Chapter 1. Two imports and Samye: a route decreed by the king¶

Essay 8 closed by citing Volume 1's comparison of Tibet to Indian Buddhism's vault: before the great monasteries burned, the whole scholarly tradition had already moved to the plateau. But the comparison was only half right. What arrived was not simply kept as it was. It became a new center on the plateau and developed forms found in neither India nor China. Essay 8, Chapter 3 also left a question open. The same esoteric Buddhism that in India came only at the last stage of decline has lived on in Tibet to the present and remade the religious life of a civilization. One variable, two places, two outcomes: no single cause can explain it. This essay must supply the missing half of the explanation. The procedure remains the same. Examine how it arrived, who promoted it, who benefited, and who bore the costs.

First establish an overall contrast with China. Essay 9 examined how Buddhism entered China. Caravans and monks arrived first; ordinary people and scholars believed first; the state brought Buddhism under its administration only four hundred years later. The movement was from below. In Tibet it was the opposite. Buddhism was brought in by the royal house, from above. Seventh-century marriage alliances brought the earliest Buddhist shrines. Later histories of the Dharma portrayed Songtsen Gampo as a Dharma king and his two queens as emanations of Tārā. Yet contemporary Old Tibetan documents from Dunhuang show far fainter traces of Buddhism in Tibetan society. Most of the Dharma-king narrative was projected backward from the period of the later diffusion. The later the record, the richer its detail. Bodhidharma's rule holds on the plateau too, and the usual discount applies here.¹

The substantive beginning comes with Trisong Detsen. Around 779, Samye Monastery was completed and the first Tibetan monks were ordained, the group known to history as the seven men put to the test. The Indian invited to preside was Śāntarakṣita, Nālandā's leading scholar. Essay 5, Chapter 2 noted that Nālandā determined the catalog of the texts that went abroad. China received them indirectly through the Western Regions; Tibet invited its teachers directly from Nālandā. Textbooks, teachers, and an educational system arrived together. The royal house enacted a law of support for the monastic community. Monks did not engage in production; designated commoner households supported them. By the reign of Tritsuk Detsen, the arrangement was fixed at seven households per monk. The monastic register was incorporated into royal law.² This contrast with China is worth noting. Chinese monastic communities lived on support from society, from donors, scriptural and repentance services, and estates. The state merely issued certificates. From the beginning, Tibet's monastic community was supported by the state. The advantage of proceeding from above was speed. Thirty years covered the road that had taken China four hundred. The disadvantage will appear shortly. State support would last only as long as the dynasty.

There was more than one route of import, producing a rare scene in Buddhist history. The Buddhisms of two civilizations confronted one another face to face. In the late eighth century, the Chinese Chan monk Mahāyāna taught the sudden approach in Tibet and attracted an expanding following. Trisong Detsen ordered a debate. Śāntarakṣita's disciple Kamalaśīla led the Indian side in defense of the gradual approach. The result survives in two records. The Tibetan tradition records an Indian victory. The king decreed the gradual approach orthodox, and the Chinese monk was courteously escorted out of the country. The Chinese document discovered at Dunhuang, the Decision on the Correct Principle of the Mahāyāna of Sudden Awakening, records a Chinese victory and royal praise for the sudden approach.³ Each record reports its own side victorious, the familiar scene from Essay 5. This volume does not judge the doctrinal winner. It recognizes only the institutional facts. The king initiated the debate, announced its result, and legislated orthodoxy. Thereafter, gradual stages became the fixed norm of Tibetan teaching, while the sudden approach survived as a memory of heresy against which precautions were taken. Political authority decided the route. This was the first precedent Samye set for Tibetan Buddhism.

As required, I explicitly mark what follows as this volume's conjecture. Samye's decision was less a doctrinal victory than a double choice in diplomacy and institutional design. On the diplomatic side, Tang China and Tibet had been at war for half a century. Tibetan troops had briefly occupied Chang'an in 763. Adopting an enemy country's religious route made little sense at court. Choosing India or China was first of all choosing an ally. On the side of institutional design, the king wanted a religion that could legislate. The gradual approach brought a complete set of institutions that could be transplanted, with educational arrangements, ordination lineages, translation rules, and stages of practice. Every item could be written into royal law. The sudden approach had only transmission between master and disciple. Essay 10, Chapter 3 called Chan Buddhism optimized for disaster. The state wanted a Buddhism that could be examined and assessed. To choose the gradual approach was to choose an ally and a set of institutions that could be put into effect step by step.

After deciding the route came deciding the language. In the early ninth century, the court promulgated standardized translation terminology. It compiled the Mahāvyutpatti as an authorized lexicon and issued the Two-Volume Explanation of Words as authorized translation rules. All older translations were to be revised accordingly. Translators had no right to invent terms of their own; new terms required court approval.⁴ The translation workshops in Essay 9, Chapter 2 had royal funding but left decisions to the chief translator. Tibet went further. Language itself became a public instrument. The consequences were profound. China translated Buddhist scriptures into its existing language, and the influence of matching concepts lasted for centuries. Tibet remade its language into the language of Buddhist scriptures. Through coined terms, fixed rules, and sound correspondences, a written language was virtually recast for translation. Local expression yielded ground; precision was the gain. Tibetan translations can be translated back into Sanskrit word by word, becoming an important resource for later Indology. Screening was established here too. Texts without a Sanskrit provenance were not translated, and the court compiled the translation catalog. The popular circulation of suspect and spurious scriptures seen in China had no place in Tibet's system. The restriction would later loosen, and newly made scriptures found another way in, as a later part of this chapter will show.

Then state support came to an end. In the middle of the ninth century, Tritsuk Detsen was murdered. Langdarma succeeded him and suppressed Buddhism. Monasteries closed, monks returned to lay life, and translation workshops dispersed. A few years later, Langdarma himself was shot dead by a monk. The dynasty then disintegrated, and Tibet entered more than a century of fragmentation. Put the calendars side by side. Langdarma's suppression came in the early 840s, Huichang's in 845. On the two sides of the Himalayas, no more than five years separated them. Their structures differed, however, and so did their outcomes. In China, the state suppressed Buddhism and survived. Two years later, the same state restored it. In Tibet, suppression and the fall of the state were one drama. No state remained afterward to restore anything. Tibetan Buddhism therefore underwent a far more thorough test than Huichang. The institutional level disappeared entirely, and the question was what remained.

The answer was two chains. One was a chain of formal monastic acts. Three monks fled to Amdo with Vinaya texts. The ordination lineage survived unbroken in the borderlands. When Lachen Gongpa Rabsal received full ordination, two Chinese monks helped supply the required quorum. The two traditions cooperated once in this ceremony. A hundred years later, ten men from Ü-Tsang came east to receive ordination. The usual chronology takes 978 as the first year of the later diffusion. The note below attaches that year to different events: the ten men's ordination in the headwaters region in Guo Heqing's note, and the spread of the Vinaya lineage from Kham to Ü in Roerich's translation. Buddhism's revival in Tibet began with ten men's legally valid status as ordained monks. Essay 2 said that the councils guarded the register; Essay 3 said that the Vinaya's second form of existence was a chain. Tibet's history bore out both propositions. Books could be translated again and temples rebuilt. Only the chain of living people could not be rejoined once broken.⁵

The other was a bloodline. Among lay communities in Ü-Tsang, households of ritual specialists transmitted their arts from father to son. Suppression could not enter the family home. Rites for the dead, averting calamity, and warding off spells continued as usual. This stratum later coalesced into Nyingma. Essay 8's conclusion received literal confirmation in Tibet. Fire can sever a chain that is made; it cannot sever a chain that is born. The chain of formal monastic acts escaped, while the bloodline stayed in place. Each wintered separately, and together they carried the tradition through those hundred years.⁶

The period of fragmentation did not end Buddhism. It prompted a second import. The royal house of Guge in the west supplied money and people. Rinchen Zangpo studied in Kashmir and returned with new translations, marking the division between Old and New Translations. In 1042, Atiśa entered Tibet, invited at great expense through the efforts of two generations, Yeshe Ö and Jangchub Ö. Histories of the Dharma say that Yeshe Ö died in prison while money was being raised for his ransom, leaving instructions that it be used instead to invite the Dharma. The episode is discounted as hagiography, but the royal house's heavy expenditure is beyond doubt.⁷ What Atiśa brought was chiefly an order of stages; new sūtras mattered less. The Lamp for the Path to Awakening organized all teachings into the paths of three kinds of person. The lesser seeks a good rebirth, the middling liberation, and the greater Buddhahood. Everyone begins practice at the bottom. Access is restricted at the higher stages. Those observing celibacy may not receive the secret and wisdom initiations. Essay 7, Chapter 3 recorded this prohibition. Tibet made it a generally binding rule.

Place the stages of the path alongside Chinese classification of the teachings, and two solutions to the same problem appear. Both faced the same situation. Exoteric and esoteric scriptures and spells, arriving in disarray over hundreds of years, were all present at once. China shelved the scriptures horizontally, distinguishing higher from lower rather than authentic from spurious, and let each reader choose a shelf. Tibet lined up the teachings vertically, organizing a sequence everyone had to pass through. Higher and lower became earlier and later. Authenticity was no more at issue here; the question was which step one had reached. Classification of the teachings is a bookshelf; the stages of the path are a staircase. One may read just one book on a shelf, but no step on the staircase may be skipped. This is the procedure named in this essay's title, reorganization. It turns teachings that arrived in disarray into an ordered establishment. The sequence governs the order of study and practice. How the schools passed themselves on, and who finally took charge, are the subjects of the next two chapters, one apiece.

The bookshelf ranks teachings without deciding their truth or falsity; “Perfect” renders the Chinese category “complete” or “rounded.” Its Chinese arrow points upward from shallow to complete; the English arrow has heads at both ends. The three stages on the staircase are the paths of lower, middle, and higher capacity: favorable rebirth, liberation, and Buddhahood. The two higher empowerments barred to celibate practitioners here are the secret and wisdom empowerments, not a single “second empowerment.”

The fires mark separate events: Langdarma in Tibet in the 840s and the Huichang suppression in China in 845. The English layout places one transmission chain under each fire. In Chapter 1, however, both chains concern Tibetan transmission surviving the first event: the ordination lineage through Amdo and the household lineage through kinship. The Huichang fire is a separate comparison, not the origin of the household lineage. “Formal-act lineage” refers to communal ordination procedure, not karmic causation.

Besides the order of stages, a catalog had to be fixed. In the fourteenth century, Butön compiled the catalog of the canon. The Kangyur collected the Buddha's words, the Tengyur treatises and commentaries. Admission depended on Sanskrit provenance. Butön left out a group of Old Translation tantras, and the Old and New traditions fought over this for centuries.⁸ The restrictions were real, and so was the way around them. Nyingma's treasure tradition had its own source outside the catalog. Treasure revealers kept discovering new teachings attributed to Padmasambhava in rocks, lakes, and minds. These did not enter the Kangyur; they circulated in collections of their own. The corpus ratchet of Essay 4, Chapter 1 did not stop in Tibet; it only changed form. China's new scriptures claimed to be spoken by the Buddha and had to pass the translation workshops' screening (Essay 9, Chapter 2). Tibet's new teachings claimed to have been hidden by Padmasambhava. They bypassed the workshops and appeared as discoveries at sacred sites. The stricter the screening, the more new teachings came from other sources. Each civilization supplied its own evidence for this.

Reorganization gave Buddhism its institutions; popular life gave it its everyday religious practice. This stratum deserves a separate look, for it shares origins with China's popular stratum but differs in structure. On the surface lies a technology of merit for everyone. The six-syllable mantra puts recitation within everyone's reach, the same design as China's single Buddha-name (Essay 10, Chapter 4). Tibet takes a further step, entrusting recitation to machinery and natural forces. One turn of a prayer wheel counts as one recitation. Prayer flags hang in the wind; each gust counts as a recitation. Water-driven mani wheels run day and night. The Uṣṇīṣavijayā dhāraṇī pillars of Essay 11, Chapter 1 save people through contact with their dust or shade. Tibet sets the scriptures themselves turning. Everyone can turn them; wind and water practice on people's behalf. The accumulation of merit is here handed over to devices.

The middle level consists of ritual services. Village ritual specialists avert calamity, prevent hail, and exorcise spirits. Monastery monks divine, bestow blessings, and identify the causes of illness. Death is the weightiest station. Phowa transfers consciousness; recitations guide the dead through forty-nine days in the intermediate state; sky-burial grounds have their own rites. The whole package rests in the hands of monks and ritual specialists. The work later most famous in the West, Liberation through Hearing in the Intermediate State, is itself a fourteenth-century treasure revelation. It comes precisely from the source outside the catalog described above.

At the bottom lie absorbed local beliefs. Smoke offerings, wind-horses, and mountain deities, the old customs of Bön, were reorganized within a system of Dharma protectors. The cycle of stories of Padmasambhava subduing the gods continues the imagery of subjugation in Essay 7. Bön itself moved in the reverse direction and became Buddhist in form, compiling a canon of its own. The scene in which Daoism imitated Buddhism at every point (Essay 9, Chapter 2) played again on the plateau.

Yet a structural difference separates this from China. China's popular stratum can operate without a monastic community. Dhāraṇī pillars stand by the roadside, local religious associations conduct their own funerals, and even the Huichang suppression could not wipe them out (Essay 11, Chapter 1). Tibet's popular stratum depends on the monastery at every point. Blessings require a tulku, divination a monk, rites for the dead a monastery. Each valley's monastery is also a school, a clinic, and a lender. In Tibet, popular religion grows within the monastic system; it does not form a separate layer outside Buddhism. The conclusion of Chapter 3 will assess how much this difference matters.⁹

The chapter closes with the first level of the answer to the divergence. In India, the same esoteric Buddhism was the last layer to be added. The roots were already gone; its only supporters were the court and those seeking miraculous efficacy, as Essay 8 showed. In Tibet, esoteric Buddhism was part of the base from the start. The royal house erected the institutional level from above, while households of ritual specialists spread the ritual level from below. The two joined in the period of the later diffusion. Thereafter, exoteric and esoteric, monastic and lay, temple and household formed a single whole. In India, esoteric Buddhism was Buddhism's last form; in Tibet, esoteric Buddhism was Buddhism itself. But the old problem of proceeding from above had only been deferred. It had not been solved. With the dynasty gone, who would be the donor? With the teachings established, who would inherit? The next chapter examines the most thorough answer Tibet gave to this oldest problem in Buddhist history.

References¶