Chapter 2. The politics of the tulku: reincarnation as an institution¶

Essay 2 posed this volume's oldest question. The Buddha appointed no successor. Registers and chains filled the vacuum of authority as best they could, and every tradition afterward kept trying to make up for that gap. India relied on master-disciple transmission and schools; China on genealogies and lists of patriarchs. Tibet's solution arrived last and was the most thorough. Let authority itself return. This chapter examines the predicament the solution addressed, what it solved and for whom, and who bore the costs.

The plateau of the later diffusion had no central royal power. Buddhism's donors shifted from kings to powerful local families, and schools consequently grew into combinations of scholarly lineage, family, and estate. Before reincarnation was invented as a system, the problem of succession already had three solutions, each with its own cost. The bloodline solution is exemplified by Sakya. The Khön family transmitted from uncle to nephew. The Dharma throne was family property; Sakya Paṇḍita and his nephew Phagpa came from the same house. Fire could not sever the chain, but the religious community was confined to one surname. A genius from another family would always remain a guest adviser. The master-disciple solution is exemplified by Kagyu. A master's approval passed on, of a kind with the genealogies of Chan. Yet one teacher had many disciples, and every generation faced division. Dakpo Kagyu split into four major branches after one transmission and eight minor branches after another. The history of transmission was a history of branching. There was also the kind of retrospectively compiled list of patriarchs that Chinese Pure Land used (Essay 10, Chapter 4). Tibet did not take this route, for reasons easy to imagine. Such a list carries neither Dharma authority nor property, whereas the plateau's schools held property. Behind all three solutions stood the same fact. Schools possessed estates, subjects, and armed forces. Succession here concerned property and political power first; the standing of legitimate transmission came second. Following Essay 10, Chapter 1, this supplies another piece of material for the large conjecture, without introducing a separate one. India's caste division and political fragmentation produced schools that judged one another's scriptures false. Unified China, with its channels of mobility, produced classifications distinguishing rank rather than authenticity. A plateau fragmented into estates produced a map of schools, one valley, one school, each holding its own mountain. Classification reproduced society again.¹

In the thirteenth century, Karma Kagyu supplied a fourth solution. Karma Pakshi was recognized as Düsum Khyenpa returned, and Rangjung Dorje succeeded as the third incarnation. Reincarnation moved from an individual case to an institution. The master dies, a child is sought, the child's recognition of objects from the previous life is tested, the child is enthroned and grows up, then dies, and the search begins again.² The doctrinal guarantees were ready to hand. Rebirth was a teaching shared by all Buddhism; a bodhisattva's return through the force of a vow was a Mahāyāna consensus; esoteric accounts of realization guaranteed that accomplished practitioners could control life and death. Combined, these added a new legal meaning to the old word "emanation."

To see what the invention solved, examine which two of the earlier costs it avoided at once. It did not rely on blood, so it was not confined to one surname. Any child from another family could be a Buddha. It did not rely on dividing the family through Dharma transmission, because there was only one successor. Dharma throne, estate, subjects, and donor network passed together to the same person. The labrang arose to meet this arrangement. The tulku's residence became a permanent institution, with stewards, treasurers, subordinate monasteries, and farms. The corporation did not die; it merely changed bodies.³ For the first time in Buddhist history, a religious community possessed a corporation in perpetuity. Chan's genealogy required renewed authorization in every generation; Sakya's bloodline was subject to reproduction and the supply of family members. The tulku system, by contrast, could never lack an heir in law. Tibet filled the vacuum of authority in Essay 2 completely with the doctrine of rebirth.

Placed within this volume's sequence of criteria, this is the fifth and final form of privatized certification. The Interlude gave us silence about the fruits of attainment; esoteric Buddhism assigned the signs of realization to the teacher; Chan had a master's approval; Pure Land verified birth at the deathbed. All four moved testing out of public view. Reincarnation appears to do the reverse. Certification is public. The child must identify the previous life's rosary and ritual implements before witnesses. The ceremony has spectators; the procedure has written rules. But what is public is the ceremony; the criterion is not. The labrang prepares the objects to be recognized and arranges the occasion of the test, and those who judge are the previous incarnation's stewards and disciples. The years and directions of the search are likewise decided by the labrang. Pure Land's verification lies on the other shore, where no one can go to challenge the claim. Reincarnation brings verification back to this shore and places it on a child who cannot yet speak. Those who speak for the child are precisely those who most need the child to exist. Essay 11, Chapter 3 said that China handed the verification of liberation over to Pure Land. Tibet goes further, turning verification into an office passed from one incarnation to the next. The miracle of recognizing objects is discounted as a victory narrative. The claim that this procedure was never interrupted because no child could be found in seven hundred years remains to be tested against a lineage-by-lineage record. The institutional inference is narrower: those who search do not want to fail to find one.

The center is the labrang, the enduring corporate institution; the five numbered steps are death, search, authentication, enthronement, and brief personal rule. The labrang arranges the objects, the occasion, and the judgment in authentication. The three crossed-out alternatives are hereditary succession confined to one surname, teacher-to-disciple succession that splits in each generation, and a list of patriarchs that carries no property. Here “division” concerns the institutional inheritance.

Chapter 2 expressly presents the recurring regency window as an institutional conjecture. “The heir is always an infant” describes the renewal of succession with a child, not an age maintained throughout an incumbent’s life; the cycle itself includes personal rule. The English timeline adds regular ticks, but neither image supplies a measured statistical series. The closing line calls this the ultimate answer to the succession problem: let authority itself return.

As required, I explicitly mark the following as this volume's conjecture and the source of this chapter's title. The tulku system is the most ingenious institution of power in Buddhist history. Its ingenuity lies not in solving succession, but in making succession take the form most advantageous to the permanent institution. The successor is always an infant. Every generation therefore entails a regency window of ten to twenty years. The regent always has power without bearing the sacred responsibility of the Dharma throne. Doctrine supplies all the guarantees for the arrangement; questioning the recognition procedure amounts to questioning rebirth itself.

First give the straightforward half of the account its full weight. This design need not have resulted from anyone's secret planning. It looks more like convergence through institutional evolution. The steadier a labrang, the longer its lineage survived. After several generations of elimination, the forms remaining all had strong labrangs. But origins do not change a thing's character. In a polity whose successor is always a minor, real power falls by default to the permanent administration. The nineteenth century in the next chapter will test this conjecture against history.

The last element of this system came from beyond the mountains. In 1247, Sakya Paṇḍita answered a summons to Liangzhou to meet Köden and laid out the procedure for Mongol administration of Tibet. Kublai appointed Phagpa state preceptor, then promoted him to imperial preceptor and put him in charge of the Bureau of Buddhist and Tibetan Affairs. Sakya thus governed Ü-Tsang for the Mongols. The History of the Yuan records that "the imperial preceptor's commands operated alongside imperial edicts in the western lands."⁴ This relationship has a name, mchod yon, the patron-priest relationship. The teacher supplies Dharma and legitimacy; the patron supplies soldiers and money. Compare it within this volume's sequence of relations between religion and government. Indian kings were donors, but did not use military force against a monastic community's opponents on its behalf. Chinese emperors stood above, state preceptors served at their appointment, and the Buddha was a war god (Essay 9, Chapter 3). The patron-priest relationship was a third kind of relation, with far deeper mutual dependence. Foreign conquerors needed Tibetan religion to legitimate the Mongol-Tibetan order. Tibetan schools needed armed force from beyond the mountains to overcome rivals in their own valleys. A rule consequently ran through the next four hundred years. The plateau produced no emperor of its own; every school went beyond the mountains to invite one in. Every intervention by outside power rearranged the schools' ranks. Sakya rose through the Mongols; as the Yuan declined, Phagmodru replaced it. The protagonist of the next rearrangement had not yet been born.⁵

Reincarnation solved succession; the patron-priest relationship solved military force. Each institution solved only part of the problem. Tsongkhapa's successors combined them and pushed them to their limit. The next chapter recounts Gelug's victory.

References¶