrine of the chakravartin, the wheel-turning king. Peace will come to the world only when a righteous and compassionate king receives the Wheel of Dharma, which appears in the sky, and it allows him to conquer “this sea-girt land [the known world] without stick or sword.”^[31] Using the same wheel, the Dharma King in the Kālachakra Tantra does take the sword to “non-believers.” In the next chapter I argue that a symbolic interpretation of this violence does not make sense.

King Aśoka of India (c. 300–232 BCE) was one of the best examples of the chakravartin and religious tolerance under secular rule. Not only did he not make Buddhism the state religion, it is not even clear that he was a practicing Buddhist himself. Here is his decree from the Twelfth Rock Edict: “The root of it is restraint of speech, that is, that there should not be honor of one’s own sect and condemnation of other’s sect without any ground. . . . Thus doing, one helps his own sect to grow, and benefits the sects of others, too.”^[32] By insisting that his people know the doctrines of faiths other than their own Aśoka went beyond mere tolerance to mutual respect, a position that Dara Shikoh, Akbar the Great, Swami Vivekananda, and M. K. Gandhi took many centuries later. As he states: “There should be . . . growth of the essential elements of all religious sects.”^[33]

The translator of Aśoka’s Rock Edicts emphasizes that the “essential elements,” translation of sāravaḍī, are the “vital principles” of each faith, which should induce a “wide-hearted toleration recognizing that there is an element of truth in every sect.”^[34] Furthermore, the translator also proposes that Aśoka gives the word dharma a broader meaning than in other edicts. It is not just the Buddhist dharma, but, once again, the “vital element” of each religion.^[35] Nonviolence (ahiṃsā) was one of those dharmic elements, and Aśoka implemented that principle by abolishing the royal hunt and setting up the world’s first animal hospitals. Aśoka attempted to fulfill one of the rules of the chakravartin, “maintaining an army but not using it.”^[36] He withdrew his troops from the borders and established 150 years of peace in the Indian Subcontinent. We may assume that King Ajātasattu was also deterred in his attack on the Vajjians, primarily because of the moral force of their dharmic republicanism.

As we have seen in the previous chapter, in medieval Sri Lanka Bahu I (1272–84) welcomed South Indian Shaivites with open arms, giving them lands and titles, and the Tamil kings of the Nayakkar line (1739–1815) did the most to restore the Sinhalese Buddhist priesthood and promote Buddhist art and architecture. Although the Tamil minority has suffered recently, especially after the rise of Sinhalese nationalism (at the same time as Hindu nationalism), there is solid evidence of Hindu-Buddhist harmony going all the way back to the introduction of Buddhism under King Devanamtissa (247–207 BCE). In modern times the Thai kings, ruling as secular heads of a Buddhist nation, have been exemplary in their preservation of the Saṅgha as well as a commitment to modernization of Thailand. We have also learned that Burmese kings integrated Hinduism in to their worship and honored Muslims in their midst. We will see that Bhutan’s kings have approached chakravartin status in their wise leadership in the twentieth century.

Conflict Over Incarnational Succession in the
Druk Lineage

The tantric Druk school, whose home was the Ralung monastery in the Tibetan province of Tsang, honored both hereditary and reincarnated lamas. Most Tibetan tantrics, following the example of Lord Śiva, practiced coitus interruptus, but the Drukpa allow their adepts to ejaculate and, presumably, to produce legitimate spiritual heirs. In 1592 Pema Karpo, the Fourth Gyalwang Drukpa died, and a dispute arose because before his death Pema Karpo had announced that he had chosen two reincarnations. The powerful King of Tsang ruled in favor of Pagsam Wangpo (1593–1641), who was of illegitimate birth and even failed his tulku tests, but was nonetheless in the blood line of Phagpa Lotro Gyaltsen (1235–1280), the top Tibetan religious official in Mongolia. In 1264 Yuan emperor Kublai Khan chose Phagpa to be the religious and secular ruler of Tibet.

The other candidate Ngawang Namgyal (1594–1651) was given the Druk throne at the age of eight by a large number of tantric lamas, and in 1606 he was installed as the eighteenth abbot of Ralung. With the significant exception of the Gelugpas, dignitaries and lamas from all major Tibetan schools (including his Druk rivals) were in attendance. Pagsam Wangpo had been enthroned at the Sang-ngag Choling monastery, where an attempt to reconcile the two young competing reincarnates took place in 1605. Michael Aris describes the efforts as a failure: “It appears that [Ngawang Namgyal’s] throne had been placed at a slightly lower level than that of Pagsam Wangpo’s, so he refused to participate.”^[37] The young Ngawang Namgyal had gained a reputation for being rash and hot-headed. Aris relates that he once rode his horse directly up the steps of the Tsang royal palace “to the discomfiture of the ruler who had prepared a respectful welcome for him.”^[38]

For the next ten years Ngawang Namgyal and his family tried to legitimize his incarnational right to the Druk line, but the conflict continued. The main point of contention between the two young monks was the Kharsapani image of Chenrezig, whose incarnation each of the candidates claimed to be, and which was the principal object for the legitimacy of the Druk school. (According to the Drukpas, the image was found in a backbone of a cremated lama.) Ngawang Namgyal somehow managed to get the image, and using the time-honored rule that “possession is nine tenths of the law,” refused to give it up when a Druk court demanded that he do so. Pagsam Wangpo’s throne may have been higher, but Ngawang Namgyal had something much more important. Just as in Thailand, where he who owns the Emerald Buddha is the true king, whoever possessed the Kharsapani Buddha was the true incarnation of the Druk lineage.

Ngawang Namgyal, known officially as the first Shabdrung, was ruthless in rooting out religious and political opposition to his absolute rule. The transformation of the student-guru relationship from spiritual to political submission may not have been wisest of choices. In a famous sixteen point proclamation the Shabdrung declared: “I am the incarnation prophesied by the patriarchs. I am the executioner of false incarnations.”^[39] John Ardussi poses the main question for this chapter and the next:

The Kharsapani statue is now safely stowed away at the summer palace in Panakha, where at least I as a tourist was not allowed to see it or, for that matter, any other Bhutanese religious objects (except for a gigantic thankga of Padmasambhava during a festival at Wangdiphodrang Dzong) during my two weeks there. John Ardussi, from whom I have gathered this information about the Chenrezig image, adds that, in order not to lose face, “the Ralung monastery replaced this image with another Kharsapani image of its own, which was still on exhibit there during the early 20th century.”^[41]

Even though “boundary alignments, control of trade routes” caused some tension, it is clear that religious issues were at the root of the conflict. Determining religiously motivated violence is, however, extremely difficult without having records of the principal actors’ intentions, which of course we rarely have. With regard to forced conversions, the burning of scripture, hate speech and cursing of other sects, or the destruction of monasteries, temples, and statues, all of these actions count, I submit, as religious violence and do not require any knowledge of motivation.

Bhutan’s Shabdrung, Tantric Magic, and
Sectarian Persecution

In 1616 Namgyal received information that his life was in danger, and he decided to use tantric magic that, allegedly, led to the deaths of three supporters of the rival lama Pagsam Wangpo. Soon thereafter he received a vision, which as described by Aris, has him “flying after a raven to a place situated to the south. The bird was taken to be the raven-headed form of Mahākāla, chief protector deity of the Drukpa. . . .”^[42] The vision confirmed that “the Raven-Headed Mahākāla of Action having thus come and conducted him along a path of clear light, gestures of offering this country of the Southern Land to him as his heavenly field were made.”^[43] Speaking from the Kharsapani image, Chenrezig told the Shabdrung that he, as Ardussi phrases it, “should establish a new state for the welfare of its sentient inhabitants.”^[44] The location of that country was already indicated in his Mahākāla vision, but it was further confirmed in the following prophecy from Padmasambhava:

Now that his enemies were determined to eliminate him, Namgyal decided to remove both himself and the Kharsapani image from Ralung across the border and claim the kingdom that had been promised him. Although not yet the Shabdrung, Namgyal received a warm welcome by Bhutanese Druk leaders, who had attended his installation at Ralung and saw great promise in the young lama. (There were also a large number of Bhutanese monks in residence at Ralung.) Once he was settled in the Thimpu valley (he recognized the Druk monastery there from his vision), he was ready to reply to a threatening letter sent by the Tsang authorities. Aris describes the Shabdrung’s reply as “sarcastic and contemptuous,”^[46] and the Tsang government sent an army into Bhutan to eliminate the one whom they considered to be a false contender to the Druk lineage.

Bhutanese village militias are said to have terrorized the invaders with their tantric dress and spells cast by the Shabdrung, who claimed to have taken on the form of the Mahākāla, his wrathful protector deity. Mahākāla’s totemic animal is the raven and it is alleged that an army of ravens harassed the Tibetans until they were forced to retreat.^[47] (The Raven Crown is one of the headdresses of Bhutanese royalty.) The thought of Buddhists, including monks, going into battle is hard for Euro-Americans to imagine, but their actions were no less brutal than any other soldiers of their time. Aris describes the gory details of the victory celebration: “The head, hands, and heart of the [Tibetan commander] were brought to [the Shabdrung] impaled on a banner.”^[48] The Shabdrung’s fame spread far and wide and it was recorded that “the great army of the Tsangpa had not been able to subdue this single yogin.”^[49] His magic extended into Tibet itself, and in 1631, as Shakabpa reports, one of his Tsang opponents and wife “were afflicted with smallpox and died.”^[50] In a 1639 peace settlement after a Tibetan invasion, one of the main concessions the Tibetans and their Bhutanese allies demanded was that the Shabdrung cease performing tantric war magic.^[51] As Aris states: “The defeat of the six Tibetan invasions, which took place during his lifetime were made possible by [the Shabdrung] alone, more particularly by his magical control of the guardian deities of the Drukpa.”^[52]

The Shabdrung would defeat Tsang armies two more times, and the Bhutanese would successfully defend their country against Tibetan hegemony until 1730. In 1644, under the Fifth Dalai Lama, a Mongol army led by Gushri Khan invaded Bhutan. The Tibetans were defeated and the spoils of that war, including fine Tibetan armor, are proudly displayed at the museum in Paro where I visited in 1999. In the Shabdrung’s biography it was recorded that “for three months, many [Tibetan] catapults and firearms bombarded the area. However, the Bhutanese performed a great religious ceremony, and the blessings from that ceremony are said to have protected the religious images and paintings from harm.”^[53] The Shabdrung continued to use tantric magic with deadly effect against enemies external and internal, the latter generally described as five groups of lamas, who sometimes requested help from Tibet in their battles.

Among the effects of the war magic was the sudden appearance of a “great cloud of smoke” in the Tibetan camps, which caused the invaders to flee leaving everything behind. The Tibetans retaliated by converting several Kagyu monasteries in Tibet to the Gelug sect, adding even more to the religiously motivated violence of the period. Yet another Tibetan campaign in 1647–49 also ended in defeat. This time the tantric rituals unleashed a huge swarm of bees, and, as Ram Rahul describes it, “the bee-stung Tibetans ran in pain and panic [and] their long hair became hopelessly entangled in the brambles of the undergrowth, where they fell easy prey to the counter-attacking Bhutanese.”^[54] As Shakabpa states: “This defeat shattered the myth of an invincible Mongol army.”^[55] According to Shakabpa, there were “many famous stories told by the soldiers concerning the magical capacities of the Bhutanese tantric masters.”^[56]

In 1657 the Nechung Oracle, the state oracle of Tibet, blessed a plan to attack Bhutan, but oracle at the Samyé Monastery declared: “If you listen to me, the Tibetans must stay in their own country and seek a peace treaty.”^[57] Going with the state oracle, the army marched down to the Bhutanese border. When the troops became bogged down for the summer, other oracles were consulted. Evidently, the oracle at Samyé Monastery was furious: “I knew that your strategy would not work, and asked you not to undertake it.”^[58] Many Tibetan soldiers apparently died of disease, accidental gunpowder explosions, and natural causes other than spiritual. At least this would be the conclusion from our modern perspective, as, for example, the “wrathful action” of the protector deities was like a flash of “lightning, pervad[ing] the earth and sky.”^[59] These tantric rites were essentially psychological warfare—a Buddhist form of Voodoo complete with effigies of the enemy—and any deadly effect, be it storms, mysterious deaths, or disease, would be perceived as caused by the superior power of the Shabdrung.

The Shabdrung continued to consult the Kharsapani image, and he also received advice from his deceased father in dreams. Ardussi explains that these oracles convinced him to “follow the path taken by the Tibetan Sakya hierarch Phagpa to found a new religious state . . . according to the Tibetan tradition of uniting religion and secular government in a single administrative apparatus.”^[60] Quite in line with the actions of Abrahamic theocracies, prophetic guidance and reliance on scripture were used as justification for an aggressive and violent campaign to bring all of what we now know as Bhutan together as one nation and one religion, the Druk school of Tibetan Buddhism. (One temporary and evidently expedient exception in 1627 was permission to establish a church, which was never built, for visiting Jesuits.) Just as some Christian fundamentalists do today, Namgyal took “an obscure text from the Kanjur, the Tantra on the Arising of the Wrathful Lord’s Yogic Powers, [that] provided the necessary archetype of a ‘hands-on’ Bodhisattva who, in extreme circumstances, resorted even to the killing of enemies to make his earthly kingdom safe for the Dharma.”^[61] In some instances simple persuasion was sufficient. The Shabdrung sent a letter to his Hindu neighbor to the south in Cooch Bihar, and he encouraged him to give up his devotion to Śiva. King Padma Narayan responded by saying that he had indeed converted to tantric Buddhism and that he had enclosed a copy of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā as proof.^[62] Later Bhutan and the British would go to war over Cooch Bihar.

As the Shabdrung consolidated his rule, sometimes by ruthless oppression of hold-out princes and religious orders, he composed a sixteen-point proclamation that was inscribed on his royal seal, which might be safely described as an expression of megalomania. Known as the “16 I’s,” they read as follows:

Ardussi claims that the Shabdrung did something no other Buddhist lama had done before:

Ardussi argues that such a complete unification of religious and secular authority had never happened in Tibet, but some would argue that it did indeed occur in the tenure of the Fifth Dalai Lama.

There are good reasons to support Ardussi in his claim. The Great Fifth was a reluctant actor in his secular functions of the Lhasa government, especially those dealing with the military. As Ardussi states: “In Tibet, where Gushri Khan served as defender of the faith, the [Fifth] Dalai Lama’s persona did not require such a militant interpretation.”^[65] It is also significant to note that, as we learned above, the Tibetans invaded Bhutan in 1644, and they were decisively defeated. Earlier in 1642 the Fifth had reluctantly acceded to using Mongol troops against the Tsang king, who was aided in his defeat by the Fifth and his lamas performing mass tantric rites against him. We could assume then that war magic was also used against the Shabdrung as well. If this is true, then his great victory, noted in the Fifth’s biography, was proof that the Shabdrung was a greater tantric master than the head Tibetan lama, who was also trained in the Tantras.

Keeping up the façade of dual sovereignty, the Shabdrung did appoint a regent, in Indian terms a Deb Rāja, to complement his role as a Dharma Rāja. The Deb Rāja had very little power and was limited by a three-year term, so it was left to the Shabdrung to act, as Nagendra Singh quotes from a Tibetan source, as “chief avenger and punisher of those who were inimical to the cause of Buddhism and the public peace.”^[66] The Shabdrung sent out a proclamation addressing the three realms of “gods, asuras, and men” demanding that they obey his commands, and threatening them, as Aris phrases it, “with severe punishments if they did not.”^[67]

Shabdrung’s “death” in 1651 was hidden for an incredible fifty-seven years, and his people were told that he was on an extended retreat in his palace. His officials continued to write dispatches in his name, and his butler brought his meals every day. During this time the Shabdrung also appointed a succession of regents to continue a semblance of his rule. In Tibet a similar fifteen year interval (1682–97) occurred between the Fifth and Sixth Dalai Lama. As Aris quips: “So we are faced with the odd situation that during these years the Tibetan and Bhutanese states were both ruled by corpses, in a manner of speaking.”^[68] Keeping the deaths of high lamas secret was a long tradition, primarily because of the challenge of finding the next incarnation and the political intrigue that necessarily followed. The advisers of the Great Fifth and the Shabdrung feared that internal and external enemies would take advantage of a period of political instability.

Before he took his vows as a Bodhisattva in 1632, the Shabdrung fathered a son a year earlier with a tantric consort whom he evidently shared with other tantric lamas. His initial intention was that his boy would succeed him as Shabdrung, but it is said that he was an invalid and his death in 1681 was also kept a secret. In 1705 a lama disturbed the Shabdrung’s body and “three rays issued from his body, speech, and mind, and these departed for different places in Sikkim, Bhutan, and Tibet, where incarnations of the Shabdrung were later born.”^[69] Until the official Second Shabdrung was installed in 1712, the actual rule of the country was in the hands of regents (desi).

Religious Persecution during the Rule of
Bhutanese Regents

During the rule of the regents after the First Shabdrung, Bhutan fell into disarray, and military forces led by monks were sent out to pacify incipient rebels. Aris states that the “campaign itself seemed to have had little of the flavor of a crusade or jihad. It was more the reflection of a confident expansionary trend in the new state, justified but not occasioned by religious prophecy and sentiment.”^[70] Aris’ qualification of the religiously motivated violence, however, is belied by the fact that he records, under the rule of the Second Regent, the “extermination by the Bhutanese authorities of a pro-Tibetan faction.”^[71] The invading forces, described as “the entire Tibetan-Mongol army,” was under the authority of the Great Fifth, so one can assume that this group was most likely pro-Gelugpa or one of the five dissenting Buddhist sects. There is no evidence that the Shabdrung, not yet spiritually dead, used tantric rituals to help in this campaign or other political or religious events.

Under the Third Regent there were two more Tibetan invasions under the Great Fifth, the second led by the largest army to date, and each were expelled by the Bhutanese. Bhutanese expansion reached its height under the Third Regent, and there were no more Tibetan incursions for thirty-seven years. The Third Regent was overthrown in 1680 and died in the same year. It was said that his demise was due to the karma accrued by causing so many deaths during his reign. Tantric Buddhists follow the general rule of the consequences of karma “ripening” sometime in the future. Only true Bodhisattvas, such as the first Shabdrung and the highest lamas, may use, without accruing karma, “compassionate” violence for the protection of Buddhism and salvation for all sentient beings.

The Fourth Regent’s honorific was Sri Rinpoché (“the precious enthroned”), who was a distant blood relative of the Shabdrung. He ruled for fifteen years (1680–95), while the Shabdrung was still presumably resting in his palace retreat. As Aris explains: “No doubt [his] appointment had the seal of approval of the [dead] Shabdrung as in the case of his predecessor and ruling abbot Sodnam Odzer.”^[72] The latter died in 1689 firm in his belief that the Shabdrung was still alive. During the reign of the Fourth Regent, the Shabdrung’s incarnation was found near the Tibetan border, and before the Bhutanese could bring him to the capital, the boy was kidnapped by the Gelugpas. The Fourth Regent tried unsuccessfully to secure his return, but the boy died mysteriously in China. The Shabdrung’s granddaughter, one of two children of his invalid son, ruled briefly as regent, but she died of smallpox in 1698.

Two more regents were appointed from 1698 to 1708, and then finally the Shabdrung’s “second” incarnation, the nineteen-year-old Kundga Gyalmshan, already ten years in hiding after the death of his sister, was brought forth as a candidate for the Second Shabdrung. Kundga, however, was not accepted and the conflict about incarnational succession continued for another four years. Presumably, the problem with the first Shabdrung’s grandson was the fact that he was not one of the predicted incarnations from the three rays of the Buddha-mind, which streamed forth when the Shabdrung’s body was disturbed in 1705. The emanation of the Bhutanese Bodhisattva’s body was directed toward Sikkim and the “ray of mind” was pointed toward Tibet. The emanation of the Shabdrung’s speech was found in southern Bhutan in the boy Phyoglas Namgyal (1708–36). In 1712, during the reign of the Eighth Regent, Phyoglas was installed as the Second Shabdrung. So as to eliminate any more reincarnational confusion, the First Shabdrung’s son was murdered in 1713.

The Second Shabdrung’s tenure was not without controversy, and in 1736 he was forced to flee the winter palace in Punakha and died in exile the same year. His supporters found his reincarnation in the infant Shākya Tandzin (1736–80), but he was imprisoned by the enemies of his successor. As Aris elaborates: “The vacuum of the years 1730 to 1746 was filled with no less than three ‘representatives’”: two incarnations of the First Shabdrung’s son and one of the Fourth Regent Śri Rinpoché.^[73] (The Bhutanese were trying to blend, not very successfully, two principles of succession—hereditary and incarnational.) Finally, the Bhutanese government agreed that the Third Shabdrung should be the incarnation of the boy who was kidnapped by the Tibetans, and whom the Fourth Regent believed was in the direct incarnational (not hereditary) line of the First Shabdrung. This time the Bhutanese, after some difficult negotiations, were able to bring the child from Tibet and install him as the Third Shabdrung Jigsmed Gragspa in 1746.

Fortunate for the young contender Shākya Tandzin (above), he was released from prison and was recognized as the Bodhisattva’s speech while Jigsmed was entrusted with his mind. To round out the original three rays emanating from the First Shabdrung, the Bodhisattva’s body was found in the son of the king of Sikkim. This tripartite incarnational line was accepted by Bhutanese officials until the establishment of the monarchy in 1907. Dual sovereignty was reintroduced with much clearer lines of authority between the Deb Rāja ruling in the temporal realm and Shabdrung, as a British official put it, “wholly confined to the contemplation of his spiritual dignity.”^[74] The diminished power of the Shabdrung was demonstrated clearly in the conflict among five contending deb rājas during the years 1850–52. As Aris states: “The Shabdrung of this period, Jigsmed Norbu (1831–61), was totally ineffective in stemming the tide of revolt and counter revolt.”^[75] In stark contrast to the First Shabdrung’s religiously motivated violence, here it is clear that the conflicts are primarily of a political nature. Of the fifty-five deb rājas between the retreat of the First Shabdrung in 1651 and the first king in 1907, only twelve were deposed and six murdered.

British Influence and the Rise of Bhutan’s
Dharma Kings

Under the rule of Deb Judhur (Shidar) (1768–1773) friendly relations were established with Tibet and Nepal, but Bhutan intervened in its southern neighbor Cooch Behar on a regular basis. In 1772 the British sent troops to support Nazir Dev of Cooch Behar and the Bhutanese forces were driven out. With the mediation of Tashi Lama, regent to the young Eighth Dalai Lama, a peace treaty was signed in 1774. The Bhutanese agreed to allow East Indian Company traders to pass through their country on their way north to Tibet. The Tibetans had always bought their tea from China, but with new plantations in Assam and Bengal, British tea was now able to compete with the Chinese.

For most of the middle 1800s tensions increased between Britain and Bhutan over the Assamese and Bengali “Duars,” 220,000 square miles of border territory between Bhutan and India. When the British annexed the Assamese Duars, Bhutanese incursions increased, but the Afghan and Anglo-Sikh wars prevented the British from acting more decisively. When the Bhutanese made clear that they supported the Indian rebels in the mutiny of 1857, the British were forced to act. In 1862 the British sent Ashley Eden to Bhutan, but Bhutanese officials were bent on humiliating him. “Under compulsion” (the exact words under his signature), Eden signed a treaty that was not only very unfavorable, but unusually offensive to the British.

The British Raj repudiated the treaty, and when the Bhutanese refused to accede to British demands, they sent a military force to enforce them. In response the Deb Rāja promised retaliation: he “would send against them a divine force of twelve Gods, who were ‘very ferocious ghosts.’”^[76] This has all the signs of a threat of tantric magic that the first Shabdrung had used against his enemies. Initially, the wrathful deities appeared to cause the British forces to fall into disarray, but they eventually recovered and forced the Bhutanese to agree to negotiations. The Ten Article Treaty of Rawa Pani was signed on November 11, 1865, and Bhutan agreed to cede all eighteen duars and to cease all violent activities in these areas. This treaty remained the basis for peaceful relations between Britain and Bhutan until Indian independence in 1947. As far as I can ascertain, this is the last time a Bhutanese official or lama publicly threatened anyone with war magic.

The kings of twentieth-century Bhutan have been praised for their wise rule and the peace that they brought to their country. In 1947 the Bhutanese gained their independence, but India still controls their foreign policy. With millions of square miles of Indian territory under dispute from the war with China in 1962, the Indians fear that China will exert pressure on Bhutan just as it has in Nepal. While on tour in Bhutan in 1999, I witnessed the Royal Bhutanese army on maneuvers with Indian soldiers.

In the 1950s the third king Jigme Dorje Wangchuck opened his country to the world and began to develop his country along modern lines. For centuries Bhutanese raiders had kidnapped Indians and had brought them back as slaves. It was not until the reign of Wangchuck III that this heinous practice was abolished. Crucial to the economic success and political stability of many Asian countries, land ownership was limited to thirty acres and those who had no land were given their first plots.

Harvard-educated Jigme Singye Wangchuck continued the policies of his father when he took the throne in 1972 and ruled for forty-four years. In 1999 Wangchuck IV established internet connections to the outside world and allowed his people to receive television programs for the first time. Earlier he had banned plastic bags, which clog the rivers and streams of neighboring India and Nepal. He also forbade the importation of motorcycle taxis, which foul the air of many South Asia cities. Furthermore, he decreed that Bhutan would no longer export logs to India, and that there would be more emphasis on hydroelectric power generation.

King Wangchuck IV also decided that it was time to take seriously the worship of the Himalayas as goddesses, and a royal decree went out that these sacred beings would not be climbed nor be cluttered with garbage. He limited tourism to a small number of visitors per year (9,000 in 2012), and the $200 per day per person fees (eliminating bargain tourists and “backpackers”) were invested in better accommodations and infrastructure. In contrast to India and Nepal, the Bhutanese have free health care and free schooling. In 2005, Wangchuck IV proposed that the National Assembly ban smoking and the sale of tobacco products, and the parliamentarians quickly complied. All over the world we see that a lack of political will sometimes prevents even the most reasonable reforms, so the advantages of a beneficent dictator—Plato’s philosopher king if you will—may be tempting to embrace.

Against many of his citizen’s wishes—he had been wildly popular—Wangchuck IV ordered the drafting of a constitution, called for elections, and then, to the great surprise and regret of his subjects, abdicated in 2006. The new constitution gave the National Assembly the power, by a two-thirds vote, to impeach the king, an unprecedented policy even among the most enlightened constitutional monarchies. His son Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck ascended the throne in 2008 and continued to liberalize the political system. Cultural restrictions, however, are still in place. In contrast to Mongolia, India, Tibet, and Ladakh, access to Buddhist monasteries and their statues and paintings is severely restricted. Tourists are allowed to witness some Buddhist festivals with cham (mask) dancing and displays of specially selected thangkas, elaborate paintings of Buddhist deities and lamas. The king has made the preservation of traditional religion, dress, and architecture a top priority.

Our Bhutanese guide was assisted by a young man, who kept telling us that he preferred leading trekking tours, and after hours he appeared at the hotel bar in t-shirt and jeans. Since my trip in 1999, I have read of disturbances cause by young people, who are obviously testing the boundaries of their freer society. On the other hand, Bhutanese women have always had more freedom than their South Asian peers. The Bhutanese I met—male and female alike—were not embarrassed by the high divorce rate, because they believe that it demonstrates the power that Bhutanese women have traditionally had to determine their own destinies.

In 1969 and 1979 the National Assembly passed laws that proscribed the public practice of religions other than Buddhism and Hinduism. Ancient Bön rituals are still part of royal celebrations and Hindu festivals are recognized as national holidays. As many as three-fourths of the population follow either Druk or Nyingma beliefs, and significantly enough, Bhutanese royalty have practiced both. (The Fifth Dalai Lama was an accomplished Nyingma devotee.) The next largest religious group in Bhutan are the Hindus (22 percent), mainly Nepalese, most of whom are refugees. Christians number less than 1 percent of the population, and there is only one church in the southern part of the country.

The Preamble of the Constitution of Bhutan, adopted on July 18, 2008, states: “Blessed by the Triple Gem [the Buddha, the Dharma, and Saṅgha], the protection of our guardian deities, the wisdom of our leaders, the everlasting fortunes of the Pelden Drukpa, and the guidance of His Majesty the Druk Gyalpo Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck.”^[77] (“Druk Gyalpo” means “Precious Ruler of the Dragon People,” and therefore is not a religious title.) The constitution also mandates the Drukpa Kagyupa as the state religion of Bhutan, but states that the king “is the protector of all religions in Bhutan,” and that “religion remains separate from politics.”^[78] Finally, the constitution states that “no person shall be compelled to belong to another faith by means of coercion or inducement.”^[79] This church/state division was strengthened by the provision, promulgated in 2010, that fourteen categories of “religious personalities” and registered monks may not vote or hold office. As is the case in many countries, family matters such as marriage, divorce, and inheritance are resolved according to the laws of their respective religions.

Despite these constitutional guarantees, there has been widespread criticism of denial of religious freedom. Dissenters claim that proselytizing is not allowed and conversions are not permitted. Furthermore, they claim that the only printed religious material that may come into the country is Buddhist. According to a 2005 U.S. State Department report on religious freedom in Bhutan, Christians “could not erect religious buildings or congregate in public. NGOs reported that permission from the Government to build a Hindu temple was required but rarely granted. There were no Hindu temples in [the capital] Thimphu, despite the migration of many ethnic Nepalese to the capital city.”^[80] The report also found that non-Buddhist missionaries are not allowed to enter the country. One of the most egregious violations of religious freedom was a police raid on three Protestant “house churches” on Easter Sunday, 2004. The government denied this, but witnesses told investigators that they were told that their religious services were viewed as “terrorist activities.” In January of 2006 two men were arrested for showing a Christian film in a Buddhist home. In a public trial they were sentenced to three years in prison.

The people of Bhutan proudly remember the reign of the First Shabdrung as the time when their country really came into its own. For the first time their nation’s sovereignty was respected, and neighboring countries, especially Tibet, learned not to intervene. Drukpa lamas controlled monasteries in Sikkim, far west to the sacred Mt. Kailasa, even farther into Ladakh. The Shabdrung also expanded the number of monasteries and dzongs, which became the administrative headquarters of a united nation. A Tibetan chronicler praised him as one in whom spiritual and temporal duties were fulfilled “thoroughly and efficiently. He introduced law into a lawless Bhutan.”^[81]

What has been lost to the popular civilian memory is the religiously motivated violence that happened during the reign of the Shabdrungs, and the incredible confusion and conflict that was caused by the principle of incarnational succession. The contrast between rule by incarnate lamas and the kings of twentieth-century Bhutan is stark and instructive. One only hopes that the current government learns to abide by its constitutional commitments to religious freedom. As we have seen, Buddhist kings in other countries have generally led people well and progressively. Even the current Dalai Lama realizes the advantages of a hereditary monarchy, and especially if it is limited by a constitution. But incarnated lamas, some good but most bad or ineffective, continued to rule Tibet, and the most enlightened lama, even while in exile, has revived the principle of dual sovereignty with a fully empowered Parliament in Dharamsala, India.

Notes

Tsepon Shakabpa, Tibet: A Political History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), 118, 119.

See Maitreyee Choudhury, Himalayan Studies in India (New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 2008), 13.

John Ardussi, “Formation of the State of Bhutan (‘Brug gzhung) in the 17th Century and its Tibetan Antecedents” Journal of Bhutan Studies 11 (Winter, 2004): 11–12. PDF file at http://www.bhutanstudies.org.bt/pubFiles/v1 1–2.pdf.

Robert Beér, The Encyclopedia of Tibetan Symbols and Motifs (Chicago: Serindia Publications, 1999), 250.

Ibid., 55.

Ibid., 298.

Nagendra Singh, Bhutan: A Kingdom in the Himalayas (New Delhi: Thomson Press Limited, 1972), 18; Michael V. Aris, Bhutan: The Early History of a Himalayan Kingdom (Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips, 1979), 46–7.

Shakabpa, One Hundred Thousand Moons: An Advanced Political History of Tibet, trans. Dererk F. Maher (Leiden: Brill, 2010), vol. 1, 284.

Aris, Bhutan: The Early History of a Himalayan Kingdom, 142.

10.

Cited in Tim Johnson, Tragedy in Crimson: How the Dalai Lama Conquered the World but Lost the Battle with China (New York: Nation Books, 2011), 311n8.

11.

See N. F. Gier, Spiritual Titanism: Indian, Chinese, and Western Perspectives, passim.

12.

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 520.

13.

Majjhima Nikāya 1.163.4; The Middle Length Sayings, trans. I. B. Horner (London: Pali Text Society, 1976), vol. 1, 207.

14.

Donald S. Lopez, “Introduction” in Religions of Tibet in Practice, ed., Donald S. Lopez (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 15.

15.

Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 123.

16.

Anguttara Nikāya 4.6.36; The Book of Gradual Sayings, trans. E. M. Hare (London: Pali Text Society, 1995), vol. 4, 44.

17.

Wikipedia entry on tulkus at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulku, accessed on July 10, 2013

18.

Lopez, “Introduction” in Religions of Tibet in Practice, 23.

19.

Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism, 126.

20.

Ibid., 123.

21.

Ibid., 113.

22.

Narayan Champawat, “Buddha” in Great Thinkers of the Eastern World, ed. Ian McGreal (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 164.

23.

Anguttara Nikaya 4.6.36; Book of Gradual Sayings, vol. 4, 44.

24.

David J. Kalupahana, “Buddhism and Chinese Humanism,” 11 in typescript. This paper was presented at a Symposium on Chinese Humanism, sponsored by the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy during a special session of the American Philosophical Association, March 25, 1977. See also N. F. Gier and Paul K. Kjellberg, “Buddhism and the Freedom of the Will” in Freedom and Determinism: Topics in Contemporary Philosophy, eds., J. K. Campbell, D. Shier, M. O’Rourke (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 277–304.

25.

Gail Omvedt, “The Buddha as a Political Philosopher,” Economic and Political Review 36:21 (May 26, 2001): 1802.

26.

The Mahāparinibbāna Sutta, 1.1–12; in the Dīgha Nikāya, 2:73–4; The Long Discourses of the Buddha, trans. Maurice Walshe (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1995), 231–34.

27.

Quoted in Omvedt, “The Buddha as a Political Philosopher,” 1802.

28.

Laksiri Jayasuriya, “Buddhism, Politics, and Statecraft,” International Journal of Buddhist Thought & Culture 11 (September, 2008): 46.

29.

Anguttara Nikāya 3.14, trans. Nyanaponika Thera and Bhikku Bodhi (Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, on-line ed., 2010), accessed at http://books.google.com/books?id=Bf4Sn056puUC&pg=PA7&dq=anguttara+nikaya&hl=en&sa=X&ei=NGjZUp3mCurJygHb_4Aw&ved=0CF0Q6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=anguttara%20nikaya&f=false on January 17, 2014.

30.

Majjhima Nikāya, 1.190–1; The Middle Length Sayings, 236–237. I have paraphrased Horner’s translation.

31.

Dīgha Nikāya, 3.61; The Long Discourses of the Buddha, trans. Maurice Welsh 395–96, accessed at http://books.google.com/books?id=Y70tt60nE2gC&printsec=frontcover&dq= The+Long+Discourses+of+the+Buddha&hl=en&sa=X&ei=EmnZUvnZM-3iyAHeioGYCw&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=The%20Long%20Discourses%20of%20the%20Buddha&f=false on January 17, 2014.

32.

Quoted in Radhakumud Mookerji, Aśoka (New Delhi: Motila Banarsidass, 1989), 159.

Ibid.

Ibid., note 1.

Ibid., 161, note 3.

Omvedt, “The Buddha as a Political Philosopher,” 1803.

37.

Aris, Bhutan: The Early History of a Himalayan Kingdom, 207.

38.

Ibid., 208.

39.

Ibid., 214.

40.

Ardussi, “Formation of the State of Bhutan,” 13.

Ibid., 211.

Ibid., 209.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Quoted in ibid.

Ibid., 212.

Ram Rahul, Modern Bhutan (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1972), 22. Rahul identifies the birds as eagles, but the raven is the bird associated with Mahākāla. He also says that the raven was removed from the royal crown, but there is an image of the former King Jigme Singye Wangschuk (1972–2006) wearing the raven crown at www.hubert-herald.nl/Bhutan.htm#bhrg, accessed on June 25, 2006.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., 284.

Aris, Bhutan: The Early History of a Himalayan Kingdom, 223.

52.

Ibid., 230.

53.

Shakabpa, One Hundred Thousand Moons, 352.