Download Kingship and Religion in Tibet research plan

SOFJA KOVALEVSKAJA-PREIS RESEARCH PLAN
KINGSHIP AND RELIGION IN TIBET
Dr. Brandon Dotson
1. THE CURRENT STATE OF RESEARCH
The period when kings held sway over Tibet is known as the Tibetan Empire
(c.600–850 CE), and is viewed as Tibet’s great golden age. At this time Tibet
controlled a massive area, and colonized neighboring kingdoms while competing with
Tang China for control over the Silk Road, essentially the heart of the Central
Eurasian economy. Scholars have approached Tibetan kingship from a variety of
angles, but rarely have they treated it as a topic unto itself such that it can be brought
into dialogue with the study of sacred kingship cross-culturally. As a result, most of
the work is descriptive and tends to lack any explicit methodology. This is surprising
given that Tibetology began mostly as an outgrowth of Indology, which enjoys a long
tradition of engagement with the topic of kingship both in India and Southeast Asia.
The origins of Tibetology in the early twentieth century and its blossoming in the
middle of the century were also contemporaneous with a strong current of
comparative anthropological studies of sacred kingship by such theorists as Sir James
Frazer, A.M. Hocart, Ernst Kantorowicz, and their successors. Likewise, there is large
body of work on kingship in Central Asia and China that has never been fully brought
to bear on the topic of Tibetan kingship.
Amid all of these models, the institution of Tibetan kingship remained largely
ignored up until the middle of the twentieth century. The watershed moment was
Giuseppe Tucci’s 1955 paper, “The sacral character of the kings of ancient Tibet,”
presented at the 8th International Congress for the History of Religions, held in Rome
with the theme “The Sacral Kingship/ La Regalitá Sacra.” The congress played host
to scholars approaching the institution of sacred kingship from different
methodological angles, ranging from anthropological to psychoanalytical, and Tucci’s
colleague, David Snellgrove, also presented a paper on the concept of divine kingship
in tantric Buddhism. Judging from Tucci’s article, published in the proceedings and
also in the journal East and West, he digested many of the theoretical concerns raised
by others at the congress, and demonstrated a familiarity with the work of Sir James
Frazer, whose shadow, as one reviewer of the proceedings quipped, “hung over the
congress in Rome.”1 Tucci assimilated such theory silently, however, without
acknowledging the influence of any theorists on his own, ostensibly descriptive,
account of the features of Tibetan sacred kingship.
Although qualifying his work as provisional and preliminary, Tucci wrote
with authority, outlining what he saw to be the principles of the Tibetan kingship, in
particular the magical, divine, and life-giving qualities of the king himself. Tucci
argued that the Tibetan king was ancestralized, such that each incumbent was the
avatar of the ancestral spirit, and therefore reigned simultaneously on both the
celestial and terrestrial planes. Further, he claimed that the ancestral spirit’s presence
in the son occurred at the age of 13, signifying maturity, fertility, and eternal youth,
and that this coincided with the removal of the father, in whom the spirit ceased to be
present. Tucci held that this removal was achieved through ritualized regicide, a
practice that he perceived behind the many assassinations that occurred during the
imperial period (Tucci 1955: 199–200). Tucci also described the king as guaranteeing
1
A. Caquot, “Compte Rendu, The Sacral Kingship. La regalità sacra. Studies in the History of
Religions.” Revue de l’histoire des religions 157.1 (1960): 81.
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and transmitting four powers: the religious law (chos); “majesty” (mnga’ thang);
government or temporal power (chab srid); and his “helmet” (dbu rmog), which was
“the visible emblem of the magic power of the king” (Tucci 1955: 199–200). Of these
four, the religious law was entrusted to the sacerdotal class, and temporal power to the
ministerial class, creating what Tucci described as the triumvirate of king, the “head
shaman,” and the chief minister. Although at the apex of this triumvirate, the king
was, according to Tucci, viewed only as a primus inter pares by his ministerial
aristocracy, and was essentially a “sacred but inert symbol” (Tucci 1955: 197).
Taking a highly Frazerian line, Tucci pointed out passages in a variety of
Tibetan sources in which the king is likened to rain and is a symbol of fertility. He
summarized the king’s role as “that of keeping off epidemics, causing the rain to fall,
assuring fertility, in other words that of maintaining the cosmic and social order intact
and in due working order” (Tucci 1955: 200). Anticipating some of the
preoccupations of those who would take up and refine his researches, Tucci also
noted the titles and epithets of the kings, such as sprul, which he took to mean “magic
power,” btsan po, which he related to “power mainly of a chtonian [sic] character,”
and lha sras and lde sras, both meaning “divine son” or “son of gods.”
For Tucci, the royal adoption of Buddhism had to do primarily with the repoliticization of the kingship:
The power of the Kings was limited by the control of the shamans and by the
jealous intervention of the feudal nobility, subject to the yoke of customs
which, while exalting – as we shall see – their sacred majesty, reduced in
practice their authority. The king therefore saw in Buddhism a powerful
auxiliary in the attempt to reorganise royalty on a new unitarian basis.
Buddhism, by glorifying the king as the Dharmārāja, the representative of the
Law [Buddhist teachings] on earth, increased his prestige, raising him above
the conflicting currents and thus justifying the demand for a rigid monarchical
system. (Tucci 1955: 197).
Tucci’s article was, and continues to be, extremely influential as a standard
source of information on Tibetan sacred kingship. One of those who it influenced
directly was Tucci’s disciple, Erik Haarh. In his only major work, The Yarluṅ
Dynasty, published in 1969, Haarh ratified Tucci’s Frazerian description of the
Tibetan sovereign as a king whose health and well-being ensure the success of the
realm, but who therefore must be ritually killed in the event of illness, bodily defect,
or old age. Haarh also put forward some of his own ideas about the Tibetan kingship,
and offered detailed readings of many Tibetan sources, including the first chapter of
the Old Tibetan Chronicle, and an important Old Tibetan funerary text. In his
treatment of the royal foundation myth of Dri gum btsan po as indicating a paradigm
shift in the nature of Tibetan religion, and in his more or less unexamined (or, rather,
overly emic) approach to the Bon religion as “pre-Buddhist” and “shamanic,” Haarh
took Tucci’s article as almost a blueprint for his detailed study.
Erik Haarh’s monograph was transitional in this respect, since subsequent
works on Tibetan kingship increasingly favored Old Tibetan sources over later
Buddhist histories, and thus included fewer, or at least different, assumptions about
the cultural and spiritual milieu of the Tibetan Empire. This latter research promoted
close study of the pillar edicts of the Tibetan kings, and careful readings of relevant
Tibetan documents preserved in the cave library at Dunhuang, dating from the 8th to
11th centuries CE. This is particularly true of Ariane Macdonald’s masterwork,
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published in Etudes Lalou in 1971. Here Macdonald made a detailed study of the Old
Tibetan Chronicle and related documents, including funerary texts, divination
manuals, and administrative records. Combining philological rigor with impeccably
chosen source material, and working with a highly qualified Tibetan informant,
Yonten Gyatso, Macdonald presented a coherent picture of the beliefs of the early
Tibetan monarchy and also of early Tibetan society in general. Macdonald’s minute
details drawn from the earliest available sources contrasted sharply with the
categorical statements found in the works of Tucci and Haarh, which relied mostly on
Tibetan histories written at least four centuries after the fall of the Tibetan Empire.
Macdonald’s work continues to be a high watermark in the field, by which
later contributions are inevitably judged. It is not without its critics, however, notably
R.A. Stein, considered by many to be the greatest Tibetologist of his generation. Like
Macdonald, Stein worked almost exclusively from Old Tibetan texts in his treatment
of the beliefs surrounding the Tibetan kingship. He confirmed Macdonald’s
observations that the king was presented as an ordering principle that created cosmic
harmony, and functioned as a link connecting the ways of gods and the ways of men.
Both scholars emphasized the similarity of such beliefs to those found in Chinese
kingship, and pointed out many of the overlapping metaphors used in both cultures to
describe the sacred kingship. Stein also investigated the epithets that describe the
Tibetan kings, such as ’phrul, by considering the Chinese terms used to translate
them, and in this way further refined our understanding. Stein disagreed with
Macdonald, however, over the somewhat surprising conclusion to her work, namely,
that the royal religion of the Tibetan Empire was called gtsug lag, and that this was a
Tibetan form of Confucianism. Employing his characteristic academic precision to the
meaning of the term gtsug lag, Stein demonstrated Macdonald’s conclusion to be
wrong on both counts. At the same time, Stein was complimentary of the bulk of
Macdonald’s work, and confirmed or advanced many of her findings.
Since Stein’s article in 1985, there have been several works relevant to Tibetan
sacred kingship, with perhaps the most significant among them being a recent article
by Charles Ramble. Here Ramble considers the general principles of Tibetan rulership
as seen in textual sources and in ethnographic data from the present-day Tibetan
cultural area. Ramble’s approach represents a significant break with the earlier
tradition of increasingly refined descriptions of the characteristics of the divine king,
the metaphors used to describe him, and the beliefs and narratives that instantiate his
power. Setting this mostly to one side, Ramble is instead concerned more with what
we might call “Tibetan political theory,” that is, the features of what amounts to a
social contract that binds Tibetan subjects to the ruler and the ruler to his subjects.
Ramble identifies three main principles of Tibetan kingship: first, the king must be
invited, and must only agree reluctantly to serve as ruler; second, there is a contract,
usually unwritten but made explicit in the language of reciprocal oaths, according to
which the subjects pledge their loyalty in return for just rule, and the king pledges to
rule justly in return for his subjects’ loyalty; and third, that if this contract is broken
by the king, he may be killed by his subjects. This last principle Ramble terms
“justifiable regicide.” Ramble gives numerous examples to demonstrate the relevance
of these principles throughout Tibetan history over an impressive stretch of both
space and time. His analysis, conceived perhaps as a corrective for the previous
emphasis on the more explicitly divine features of Tibetan kingship, is notable for its
omission of any discussion of the king’s divine origin as a principle of Tibetan
rulership.
From Tucci’s seminal article onwards, Tibetological work on sacred kingship
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has continued to be almost purely descriptive. Such a choice is partly stylistic, but the
result is, in many ways, a missed opportunity to consecrate the study of Tibetan
kingship as an enterprise that is open to comparative theoretical concerns, and whose
goal is, through the painstaking research of specialists working with Tibetan-language
materials, to open up for comparison all of the minutiae of the Tibetan examples.
2. THE PROPOSED WORK AND METHODS
The project “Kingship and Religion in Tibet” is an ambitious undertaking that
will employ kingship as a heuristic device to chart the relationship between spiritual
and temporal power in Tibet from from its earliest elaborations during the period of
the Tibetan Empire (c.600–850 CE). Drawing on historical and philological
methodologies, the research group will make a thorough examination of Old Tibetan
sources to describe in detail the features of the Tibetan kingship. Situating this in a
wider geographical and historical context, the analysis shall investigate the Tibetan
kingship in light of traditions of sacred kingship in India, Southeast Asia, Central
Eurasia, and China, while also taking into account comparative anthropological
theories of kingship. In addition, the project shall analyze the Buddhist transformation
of Tibetan kingship both in the imperial and in the post-imperial periods, and consider
the competing depictions of the early kings. All of this shall be achieved through a
focus on three complementary themes: 1) Tibetan kingship in the earliest sources; 2)
Buddhism and royal religion; and 3) the Buddhist transformation of Tibetan kingship
in the post-imperial period.
Kingship recommends itself as an ideal heuristic device for approaching some
of the larger themes in Tibetan culture, such as the relationship between spiritual and
temporal power, chiefly because of its long and varied history as a topic of academic
enquiry. For anthropologists such as A.M. Hocart and Lucien Scubla, and for theorists
like Sigmund Freud and René Girard, kingship lies at the root of humanity’s social
origins and its first religious beliefs. Kingship is also a repository in which complexes
of ideas and practices are constellated. One finds its imagery in local religions, as in
the case of the symbolism of the dmu cord and its use by Magar ritual specialists in
northern Nepal, and also in world religions, as in the case of iconographic depictions
of crowned Buddhas, or in the symbolism of tantric initiation. Taking kingship as a
heuristic device to guide us through early Tibetan history also has the effect of
shifting the terms of a somewhat polarized debate. By placing the focus on royal
religion and the cult of kingship – a complex of beliefs and rituals that might
incorporate both Buddhist and non-Buddhist practices, and include priests from
several traditions – we move beyond a Buddhist versus non-Buddhist dichotomy that
has tended to crystallize Buddhism and “not Buddhism,” as two discrete categories.
Obviously Buddhism (or even North Indian Buddhism in the late 8th century) is not
monolithic, but the non-Buddhist category is even more problematic, since there is a
seemingly irrepressible urge to fill it with something definite and coherent against
which to define Buddhism. This void has been filled in the past by vague categories
such as “shamanism,” “animism,” “gtsug lag,” the anachronistic projection into the
past of the Bon religion, or various combinations of the above. Different cultural
settings and different religious traditions provoke different methodologies for the
study of religion and different theories of religion. For this project, kingship shall
provide the entrée into articulating a new approach to Tibetan religion in which
Buddhist and non-Buddhist traditions are scrutinized as components of royal religion
and of popular religion in order to offer a more accurate and holistic view of the
relationship between temporal and spiritual power.
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Kingship and religion in Tibet is an ideal subject for a large research group
because while at the core of it is highly focused textual scholarship centered on Old
Tibetan manuscript sources, it is expansive enough to include different disciplines,
and is of particular interest to colleagues in Tibet and the Tibetan cultural area. The
comparative aspect of the project, which situates Tibetan kingship within Indian,
Southeast Asian, and Central Asian models, allows for some flexibility in the
composition of the research team, as does the emphasis on anthropological theories of
kingship. The core of the team will consist of the project leader, two post-docs, and
two PhDs. These shall be staggered such that the arrival of new team members
coincides with the evolving themes of the project. In the interest of allocating distinct
areas of expertise to each team member, ideally the first PhD student would undertake
research on Buddhist models of kingship in Tibet, and also have proficiency in
Sanskrit, and the first post-doc would have experience working with Old Tibetan
manuscripts and have some expertise in philological methodologies. Similarly, the
second PhD student would ideally work on early Tibetan religion and ritual, and the
second post-doc would work on the early post-dynastic period, and ideally have a
background in the Bon religion. Naturally, these are only ideal descriptions, and the
project is flexible enough to accommodate varying specializations.
Because of the great popularity of Old Tibetan studies in Tibet and China, and
in the Tibetan diaspora, it is extremely important to remain in close dialogue with
Tibetan scholars. This will be achieved through annual research trips to partner
institutions, and by inviting visiting scholars for yearlong stays at LMU-München.
The team’s visits will be for six weeks, and we will choose the partner institution
based on relationships with individual Tibetan scholars and based on ease of
cooperation with the partner institution. The Northwest Nationalities University in
Lanzhou is one leading candidate as the first partner institution. Here Dongzhi Dorje
specializes in Old Tibetan language and linguistics, and has worked with the project
leader before. Other possible destinations include the Tibetan Academy of Social
Sciences in Lhasa, the China Tibetology Research Center in Beijing, the Library of
Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamsala, Menri Monastery in Dolanji, India, and
Triten Norbutse Monastery in Kathmandu, Nepal. The latter shall be the likely site of
the group’s research trips in the final three years of the project, when the focus shifts
to Old Tibetan ritual texts and to Buddhist and Bon depictions of kingship in
traditional religious histories. We will invite visiting researchers to LMU-München
from the institution that hosts our group in the previous year. This will serve to build
relationships between partner institutions and LMU-München, and to facilitate
collaboration between Tibetan scholars and the members of the research group.
The research group will also hold a colloquium or lecture series each year in
order to bring to LMU-München world-leading scholars with whom we would like to
be in dialogue. Such colloquia will also serve as a platform from which to disseminate
our results, raise our visibility, and further contribute to the academic life of our host
department at LMU-München.
2.1 Tibetan Kingship in the Earliest Sources
The first of the three main themes of the research project is an in-depth
analysis of the most reliable epigraphic, manuscript, architectural, and iconographic
sources on kingship during the period of the Tibetan Empire, resulting in an accurate
and comprehensive description of the Tibetan kingship. This will involve an analysis
of the sources by employing palaeographical, codicological, and text-critical
methodologies to ascertain their possible dates, and also in order to understand their
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biases and reliability. In this way the project will set its foundations on solid ground.
Alongside this, we will also situate the Tibetan kingship in its proper intellectual and
cultural setting. The research team will achieve this through a review of the relevant
comparative anthropological models and theories of sacred kingship, and an
assessment of their applicability to the Tibetan data. It will also entail an examination
of the models of kingship that existed in the Tibetan cultural universe, located
uniquely at the intersection of South and Central Asia. Here the project will assess the
comparability of Vedic, Brahmanical, Buddhist, and Śaivite models of kingship from
India, Śri Lanka, Thailand, and Cambodia, and also consider Central Asian and
Chinese models of kingship. Like the project as a whole, this examination of early
Tibetan kingship involves an interdisciplinary marriage of philology, history, and
anthropology, making it ideal for a team of researchers with different specializations.
Methods and Sources
The work will begin by problematizing the relevant historical sources. From a
bird’s eye view, these can be divided into sources dating to the imperial period and
those composed after the Tibetan Empire collapsed in the middle of the 9th century.
Looking more closely, there is not always a clear dividing line between imperial and
post-dynastic sources, and there is no guarantee that an Old Tibetan manuscript – that
is, a source written in Old Tibetan language and with Old Tibetan orthography – dates
to the imperial period. Nearly all of the extant Old Tibetan manuscripts (as opposed to
epigraphical sources and wooden slips) are from the library in cave 17 at Dunhuang,
which was probably sealed in the first part of the 11th century. The Tibetans held
Dunhuang from 786 to 848, but Tibetan was used as a lingua franca in and around
Dunhuang for centuries after Tibetan occupation, meaning that one can never be safe
in assuming that a Tibetan Dunhuang manuscript dates to the period of Tibetan
occupation. In fact, recent research by Tsuguhito Takeuchi, who is more intimately
familiar with the Old Tibetan written corpus than is any other living scholar, indicates
that a significant proportion of Old Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang post-date the
fall of the Tibetan Empire (Takeuchi 2004). Takeuchi has also recently periodized the
Old Tibetan language, based in part on linguistic shifts, into Early Old Tibetan (mid7th to mid-8th century), Middle Old Tibetan (late-8th to mid-9th century), and Late
Old Tibetan (late-9th to early 12th century). In addition to linguistic and textimmanent details (such as a date, or datable reference), palaeographical and
codicological features also offer clues for dating Old Tibetan manuscripts.
In general, palaeography and codicology of Chinese and Tibetan manuscripts
lags behind the methods and tools developed in the field of Indology, and even further
behind with respect to studies of Greek and Latin works. Akira Fujieda and JeanPierre Drège have advanced preliminary models for the palaeography and codicology
of Chinese Dunhuang manuscripts, and their observations and proposed
methodologies will be applied also to the Tibetan manuscripts. Cristina ScherrerSchaub has also made some preliminary attempts at a palaeography of Old Tibetan
manuscripts, and has usefully outlined some proposed methods for taking this work
forward. Similarly, Sam van Schaik at the British Library is developing
palaeographical tools that may also help to date Tibetan manuscripts. These methods,
along with Cathy Cantwell and Rob Mayer’s observations about textual criticism and
editing Old Tibetan manuscripts, will be brought to bear on our Old Tibetan sources
on Tibetan kingship. In the first place, this task will be aided by high quality digital
images of the manuscripts, available freely online through the International Dunhuang
Project. In some cases, however, our investigations will necessitate research visits to
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the libraries that hold the manuscripts – in nearly every case either the British Library
in London or the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. This methodological
grounding will ensure that we understand our sources properly, and will serve us well
in a field where texts are too often read exclusively for their contents.
Another important aspect of scrutinizing our sources is to securely establish
their biases and their aims. In the case of official pillar edicts and semi-official
histories like the Old Tibetan Chronicle, there is obviously a monarchical bias that
seeks to present the king as a divine being who rules justly. In other words, our most
fundamental sources for the early Tibetan kingship come from within the milieu of
the king himself, and have what might be called propagandist imperatives. The same
can also be said for the use of Vairocana iconography in royally sponsored temples, or
for the symbolism of the architecture of Bsam yas Monastery. These official sources
can be weighed alongside other more candid sources, such as the short Dunhuang
manuscript PT 1038, which presents three theories of the origin of the kingship,
ending with a non-committal “who knows?” In all of these cases, one cannot
necessarily get beneath the bias of a source to arrive at what really happened; the
point is that one be aware of the bias and employ the source accordingly.
A Comprehensive Portrait of Early Tibetan Kingship
Moving carefully through these documents, the researchers will construct a
description of the primary features of early Tibetan kingship. This will be achieved
through an analysis of pillar inscriptions, iconographic and architectural evidence,
official documents such as the “Prayers of De ga g.yu tshal,” which accompanied the
treaty of 821–822, and semi-official documents like “The Dharma that Came Down
from Heaven,” “The Envoy of Phywa to Dmu,” and, most importantly, the Old
Tibetan Chronicle, a transitional text with traces of oral composition, which
represents the first extant Tibetan narrative history of the Tibetan Empire. The
analysis shall focus in particular on the principles of kingship, the qualities of the
ideal king, myths of the king’s origin, and royal rituals and ceremonies.
In the Old Tibetan Chronicle, the king is represented as having come down
from heaven to instantiate among men the ways of the gods. In this context he is
likened to a divine arrow planted in the earth. The king is also said to be
simultaneously present on both the earthly and celestial planes, and the arrow, like the
dmu cord attached to the king’s head, is also a symbol of the king’s movement
between the two. The king’s role as an ordering principle is a central element to his
being the guarantor of “good customs and a great art of government” (chos bzang,
gtsug lag che), a formula central to the kingship. This ties in closely with comparative
theories of sacred kingship in which the king’s body is assimilated to the body politic,
and where the kingdom’s fertility, well-being, order, and good customs are the
outward signs of the king’s beneficence. It also echoes Vedic, Arthaśāstric, and
Buddhist notions of kingship in India and Confucian ideals of kingship in China.
In analyzing the king’s role in bestowing and maintaining his kingdom’s
prosperity, good customs, and great governance, the research group shall consider
both the practical aspects of this role and those aspects that are subtle or magical. On
the practical side, the king stands at the head of a massive administration, and his
kingdom is ordered through a complex system of law and administration. The features
of the king’s laws and his role in guaranteeing social order will be analyzed through a
survey of published and unpublished Old Tibetan legal and administrative documents,
and through further considering the ideals of governance embedded in eulogies to the
kings found in the Old Tibetan Chronicle, “The Dharma that Came Down from
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Heaven,” and other Old Tibetan sources. Much of this ground has been covered
already, for example in a survey of Tibetan imperial administration by Dotson (2009:
46–73), and in Ramble’s theory regarding the contractual nature of the relationship
between king and subject. However, the realpolitik facets of the king’s “good law”
have not been adequately related to the king’s status as an ordering principle. Here the
research team shall contribute to this enquiry by charting the contours of the dialectic
between the king as an active source of administration, and the king as a passive
conduit for his kingdom’s good customs, well-being, and prosperity – an old issue
with many points for cross-cultural comparison.
The Tibetan king’s qualities are expressed in the titles, formulae, and
metaphors associated with him. Considering these, the research group will analyze
terms such as khri (a title prefixed to the king’s name upon enthronement), lha sras or
lde sras (“son of gods” or “divine son”), btsan po (“emperor” or “king”; literally
“mighty”), lha btsan po (“god, emperor,” or even “god-king”), and ’phrul gyi lha
btsan po (“sacred god-king”). We shall also reassess Tucci’s conclusions about the
terms mnga’ thang (“majesty”) and dbu rmog (“helmet”), Stein’s research into the
term ’phrul, and Li and Coblin’s definition of byin (“splendor”). The analysis shall
also examine metaphors for the relationship between king and country, among them
being the relationship between heaven and earth, rain and soil, and horse and rider.
A further element crucial to a comprehensive description of the early Tibetan
kingship is its mythology. The first king’s descent from heaven is described in the Old
Tibetan Chronicle and evoked in several pillar inscriptions. The widespread use of
this myth served to ancestralize the Tibetan king and confer upon the incumbent the
charisma of office. This myth provides the Tibetan kings with a divine back-story in
the heavens, and in the Kong po Inscription (c. 800) it is also used to underline
connections between the Tibetan kings and the rulers of Kong po, a vassal kingdom in
southern Tibet. In this way fictive kinship ties are created to bind vassal kings to the
Tibetan king. Such a practice also appears to relate to the sku bla rite, one of the
putative central rituals of state that deployed ritual and ceremony to bind vassals to
the king. As Nathan Hill has argued, the mythical template for the sku bla rite is
found, in fragmentary form, in the Dunhuang document “The Envoy of Phywa to
Dmu.” This fragmentary Old Tibetan text sets out the ideal that vassal rulers offer
obeisance to the tutelary deity of the king and in this way become united with the
king. Such mythological antecedent tales are often evoked prior to the performance of
the rite whose origins they describe and empower. Unfortunately, a description of the
rite itself is not included in the surviving manuscript fragment, so we are left to infer
what form it may have taken.
The ideals expressed in the myth, and the links it creates between the Tibetan
ruler and his vassals underline the importance of ritual in the constitution of the polity
of the Tibetan Empire. Tambiah (1976: 125–26) has argued in the context of the
“galactic polity” in Southeast Asian empires that while central capitals and their
vassal satellites were linked through forms of subordination such as taxation, law, and
administration, in practice there was very little in the way of rigid centralization,
which varied over time, and these empires were in fact held together more by ritual
than by such realpolitik indicators so familiar from Western political theory. Geoffrey
Samuel has demonstrated the applicability of Tambiah’s galactic polity model to premodern Tibetan kingdoms, and the research group shall consider to what extent ritual,
alongside more traditional concerns such as dynastic marriage, tax, and administrative
centralization, constituted the character of the Tibetan Empire as a polity.
For Macdonald and others, the sku bla rite relates to the cult of sacred
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mountains. Most theorists, including Macdonald, Karmay, and Kapstein, have
assumed that the mountain cult played a central role in the Tibetan kingship, and they
have proposed models for how it may have operated. These models are centered on a
royal absorption or appropriation of regional and local cults. By applying our methods
to Old Tibetan sources, the research team will assess these models and seek to
determine the precise relationship between the Tibetan king and the cult of mountain
deities. This will allow us also to investigate the extent to which the Tibetan kingship
was able to embrace under its rubric local cults, which relates to the second theme of
the research plan.
Another myth that is absolutely central to royal ritual, and which shall be
analyzed in great detail, is the myth of Dri gum btsan po. The earliest extant version is
included in the Old Tibetan Chronicle, and the myth is referred to also in the Kong po
Inscription. In addition, it is found in several later, Classical Tibetan sources. This is
one of the most well known of all Tibetan myths, and it has been studied in detail by
Haarh, Macdonald, Hazod, and Kapstein. Tucci also signaled its importance in his
seminal article on Tibetan kingship. As with most great myths, it can be read on a
number of levels. Here the analysis will focus on the myth as an antecedent tale for a
central royal ritual, the ransom rite. In the myth, a royal double, Ngar la skyes,
recovers the corpse of King Dri gum btsan po by offering as ransom an
ornithomorphic child, whom he commits to the waters and to the serpent spirit that
has taken hold of the king’s corpse. The king’s corpse is buried, and this is followed
by the victory of Dri gum btsan po’s son over the realm of his father’s usurper and
killer. The son’s accession to the throne is then marked in the traditional fashion when
he is given a new name. The myth serves as an antecedent tale both for the ransom
rite performed in the course of the royal funeral ritual, and also for the coronation.
Seen from a comparative perspective, this is not altogether surprising, since funeral
rites and coronation rites often borrow heavily from each other, both being rites of
passage involving symbolic death and rebirth (Scubla 2005: 50–51). In the context of
the coronation ceremony, the research team will investigate this and other Old Tibetan
documents, such as PT 1290, which seems to include a coronation verse for Khri
Gtsug lde btsan (815–841). We shall construct a clear picture of the ceremony, and
consider to what extent it incorporates concepts of symbolic or real victory, social
death, and other such themes emphasized by Hocart and others in their studies of
coronation ceremonies.
Theoretical and Comparative Concerns
The comparative aspect of this first theme involves a survey of the relevant
models of kingship both from the field of anthropology and from studies of kingship
in South and Central Asia. This will give the research team a theoretical grounding
and a familiarity with the larger intellectual context to which it contributes. It will also
lead to observations and questions that would not arise were the project limited only
to the study of Tibetan kingship from a narrowly defined, strictly Tibetological
perspective. This contextualization of the Tibetan example of kingship will entail a
review of the main theories of sacred kingship proposed by Frazer and Hocart, along
with a familiarity with the objections of their critics. We shall also ask why
Africanists have recently returned to Frazer’s ideas, and investigate how these ideas
have been deployed. Similarly, we will consider whether or not the rehabilitation of
some of Hocart’s theories and their application to Indological studies of kingship in
recent decades offers a successful model that might be followed in our own work.
In The Golden Bough, a massive comparative study of mythology and
9
religion, Sir James Frazer focused in particular on sacred kingship and put forward
two hypotheses on its nature. The first, more enduring hypothesis, is that the body of
the king is associated with the body politic such that the king’s health and well-being
mirror that of his kingdom and ensure its fertility and prosperity. The logical
consequence of this is that the king must be removed before his old age precipitates
the degeneration of the kingdom, and this is often achieved through ritualized killing
(Quigley 2005: 9–10). According to Frazer’s second hypothesis, the king absorbs the
collective evil or negativity of his kingdom and serves as a vessel for carrying this
away. This explains the constant rituals for the purification of the king, and the
ultimate purification – his ritual killing and replacement with a successor (Scubla
2005: 46–47).
Frazer’s brand of evolutionism fell out of favor, with notable criticisms from
the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Frazer’s work was superseded. While his
methods were largely dismissed, some of Frazer’s results, such as his theory of the
assimilation of the king’s body to the body politic, formed the basis for focused
studies of kingship and political theory. This is the case with Ernst Kantorowicz’s
landmark study, The King’s Two Bodies, which, among other things, examined the
analogies between “king and country” on the one hand and “Christ and his Church”
on the other in medieval European political theology. More recently, Frazer’s
approach to the symbolic mechanisms of sacred kingship has enjoyed a critical
reappraisal from some corners of social anthropology, particularly among Africanists.
The other towering figure in the comparative anthropological study of
kingship is Arthur Maurice Hocart. Hocart also wrote in the first half of the twentieth
century and has enjoyed a recent rehabilitation after having been mostly dismissed for
proposing diffusionist theories of common temporal and geographical origins for such
fundamental social institutions as sacred kingship. As with Frazer, Hocart used
kingship as a heuristic device for understanding religion, instrumentalizing it to
interpret, among other things, the Buddha’s enlightenment and the symbolism of
Christian communion. Notably, he stated that “the earliest known religion is a belief
in divine kings” (Hocart 1927: 7). Without reference to Frazer, Hocart repeated and
elaborated the view that the cult of kings is a solar cult, with the king himself likened
to the sun and its life-giving powers.
Surveying the comparative anthropological literature on kingship, the research
group will assess the foundational theories, consider their limitations, and investigate
how they have been deployed in more recent studies of kingship. This review will
also lead us to some fundamental questions that will facilitate cross-cultural
comparison and cross-disciplinary dialogue: Is the Tibetan king presented as the
embodiment of his kingdom? Does the Tibetan king guarantee fertility and wellbeing? Has the kingship transmuted good conduct into transcendent law? Is the model
of the king as a sort of sponge for his kingdom’s collective evil relevant to the Tibetan
kingship? Is there evidence for ritualized regicide? How was the king ritually
separated from the rest of the populace? Were there central rituals for purifying the
king? Is solar imagery prevalent in the Tibetan kingship? Did the royal regalia, such
as the turban and the divine heirlooms, ancestralize the king and symbolize the
kingship itself in the same way as Kantorowicz and others have demonstrated for the
king’s crown and other regalia in a European context? Here the danger of allowing
comparative theoretical concerns to distort the data or to filter our results is tempered
by careful philological study of Old Tibetan sources. This bifocal approach of detailed
philological methodology and a comparative theoretical perspective – or, both “closeup” and “wide-angle” – lies at the heart of the research project’s unique contribution.
10
The study of sacred kingship in Indian societies ties in with one of the more
persistent topics in classical Indology, which is the caste system and the relationship
between priests (brahmans) and kings. The locus classicus of this subfield is Louis
Dumont’s famous work on Indian caste, Homo Hierarchicus, which adopted a largely
emic perspective and thereby enshrined within Indology the brahman elite
perspective that the priests, and not the kings, stood at the apex of purity. This
contradicted Hocart’s analysis, which, based on reciprocity and lack of reciprocity in
the system of giving and receiving gifts, placed the king at the pinnacle of Indian
society, a point that has been echoed more recently by Nicholas Dirks (Dirks 1993:
130–31). Hocart’s theories have also been rehabilitated by Declan Quigley in his
reinterpretation of Indian caste organization as “a particular form of kingship”
(Quigley 1993). Quigley and other anthropologists such as Burkhard Schnepel, along
with historians like Burton Stein and Hermann Kulke, have, over the past thirty years,
tended to champion Hocart’s views to the extent that they have shifted the focus back
to the king through careful studies of individual Indian kingdoms.
Alongside these works, there have been several careful historical studies of the
textual sources for Vedic, Brahmanical, Buddhist, and Śaivite varieties of sacred
kingship. Among these are the works of Ted Proferes on Vedic ideals of sovereignty,
Stanley Tambiah on Indian models of Buddhist and Brahmanical kingship and their
reception in Thailand, John Clifford Holt on Buddhist kingship in Śri Lanka, and
Alexis Sanderson on Śaivite models of kingship in both India and in the Khmer
Empire of Cambodia.
Surveying these works will offer a variety of models of kingship and religious
conversion that will inform our analysis. In some cases, these are models very similar
to the cakravartin ideal that prevailed in Tibet. In other cases, they will demonstrate
how kingship can be centered on the figure of the Buddha Vairocana, or on
Avalokiteśvara. Here the research team will take care not to oversimplify or
essentialize these models, and will ask the following questions: Is there an overemphasis on royal patronage and the “sangha and state model” in Buddhist kingship?
Have studies of Buddhist kingship misrepresented the Aśokan model? What other
models are applicable? What sorts of modes of interaction do we find between
Buddhist and indigenous models of kingship? This survey will also be relevant to the
other two themes of the research project: it will shed light on the relationship between
Buddhism and indigenous religions in cross-cultural examples, and the ongoing
debate about priests and kings will inform our investigation of the later literary
transformation of the Tibetan sacred kingship by monk historians, a development that
may have some important parallels with brahman redactions of royal history and
customs in India.
Before and after the Tibetan conversion to Buddhism, many of Tibet’s
strongest cultural ties were with China and Central Asia, where there are also strong
and fairly well-documented traditions of sacred kingship. This can be seen in the
shared features of many of the foundation myths of various Central Eurasian
kingdoms, and in their social structures. Christopher Beckwith, for example, situates
Tibetan kingship within what he calls the “Central Eurasian culture complex,” which
is characterized in part by the relationship between the ruler and his personal guards,
the comitatus. These are nobles who are loyal to the death, and whom the king favors
with extravagant gifts gained via trade and conquest. Often they are interred with the
king when he dies, to enjoy the same relationship with the king in the afterlife that
obtained during his lifetime. Within this complex of ideas, the king is also conceived
of as commanding the dominion of the entire world, and of necessity he expands his
11
empire in all directions. Beckwith finds the king–comitatus relationship at the heart of
many Central Eurasian polities, and even further afield among the Arabs and among
Germanic peoples in Europe (Beckwith 2009). In addition, one finds among the
Turks, the Chinese, and many other Central Asian peoples the concept of the emperor
as a sky god descended from heaven to instantiate on earth the ways of the gods.
Often this is also linked to a sacred mountain, as in the complex of ideas described by
Mongolists as “tengerism” (Hamayon 1994: 87, n. 13). These concepts and practices
are also found to a certain extent in early Tibet, and it remains to be determined the
degree to which models such as Beckwith’s “Central Eurasian culture complex”
might help to illuminate the Tibetan kingship.
In comparing Tibetan and Chinese traditions, it is important to recall Stein’s
observation from the 821-822 Sino-Tibetan treaty pillar that the Tibetan inscription
states that China, like Tibet, but unlike other foreign kingdoms, possesses “good
customs and great art of government” (chos bzang gtsug lag che), as Tibet does, and
can therefore be treated as an equal. On this point, the research team will query to
what extent this statement indicates anything more than a vaguely similar political
ideology, and whether or not there are grounds for drawing any firmer conclusions
regarding the similarity of Tibetan and Chinese religio-political beliefs. In doing so,
we shall consider Chinese models of Buddhist kingship, such as that described by
Orzech in the context of the fifth-century Scripture for Humane Kings (Orzech 1999).
2.2. Buddhism and Royal Religion
Having clarified the nature of the early Tibetan kingship, the research team
will consider how the royal conversion to Buddhism impacted the kingship. This will
once again involve a careful examination of textual, iconographic, and architectural
materials alongside a consideration of models of Buddhist kingship that prevailed in
India and elsewhere. While the material available (e.g., iconographic or textual,
contemporary or late) often dictates one’s approach, there are also several “readymade” models for thinking about religious conversion. Tibetan Buddhist tradition
itself offers various emic paradigms. The telluric deities of Tibet, for example, are
tamed by Padmasambhava or by another tantric adept, and bound by oath to serve as
protectors of the Dharma. Sites identified through geomancy as nefarious places are
similarly transformed or suppressed by the erection of a stūpa or temple. One could
equally speak of better-known paradigms such as syncretism, violent conversion in
which tradition is forced underground, or “accretion,” where the new rituals and
beliefs exist alongside the old, often amid apparent contradiction. Each of these
models has been brought to bear on the Tibetan conversion to (or “assimilation of”)
Buddhism, and the research group shall consider the appropriateness of each of these
models to our analysis. This analysis will focus on the Vairocana model, the
cakravartin ideal, the meaning of new Buddhist royal titles, including bodhisattva and
dharmarāja, competition for patronage over central rites such as royal funerals, the
importance of statues, temples, and texts as sacred objects and their relationship to
existing royal heirlooms, and the impact of the political ascendance of the clergy.
The Tibetan Adoption of Buddhism
In Tibetan Buddhist historiography, the period when Buddhism was adopted
during the Tibetan Empire is known as the “early diffusion” of the teachings (snga
dar), and is conceived of as a golden age whose main actors, such as King Srong
btsan sgam po (c.605–649), Padmasambhava (late 8th century), and King Khri Srong
lde btsan (742–c.800), have been deified and worshipped. While some Tibetologists
12
have followed this traditional framing narrative, most have tended instead to hone in
on the realpolitik aspect of the conversion by pointing out the political and
administrative benefits of adopting this world religion. Kapstein, for example, points
out that Tibet was surrounded on all sides by Buddhists, and that the Buddhist models
of kingship, understood by Tibet’s neighbors, had resonance for a ruler who claimed
dominion over all the earth. Equally, Kapstein notes the practicality of fostering a
literate elite to serve as administrators while at the same time introducing a system of
morality that would serve the interests of law and order. This functionalist approach
has tended to downplay the importance of belief and devotion, or the role of
performative events like festivals and public rituals of state. Often – though not in
Kapstein’s case – the emphasis on the practicality of the conversion overlooks the
king’s own apparent devotion as well, despite the many Buddhist commentaries
attributed to King Khri Srong lde btsan after he accepted Buddhism as the official
religion of Tibet.
Some of our most important sources for the Buddhist conversion, and for
ascertaining just what sort of Buddhism the Tibetan king swore to uphold, are the
royal pillar inscriptions and edicts that celebrate the completion of Bsam yas
Monastery in c.779. Here King Khri Srong lde btsan sets out the official narrative (a
cynic might call it the “party line”) of the conversion: Buddhism was practiced by the
previous kings, who built temples; some Tibetan non-Buddhist practices harm the
country and cause disease and famine; Buddhist teachings emphasize karma and
rebirth in the six realms; and one must adopt virtuous action in order to avoid rebirth
in hell. These are also the main points in King Khri Lde srong btsan’s Skar cung Edict
(c.812), which essentially ratified his father’s Bsam yas Edict. In its presentation of
Buddhism as a Tibetan royal tradition we can see several points of continuity with
earlier legitimation strategies. For example, Buddhism is ancestralized as the tradition
of previous kings, it ensures the well-being of the realm as opposed to backwards
practices that cause disease and famine, and it promotes good customs to ensure a
well-ordered universe. In this official version, the Tibetan conversion to Buddhism is
decidedly a “top-down” affair, with the king himself adopting Buddhism and then
forcing the ministerial aristocracy to do so by swearing an oath. This seems like a
complete paradigm shift, with no hint of dissension or “growing pains” during the
initial phases of conversion.
From royal edicts and documents it is clear that the Tibetan king enjoyed a
transformative recasting as a bodhisattva and a dharmarāja. Later Tibetan sources
portray King Srong btsan sgam po, the founding father of the Tibetan Empire, as an
incarnation of Avalokiteśvara, and other prominent kings are also recognized as
incarnations of various cosmic bodhisattvas. In the early Old Tibetan material,
however, this equation has yet to be found. In pillar inscriptions after the adoption of
Buddhism, and in official documents, the king is often referred to as a bodhisattva,
but there is no indication that this is intended to mean that he is an incarnation of any
particular bodhisattva. Rather, it is used as a title alongside others such as “divine
god, emperor” (’phrul gyi lha btsan po). The king is also sometimes called a
dharmarāja (Li and Coblin 1987: 229, 232), and a verse celebrating a peace treaty in
821–822 prays that he will become a cakravartin and attain complete Buddhahood
(Kapstein 2009). This demonstrates that the Tibetan kings indeed adopted the
Buddhist model of the universal ruler.
Another model that is not well attested in written sources, but which can be
found clearly from early iconographic evidence, is the association between the
Buddha Vairocana and the Tibetan king. The use of icons of Vairocana in the royal
13
cult has been demonstrated by Heller and also by Kapstein, who argues that images of
Vairocana “intended to represent the imperial presence of the Tibetan monarch whose
mandala was none other than the Tibetan empire itself” (Kapstein 2009). This is
evident in the symbolism of Bsam yas, the first Tibetan monastery, which is designed
as the Vairocana mandala with an image of four-armed Vairocana at its center.
Kapstein also points out the existence of possible parallel imperial Vairocana cults in
Barabadur, Kyoto, and Xian.
Royal Religion and Central Rituals of State
It is somewhat vexing, given the complete dominance from the 11th century
onward of the “ruler-as-Avalokiteśvara model,” that no Buddhist model – the
Vairocana model included – seems to have similarly dominated in the early period.
Again, the available data militates against essentializing definitions and points to a
pragmatic ritual landscape in which both Buddhist and non-Buddhist traditions appear
to have coexisted at the Tibetan court. In fact, this is perfectly consonant with several
other traditions of “Buddhist kingship,” particularly from Southeast Asia, where
among the Khmer, for example, brahmans played a key role as royal priests even in
those times when the empire was notionally Buddhist, and formed part of a kingship
complex that mixed the Buddhist ideal of the dharmarāja with the more pragmatic
orientation of Brahmanical traditions of statecraft (Tambiah 1976: 53). With this in
mind, the research team will examine royal religion as a category that included all of
the rituals of state, be they performed by Buddhists or non-Buddhists. Roberte
Hamayon, who deals with parallel issues concerning the role of shamanism in
Siberian state formation, writes, “a religion can be said to be working at the state level
only so far as it rules the life-giving rituals” (Hamayon 1994: 77). In this sense, “royal
religion” or “state religion” is not a title or prize to be awarded to whichever
tradition’s priests controlled these central rites, but rather a collection of worldordering beliefs and practices that might be presided over by a variety of ritual
specialists from differing, even competing, traditions. Indeed there are strong
indications that this was the case in Tibet after the adoption of Buddhism. Therefore
our goal is not to succeed where others have failed to identify a particular religion,
e.g., Bon, gtsug lag, etc. as “the royal religion of Tibet,” but rather, following
Hamayon’s lead, to focus on the central rituals of state. Here the analysis will identify
some of the modes of interaction between Buddhist and non-Buddhist traditions in
Tibet, and the strategies that Buddhists employed in order to secure patronage.
Examining Old Tibetan material with an eye to identifying the central rituals
of state, and the central arenas of competition for royal patronage, the obvious starting
point is funerary texts. These have been studied by Lalou, Macdonald, Stein, and
Bellezza, and they offer a wealth of information about Old Tibetan ritual and myth.
They are also the main point of contention with Buddhists, who opposed the animal
sacrifices that formed a key component of the traditional rites. In later histories such
as the Dba’ bzhed, funeral rites are clearly associated with the well-being of the
empire (Wangdu and Diemberger 2000: 101–03). This is particularly important, as it
goes some way toward explaining why funeral rites were the main locus of contention
between ritual specialists in early Tibet, and why this issue took center stage in the
competition for royal patronage and dominant status amongst Tibet’s ritual traditions.
Considering funeral rites from a more theoretical standpoint, Bloch and Parry (1982:
10–11, 35, 41–42) observe that in their emphasis on order, permanence and eternity,
funerary rites bolster and legitimate the ruling authority. In the case of royal funerals,
this emphasizes the permanent and unbroken nature of the royal lineage and its
14
victory over death, and certainly constitutes, in Hamayon’s terms, a “life-giving
ritual.” As such, the ritual specialists responsible for these rites played a central role
in the practices comprising the “royal religion.”
Shifting the focus away from Buddhist and non-Buddhist categories to view
ritual through the prism of royal religion is not to deny the existence of Buddhist and
non-Buddhist rituals. In the great majority of ostensibly non-Buddhist ritual texts
found among the Dunhuang manuscripts, the presiding ritual specialists are various
types of bon and gshen, whose practices appear to have constituted a ritual tradition,
if not a religion (Stein 1988; Dotson 2008: 55–56, 64–65). In Old Tibetan ritual texts
we find Buddhists sometimes mimicking, sometimes transforming, and other times
belittling the form and content of non-Buddhist rites. While some of the Old Tibetan
funerary texts display no apparent Buddhist influence, others do, and one Buddhist
text famously co-opts and transforms non-Buddhist funerary rites in order to do away
with such practices as animal sacrifice (PT 239; Stein 1970). Here the sheep that
would be sacrificed to serve as guides to the land of the dead are instead freed,
thereby transforming a bloody rite, perceived as sinful, into a positive act of freeing
the animals. The liturgy on the origin of the horse is likewise replaced by the story of
Balaha, Avalokiteśvara’s incarnation as a horse. Early Tibetan Buddhists also
formulated their own funerary rites and liturgies that were mostly independent of nonBuddhist rites, and there are indications that these were widespread. Among these is
“The Tale of Birth and Death,” a Tibetan adaptation of the Gaṇḍavyūhasūtra that
ends with the injunction to chant the dhāraṇī of the Sarvadurgatipariśodhanatantra
for the deceased. Elsewhere there are indications that Avalokiteśvara dhāraṇīs were
widespread as a means to prevent unhappy rebirths (van Schaik 2006). Indeed the
dhāraṇī is found on a soldier’s wooden slip, suggesting that he carried it with him to
battle in the event that he should die. In this we see another mode of interaction
between Buddhism and early Tibetan religion: it is not a Buddhist engagement with
indigenous tradition on its own, non-Buddhist terms, as in the transformation of the
non-Buddhist rites, but rather the construction of a Buddhist alternative. Their
orientation, however, in common with non-Buddhist rites, appears to have been
concerned more with transcendent rebirth than with enlightenment and “precious
human birth” (Imaeda 2007: 174). These various modes of interaction between
Buddhists and their competitors echo similar modes of interaction between Buddhism
and Śaivism in India during roughly the same period, where transformation of rites
and liturgies and subversion of iconography were regularly deployed as strategies in
the competition for patronage (Sanderson 2009). In this context the research group
shall examine the strategies of Tibetan Buddhists and compare them with similar
strategies found elsewhere.
Part of the project of the competing Buddhist funerary rites was to import an
entirely foreign cosmology. This entailed replacing the pre-Buddhist concept of the
afterlife and the land of the dead with the Buddhist cosmology of the six realms and
the principles of karma and rebirth. “The Tale of Birth and Death,” for example, is set
among the gods, where the son of the king undergoes an existential crisis when his
father dies. Having never seen death, he seeks out its cure, eventually receiving
teachings from the Buddha. While this setting may be due largely to the fact that the
text modeled itself on the Gaṇḍavyūhasūtra, it also presented a fundamental
challenge to Tibetan beliefs by placing the gods within the same set of circumstances
in which humans find themselves.
Most of these Old Tibetan funerary texts lack dates, and Blezer (2008) has
recently suggested that some significantly post-date the empire, a claim that our
15
research will seek to either confirm or deny. Many of the documents deal not with
funerals as such, but with the charter myths for the various implements and sacrificial
animals that figure in the rites. Here we see the close relationship between myth and
ritual whereby the former guarantees and segues into the latter. This is also the case
with regard to the ransom rite, which may also have constituted a central ritual of
state. We find Old Tibetan ransom ritual liturgies in which the mythical actors are
kings and gods who, plagued by demons, are cured by bon or gshen ritual specialists
through the ransom rite. Here the healing antecedent tale guarantees the efficacy of
the actual rite, which is performed for the patient to whom this liturgy is directed.
Nowhere is the patient named, and there is no explicit indication that this was a royal
ritual. The tale of Dri gum btsan po informs us that the ransom rite was also a royal
rite, however, and the tale itself constitutes a charter myth guaranteeing the ransom
rite performed at a royal funeral and/or at a coronation. In analyzing the ransom rite,
and its purificatory aspect in particular, the research team shall consider the relevance
of comparative models in which the king requires constant purification. Specifically,
we will seek to discover whether or not the ransom rite played this role in Tibet, and
if so, how it existed as a royal rite alongside Buddhist rites.
Royal Religion and Popular Religion
Another central point arising from the status of the ransom rite as both a
popular and a royal rite is the relationship between popular religion and royal religion.
It is evident that the concepts surrounding the sacred kingship during the period of the
Tibetan Empire involved a soteriology by which the kings communicated with
heaven, and which further cast the Tibetan king as the conduit between heaven and
earth, through whom the order of the gods was imposed upon men. While this is
simple enough, and has echoes all over Central Asia and beyond, many of the
concepts associated with the Tibetan king are not limited to the kingship, but
permeate other aspects of Tibetan culture. In our Old Tibetan material, we find the
incorporation of regional deities into an imperial pantheon, promulgated and
reproduced in divination manuals and ritual texts. We also find ostensibly royal
technologies, such as the dmu cord – which connects the king with heaven – in ritual
texts of a common variety. This suggests that concepts surrounding the divine
kingship were not only the privilege of the kings, but may in fact have been borrowed
from early Tibetan ritual heritage. Indeed Stein (1971: 490, n. 41) makes just such a
claim, and demonstrates that within Tibetan funerary texts the constitutional terms
“lord” and “subject” indicated not the king and his subjects, but the deceased and the
psychopomp horse that guides him to the land of the dead. The overlapping of royal
religion and popular religion calls to mind Paul Mus’ rather all-encompassing view of
the former: “[t]he main purpose of State Religion – Hinduism or Buddhism or, in
other quarters, Confucianism and Taoism – seems to have been the authentication of
the whole system, enlisting, as it did, at a ground level, the tutelary spirits and genii of
the commonfolk” (Mus 1964: 452). While Mus’ equation of state religion with world
religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism does not tally with our own position, the
research group shall examine the extent to which royal religion “enlisted” elements of
popular religion.
The relationship between popular and royal traditions is an under-researched
matter in early Tibetan studies, but it has been a hotly debated issue in anthropology
for decades. In Hocart’s formulation of the problem, “every new custom begins with
the leaders” and then becomes vulgarized and popular (Hocart 1927: 156–57). This
stands in stark contrast to later theories, particularly that of Maurice Bloch, for
16
example, who argues that royal rituals are often derived from popular rituals, and that
it is precisely the use of an existing ritual vocabulary that serves to embed meaning in
royal rituals, particularly in their public, performative aspect (Bloch 1987: 294–97).
This performative aspect of the instantiation of royal power cross-culturally has
received much attention in recent years, and our analysis will consider to what extent
we can discern public ceremonial in the royal religion of the Tibetan Empire.
Statues, Temples, Texts, and the Rise of the Clergy
Another highly visible component of Buddhism’s influence on Tibetan
kingship and its participation in royal religion is the central importance of the creation
of statues and temples and the sponsorship and commissioning of Buddhist
translations and commentaries. In the royal edicts, King Khri Srong lde btsan and
King Khri Lde srong btsan (reigned c.800–815) both emphasize that their ancestors,
from the time of King Srong btsan sgam po onwards, constructed Buddhist temples.
In later Buddhist narratives, these temples, and the statues that they are built to house,
take on talismanic significance, and sometimes counteract the negative telluric forces
of Tibet and ensure the country’s well-being (Ehrhard 2004; Sørensen and Hazod
2005; Sørensen 2007). Such symbolism is very strong from the 11th century, but it is
not at all overt in the Old Tibetan sources. We do, however, find in the “Prayers of De
ga g.yu tshal” the idea that temples may be built for the purification of sins. This
temple, erected to commemorate the treaty of 821–822 between Tibet, China, the
Uighurs, and Nanzhao, contains prayers that the sins of Tibetan generals, amassed
from years of warfare, might be cleared away through the temple’s construction and
dedication (Kapstein 2009). The research group shall determine to what extent sacred
objects such as statues acted as palladia for the Tibetan Empire.
While there is very little information about the importance of religious images,
and few imperial-era statues survive, there is ample evidence of the massive
translation project sponsored by the Tibetan kings. From the time of Khri Srong lde
btsan, the Tibetan king’s mobile court included his own sangha, a Buddhist council,
and a committee for the translation of the Buddhist Dharma. He initiated a massive
translation project that sought to centralize and standardize the importation of Indian
Buddhism by dictating what should be translated and how it should be translated.
These principles were set out in a series of royally sponsored edicts, including the
Sgra sbyor bam po gnyis pa and the Mahāvyutpatti (Scherrer-Schaub 2002). One
result of this translation project was three successive catalogues of Buddhist texts, the
Lhan kar ma, ’Phang thang ma, and Mchims phu ma. Many of these texts no doubt
travelled with the emperor’s court, and we shall consider to what extent we might see
in this some continuity with later practices relevant to the cult of the written word and
the ritual use of scripture as a talismanic object.
After the Bsam yas Edict and the ordination of the first Tibetan monks, the
clergy emerged as a new road to political power. Increasingly, monks held positions
at the heart of government, and acted as mentors and personal advisors to the Tibetan
king. This is evident especially during the reign of King Khri Gtsug lde btsan (815–
841), during which time a monk, Bran ka Dpal gyi yon tan, served as chief minister.
This leads up to the collapse of the empire, and it presages subsequent models in
which the kings themselves would ordain as monks, or be perceived as religious
figures, as in the dynasty of Skyid lde Nyi ma mgon (reigned 923–950 approx.) in
western Tibet, and in the belief that Srong btsan sgam po was an incarnation of
Avalokiteśvara. This late-imperial overlapping of spiritual and temporal jurisdictions,
and overzealous royal support for the Buddhist sangha, is often cited as one of the
17
reasons for the Tibetan Empire’s collapse. Here the research group will consider to
what extent this is a fair depiction based on what the earliest sources actually tell us.
2.3 The Buddhist Transformation of Tibetan Kingship
Looming large over the horizon of the first two themes of the project is the
dominance of Buddhism in Tibet from the tenth and eleventh centuries onwards, and
the way in which its dominant position has inevitably refracted imperial Tibetan
history through its lens. In our researches into the nature of early Tibetan kingship and
our analysis of the impact of Buddhism, we shall have taken great care to work only
with the most reliable epigraphic, manuscript, architectural, and iconographic sources
in order to avoid anachronistic projections into the imperial period of later depictions,
particularly those from the 11th century onwards. In the project’s third theme, by
contrast, it is these projections that will constitute our source material as we consider
how the picture of Tibetan kingship changed after the rise of Buddhism and the rise of
the lama ideal in a cultural and political climate in which kings would at first glance
seem irrelevant. In particular, the analysis shall consider the following issues: the
dominance of the model in which Srong btsan sgam po is an incarnation of
Avalokiteśvara, and this monarch’s recasting as a source of legitimacy in the
emerging tradition of revealed “treasure” literature; the rise of Padmasambhava, and
his precedence over King Khri Srong lde btsan as a model for interaction between
lamas and rulers; and the competing visions of early kingship between Buddhist and
Bon po historians.
The Post-Dynastic Context and the Rise of the Lama Ideal
Moving from mostly Old Tibetan to mostly post-dynastic sources does not
necessarily reflect a shift of focus from historical fact to narrative embellishment.
History and narrative are inseparable, and the tendency to categorically reject postdynastic works as sources for history has been perceptively criticized by Leonard van
der Kuijp, who quite rightly states that all Tibetan sources, whether old or new, have
their own imperatives and biases that must be identified (van der Kuijp 1991: 95).
With this in mind we shall consider the cultural ambience of the early post-dynastic
period during which time ideas about the imperial period gradually crystallized into a
national myth with Avalokiteśvara as its protagonist. Here the remnants of the empire,
both animate and inanimate, played a key role. The most important such remnants and
relics were the tombs of the Tibetan kings, their royal heirlooms, their temples, the
texts and images they commissioned, their putative descendants in the form of various
pretenders to royal blood who oversaw their own small principalities, the descendants
of important lay and monk officials, and the clans of the old aristocracy.
A recent revival in the study of this period, driven forward by scholars such as
Ron Davidson, Dan Martin, Per Sørensen, Guntram Hazod, and Henk Blezer, has
clarified considerably what was previously something of a blank spot in the history of
Tibet. One of the contributing factors that makes this period such a difficult but
fascinating subject of study is that it was during this time that the main sects of
Tibetan Buddhism, along with the Bon religion, emerged with their own selfconscious identities. While this initial movement towards identity formation was
experimental and provisional, their later adherents naturally tend to present their sects
as appearing more or less fully formed from their inception. As a result, this
foundational period is highly contested among Tibetan religious historians. Most
interesting for our purposes are the Rnying ma sect and the Bon religion, since they
look to the past for their origins and are therefore deeply invested in how the imperial
18
period is depicted. The Rnying ma see themselves as representing an unbroken link
with the Buddhist religion of the imperial period, which for them was the key moment
of authentic Buddhist transmission. The physical relics of this era were worshipped as
treasure, and they also participated in the famous tradition of “treasure texts” (gter
ma). Perhaps first referring to surviving imperial-era texts found in temples and
monasteries, “treasure texts” soon came to refer to compositions that took these
documents as their raw materials for revelatory redaction. It was through this method
that Srong btsan sgam po became the central figure for the early “treasure text”
tradition, and was recast as an incarnation of Avalokiteśvara, expounding a ritual
cycle to be followed by the faithful. As a narrative movement, this seems to have
begun with ’Brom ston pa (c.1004–1064) and Atiśa (c.982–1054), and reached its
apogee with the Mani Bka’ ’bum, a collection of ritual, devotional, and quasihistorical texts constituting a fully-fledged national cult of Avalokiteśvara by the 12th
century (Sørensen 2008). Within Tibetan Buddhist historiography and popular legend,
this bodhisattva becomes the patron deity of Tibet, the progenitor of the Tibetan
people, and an agent in the unfolding of Tibetan history who incarnates himself in
various key figures.
Not long after this, a paradigm shift occurred whereby a lama,
Padmasambhava, displaced King Srong btsan sgam po as the central figure in the
“treasure text” tradition of the Rnying ma. Interestingly, it was Nyang ral Nyi ma ’od
zer (1124–1192), a key figure in the redaction of the Mani Bka’ ’bum, who was the
driving force behind the promotion of Padmasambhava. He composed the earliest
extant biography of Padmasambhava, the Zangs gling ma, in which Khri Srong lde
btsan, the Tibetan king, is clearly subordinate to Padmasambhava in a master-disciple
relationship. Despite the fact that Khri Srong lde btsan is an incarnation of the
bodhisattva Mañjuśrī, it is the figure of the lama, the “living Buddha,” that attains
paramount importance at this time. On this point our research group will query the
relevance of this development to the ongoing “priests versus kings” debate in the field
of Indology, and determine the extent to which the results of this debate can
illuminate issues surrounding the rise of Padmasambhava in Tibetan texts. This issue
also relates to the complex relationship between “officiant-donee” (mchod gnas) and
“donor” (yon bdag), sometimes oversimplified as the “patron–priest” relationship
(Seyfort Ruegg 1995).
Competing Depictions of Tibetan Kingship in Bon and Buddhist Narratives
As a further avenue of enquiry, we shall survey the plurality of models
existing in later Tibetan writings and emphasize the contested nature of these histories
by investigating Bon po narrations of the Tibetan kingship. Here we find some
significant overlap with Buddhist depictions, but also some telling differences. Dri
gum btsan po, for example, remains a negative figure: he is a wicked king who brings
about his own downfall. For the Bon po, he is also a persecutor of Bon. The traditions
also differ somewhat in their depictions of King Khri Srong lde btsan. In Buddhist
sources, he is an emanation of Mañjuśrī and the sponsor of Bsam yas Monastery. For
the Bon po, he is pathetic and indecisive figure who eventually persecutes the Bon
religion. This is not quite as stark a contrast as it might first appear, however, since
Buddhist sources such as the Zangs gling ma also depict Khri Srong lde btsan as a
vacillating king often at the mercy of his ministers. Zeff Bjerken has described the
dialogue of Buddhist and Bon po historiography as a mirrorwork or a dance, and here
our research group will seek out the Bon po “reflection” of some of the main
developments of this period. In doing so, we will ask the following questions: do Bon
19
po histories subscribe to a kingship ideology similar to that found in Buddhist
histories? What do the Bon po histories say about Srong btsan sgam po? Is he an
emanation? Do they put forward a parallel figure? To what extent are Dran pa nam
mkha’ and his sons parallel figures to Padmasambhava? Is their cult comparable and
was their rise to prominence dictated by similar circumstances? Does the model of
interaction between king and lama play as prominent a role in Bon as it does in
Buddhist sources? By seeking answers to these questions and by focusing on the
persistence of kingship ideology in both Buddhist and Bon po narrative, the research
team shall assess the legacy of Tibetan sacred kingship and its continued resonance in
Tibetan culture long after it ceased to be a political reality.
3. TIMETABLE INDICATING MILESTONES DURING THE SPONSORSHIP PERIOD
2010 (Sep-Dec). Hire an academic assistant. Set up project workspace,
website. Initiate work on the project by subjecting the Old Tibetan manuscript sources
to palaeographical, codicological, and text-critical analyses while beginning a review
of the relevant anthropological and comparative literature on kingship. Apply for
status as habilitand. Make research trips as necessary to the British Library and the
Bibliothèque nationale. Make a research trip to Northwest Nationalities University in
Lanzhou or another Tibetan partner institution. Organize a series of invited lectures
by leading scholars whose work is relevant to the research project. Present research at
an appropriate academic conference.
2011. Advertise post-doc 1, PhD 1, invite visiting researcher, and fill these
posts. Continue to study and translate Old Tibetan material on kingship and ritual, and
conduct a survey of the relevant background literature on kingship. Make research
trips to the BL and BnF. Continue habilitation process. Submit selected pieces of
research for publication. Make a group research trip to Northwest Nationalities
University or another Tibetan partner institution. Continue lecture series. Convene a
colloquium of invited participants, “Research Methods in Old Tibetan studies.”
Present preliminary results of research at appropriate academic conferences. Begin
work on the second theme of the project, “Buddhism and Royal Religion,” focusing
on Old Tibetan ritual texts.
2012. Advertise post-doc 2, PhD 2, invite visiting researcher, and fill these
posts. Complete palaeographical, codicological, and text-critical analyses of Old
Tibetan source material. Make research trips to the BL and BnF. Conduct a survey of
the relevant background literature on modes of interaction between Buddhism and
indigenous religions cross-culturally. Begin work on the third theme of the project,
“The Buddhist Transformation of Tibetan Kingship.” Continue habilitation process.
Submit selected pieces of research for publication. Make a group research trip to
Triten Norbutse Monastery in Kathmandu, or another Tibetan partner institution.
Convene a colloquium of invited participants, “Kingship and Religion in South and
Inner Asia.” Present results of research into early Tibetan kingship at appropriate
academic conferences. Invite visiting researcher from Triten Norbutse for year 4.
Year 4 (2013–2014). Continue research on Old Tibetan ritual texts and the
introduction of Buddhism to Tibet, along with research into Bon and Buddhist
depictions of early Tibetan kingship. Articulate a clear theory of the relationship
between royal and popular religion, locate Buddhism and Bon within these categories.
Conduct a survey of relevant comparative material on Buddhist and royal religion.
Submit and defend habilitationsschrift. Submit selected pieces of research for
publication. Make a group research trip to Triten Norbutse, or another Tibetan partner
institution. Convene a colloquium of invited participants, “Buddhism and Bon, Royal
20
Religion and Popular Religion: Theories of Religion in Tibetan and Himalayan
Studies.” Present results of research into Buddhism and royal religion at appropriate
academic conferences. Invite visiting researcher from Triten Norbutse for year 5.
Year 5 (2014–2015). Complete research on Bon and Buddhist depictions of
early Tibetan kingship and the persistence of kingship ideals in Tibet. Prepare
monograph for publication, secure publishing contract. Make a group research trip to
Triten Norbutse Monastery, or another Tibetan partner institution. Convene a
colloquium of invited participants, “Contested Histories: Buddhist and Bon
Imaginings of the Past.” Present results of research at appropriate academic
conferences.
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