Time Travel in Tibet: collapsed empire

Mark Stevenson (academia.edu); Pat Macpherson, Ashley Wells (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

INTRODUCTION

The central soteriological [means of salvation] vision of Buddhism in Tibet is [allegedly] the same as that in Buddhism elsewhere: it is founded on the Four Noble Truths that describe cyclic existence (’khorba, “turning, going around,” Sanskrit saṃsāra, “continued wandering”) as pervaded by suffering (sdugbsngal), and it possesses instructions on the practices needed for the achievement of peace.

Nevertheless, as elsewhere, the Buddhist traditions of Tibet have been marked by developments that in some cases they shared with other Mahāyāna traditions, and others that can be identified as being specifically [uniquely] Tibetan.

The development of specifically Tibetan theories (lta ba), practices (sgrub thabs), and institutions (chos lugs, gzhung lugs, ’gro lugs) is, of course, what most stands out in phrases like “Tibetan Buddhism” or “Buddhism in Tibet.”

Nevertheless, the phenomena I explore in this chapter are instances of remarkable ways in which the history of Buddhism and its development in Tibet faced particular problems relating to time and history.

Looking into those problems has something to tell us about religion in Tibet now, in the past, and in the future (“the three times,” dus gsum), as well as about some more general problems in the study of religion. This is an “institutions” approach, rather than a doctrinal one, although the two are related.

There are a number of interesting things Tibetans have done with time over the ages, the three most obvious being, in rough chronological order:

• (1) canonical revelations known as tantras (Tibetan brgyud, continuum);
• (2) noncanonical revelations hidden in the landscape during Tibet’s early empire and discovered at a later date, or termas (gter ma, treasures); and
• (3) tulkus (sprul sku, “apparitional embodiments”), lines of "enlightened" teachers who continue to return and teach in human form for centuries. Focusing on tantra, terma, and tulku, three more or less well-known institutions that continue to generate curiosity about Buddhism in Tibet, is one way of accomplishing an overview of how Tibetan religion has been transmitted, how it has been renewed, and how it has been practiced over the centuries.

It will also provide insights into some of the historical processes underlying Buddhism’s development in Tibet and how well placed it is to continue in the immediate future.

Each of the three -- tantra, terma, and tulku -- may be understood as temporal technologies that enabled Buddhism in Tibet to flourish, but they pose a number of interesting problems for Tibetan religion in our own time, leading one to ask if Tibetan religion is about to face a crisis, what that question tells us about religion in general, and also what it says about our own time (in the sense of both this “twenty-first century” and our own construction of time including our relationship to it)….

Time in Buddhism, or any religious tradition, is not a simple matter (or at least it isn’t when scholars and mystics get hold of it: Eliade 1969; Wayman 1969; Tachikawa 1998), and neither is Buddhism’s development in Tibet...

TIME IN BUDDHISM

In addressing the question of time in this essay is interested in time in relation to soteriology [the study of doctrines of salvation] and “life-time,” rather than to questions of what time is made up of and whether or not it exists, and if it does exist, in what way it is real (questions Buddhist thinkers entertained in many places and times).

The discussion is going to get complicated enough without going too far into cosmology, and there are considerable differences around these questions within Buddhist tradition....

It is perhaps easiest and quickest to begin with a comparison. Buddhism takes a very different stance than Christianity, for example, in its general orientation to time, life, and eternity. Indeed, they head in opposite directions.

Christianity in the main sees each person as beginning at one point in time (when they are born) and ideally entering eternal life when they depart this world. The arrow of [linear] life-time begins at a single point and ideally goes forward forever, the proper destiny for a person being eternal life.

In the Buddhist traditions life has already been eternal. Neither time nor the chain of lives has a beginning, and the problem is how to bring cyclic existence [and all its suffering] to an end. While there are great aeons that are described as being to some extent cyclical, with universes and gods coming into and going out of existence, the mind-stream of individuals is beginningless, proceeding through an infinite number of lives and life-forms.

It is the beginningless series of lives that is to be brought to an end at the achievement of nirvana (mya ngan las ’das, "the transcendence of suffering"), the cessation of the causal chain that involves an individual in cyclic existence.

While there are debates in the tradition relating to the nature of karma and continuity (Sharma 1993), or the unchanging and unborn nature of the real (Prasad 1988), individuals turn through cyclic existence life after life; this is the general backdrop to the Indian worldview within which the Buddha’s four noble truths were developed, and the Buddha’s teaching makes little sense outside it.

Indeed, the requirement in the "Delineation of Monastic Discipline" (’Dul ba lung rnam ’byed, Sanskrit Vinaya-vibhaṅga) that the wheel of life (srid pa’i khor lo, Sanskrit bhava-cakra) be displayed in a temple (gtsug lha khang, Sanskrit vīhāra) is precisely “for the purpose of meditation upon the four noble truths” (Rechung 1989: 39).

Surrounded by impermanence – in the figure of death – those who fail to extinguish the cycle of ego-maintaining reactive emotions (desire, aversion, ignorance) continue endlessly to spin through the wheel as hell-beings, ghosts, and animals, rarely ever rising to a human or godly [deva] existence, rapidly descending again if they should fail to use a superior birth to attend to the task of awakening.

Ongoing study of the Tibetan manuscripts from the Dunhuang cave temples (a busy transcultural conduit of Buddhism north of Tibet, seventh to tenth centuries for Tibetan manuscripts) reveals that the conception of time held by the Tibetan imperial court and elite prior to the introduction of Buddhism was considerably different from both patterns described above, consisting of four great eras beginning with a happy time of humans and descending through three subsequent eras of degeneration when a new cycle of four eras was initiated through a revival of the cult honoring the king’s sacredness or divinity....

TANTRIC TIMELINES

Buddhism came to Tibet quite late, around about a thousand years after the Buddha’s passing. Ancient legend suggests evidence of earlier piecemeal contact, but there is no suggestion of any significant foothold in Tibetan culture until the reign of Songtsen Gampo (Srong btsan sgam po, circa 617–49/650), with a concerted translation program under way by the time of the reign of Tri Songdetsen (Khri Srong lde btsan, 755/756–97).

While China and Central Asia were initially important sources for much of the translation effort, there was at the same time a degree of prestige and authority given to Indian sources and teachers. Traditions concerning doctrinal debates at Samyé (Tibet’s first monastery, founded late eighth century) suggest the existence of a growing desire to avoid China in the context of Central Asian power machinations.

India, separated by the high Himalaya, allowed more selective cultural contact, and Buddhism’s origins in India were becoming emblematic of authenticity and textual authority, an impression that was only assisted by the rise of the Buddhist Pāla empire (750–1174) and its monastic-cum-tantric universities in northeastern India.

The late arrival of Buddhism in Tibet and the fact that it came at a time of dynamic religious activity in northern India and Central Asia has left modern historians of religion with a plethora of questions regarding the periodization of texts and doctrines, but it is unlikely that Tibetan converts in the eighth century saw things that way.

Not only had there been a flourishing array of doctrinal, cosmological, and ritual innovations since the passing of the Buddha – from which an entire new approach to Buddhist soteriology, the Mahāyāna, had developed – the entry of Buddhism into Tibet coincided with the appearance of the first self-conscious tantric Buddhist traditions in the Indian subcontinent in the mid- to late-seventh century (Davidson 2002: 24; Gray 2009: 2; Weinberger 2010: 138).

The Mahāyāna and the tantric traditions the Tibetans would come to call the Adamantine Vehicle (Sanskrit Vajrayāna) or the "Vehicle of Mantras" (Sanskrit Mantrayāna) entered Tibet at the same time... More

[The collapse of the Tibetan empire]

Loveable CIA Operative with the son of the former CIA chief, world-renowned religious figure and former Tibetan Emperor Tenzin Gyatso (14th Dalai Lama) and then-US Wannabe-Dictator George W. Bush with his adoring amateur art (AP).

The collapse of the Tibetan empire after the assassination of emperor Lang Darma (gLang dar ma, r. 838–842) in 842 had a number of significant consequences for the direction of the development of Buddhism in Tibet.

What centralizing authority had been present in the imperial court at Lhasa (Rasa) disappeared, taking with it the sponsorship it had been able to offer the monasteries. The collapse of the imperial administration also meant the disbanding of the army in a manner that Ronald Davidson has compared to the situation in Western Europe after the Black Death – dominated by wandering bands of armed men (Davidson 2005: 18).

The breakup of organized monastic religion also meant a temporary retardation of Tibetan interaction with Buddhist north India, which in turn meant that the tantras that were popular after the revival of Buddhist institutions in the middle of the eleventh century – that is to say the tantras of the newly emerging indigenous lineages, or New Orders (Sarma, gsar ma) – emphasized practices that did not exist in the earlier period (Davidson 2005: 216).

Unexpectedly, the breakup of the empire also cleared the way for the full indigenization of Buddhism, what Davidson has styled, again drawing European parallels, a “Tibetan Renaissance.” In Tibetan historiography this new era is known as “the later spread of the doctrine” (bstan pa phyi dar), in contrast to that of the imperial period, “the earlier spread of the doctrine” (bstan pa snga dar).

The authority, organization, and resources for regrouping would eventually come from the old aristocratic clans, but this did not end up being directed toward a revival of centralized royal institutions; rather, local lords competed to establish themselves as the new Buddhist authorities while merchant families dominated the trans-Himalayan trade in texts.

The fate of the original royal line remains something of a mystery, perhaps a sign of the royal household’s tenuous reliance on other aristocratic families. Those same aristocratic families were eventually responsible for investing in bringing a renewal of Buddhist teachings from India, and as fate would have it, the flourishing Buddhist Pāla empire was still waiting for them not all that far south of the Himalayas, the number of its monastic universities now expanded.

At the same time, it would not be long before Buddhism in India and Central Asia was annihilated by Muslim invasions – one of the stimuli for the appearance of the millenarian Wheel of Time Tantra (Sanskrit Kālacakra-tantra) traditions in the eleventh century – while Mongolian armies took control of the territory to Tibet’s north.

Before he left this earth (or was hounded out of Tibet), Padmasambhava is believed by Tibetans to have secreted a large number of texts in the landscape of their country as “treasures” (gter ma) to be rediscovered at a future time when they would be of greatest spiritual benefit. Probably the most famous of these is The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bar do thos grol, “Liberation through Hearing in the Intermediate State”), first discovered by Karma Lingpa (Karma gling pa, 1352–1405) in the fourteenth or fifteenth century.

While terma revelations were later developed into a threefold typology of “earth,” “knowledge,” and “pure vision” depending on the form of access the recipient (gter ston, treasure revealer) was given, the earliest revelations were associated with material remains left from the old empire (Davidson 2005: 213–215; Doctor 2005: 40). The sudden “discovery” of treasures in the tenth century probably emerged out of disagreement regarding the relative roles of lay and monastic interests in the “later dissemination.”

Davidson argues that the earliest “discoverers” of treasures in the tenth and eleventh centuries were lay mantrins (practitioners of secret mantra) with old aristocratic connections who had kept the embers of Buddhism glowing and who were now marginalized with the return of monasticism. They were committed to an older vision of the Buddhist tradition that allowed an alternative to the new Indian traditions and translations dominated by more influential parties (the translation effort required privileged access to resources to fund travel and expertise):

[I]n the late tenth century the ancient Tibetan traditions were suddenly faced with alternative Sarma voices… in response, the older aristocratic lineage holders began to build on a practice that had already been initiated by Central Asian and Chinese monks, that texts could be revealed in the target civilization. (Davidson 2005: 216)

The Tibetan Empire was once vast.

The treasure texts of the Nyingma Great Perfection were more than just one more innovation in the presentation of the Buddha’s teachings. They were keyed into the traditional protectors and autochthonous spirits of Tibet’s landscape, they offered a new “tradition” that identified the Buddhist emperors and other key figures of the former dynasty with Buddhist deities, they bore the imprimatur of the great Buddhist emperor Tri Songdetsen, and most important of all they opened a door of continuing communication with Padmasambhava, Vimalamitra, and other revered guides to spiritual development, in the process having Padmasambhava raised up as a “second buddha,” a status that would eventually be accepted by all Tibetans whatever their denominational allegiances.

In essence the terma are important to the Nyingma (rNying ma, “old order”) traditions in providing continuous renewal to the authority of Padmasambhava, bypassing the India so important in the New Order traditions while opening up a new space for spiritual expression.

Later treasures also develop an intricate mythology through the hagiographies of Padmasambhava’s 25 great disciples, among them Emperor Tri Songdetsen. At the same time, with Indian models driving intellectual fashion the Nyingma adherents were faced with the irony of the “old” becoming unconventional… in more ways than one!

Given the shaky historical ground on which tantric texts stood, it was unlikely that opponents were going to want to push too hard in questioning the termas’ credentials (Doctor 2005: 39).

Even in early Buddhist traditions there are anticipations of the decline of the true teachings after 500 years and their virtual disappearance until “rediscovery by a future Buddha” (Williams 2009: 12), and it may even be said the Mahāyāna tradition was founded upon Nāgārjuna’s (ca. 150–250) retrieval of the Perfection of Wisdom from the realm of the nāga serpents.

We find with the terma tradition, not for the first time in history, fideistic thinkers using skepticism as a fundamental defense in their arguments for faith. (Davidson 2005: 212; Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000: 163–165).

Treasures allowed the authority of the past to continue on as a physical, living presence and influence in the present, many terma contained prophesies that allowed the past to be extended into the future, and in the present they were not averse to incorporating or imitating new Indian material taken from the New Orders. When the terma traditions of the Nyingma were eventually taken up by the other orders, the holy land of India was no longer a viable source of renewal.

Empires, countries, city-states rise and fall.

The Buddhist Pāla empire (750–1174), which had ruled in ancient Bengal [modern Bangladesh, the southeastern extent of the Tibetan Empire] for over 400 years, came to an end, and with further portioning up of India between Muslim powers by the thirteenth century Buddhism in India had practically disappeared. As the influence of the subcontinent receded, the deification of the old religious kings of Tibet in the terma texts as earthly embodiments of buddhas and bodhisattvas would have consequences for native Tibetan conceptions of saintliness.

TIME: THE SPACE FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF A HIERARCHY
With the influx of Indian Buddhist doctrines during the later spread of the doctrine in Tibet, new schools or orders of Buddhism emerged centered on particular lineages of teachers and the texts and practices they transmitted.

The Sakya and Kagyu orders have their origins in this new fluorescence in eleventh-century Tibet, and their emergence as “new orders” also had the effect of consolidating the earlier tradition as the Nyingma (“old order”). The Gelug order was founded much later by followers of the great reformer Tsongkhapa (Tsong kha pa blo bzang grags pa, 1357–1419) in the early fifteenth century, but it also inherited the monastic mantle of the Kadampa (bKa’ gdams pa) order -- whose roots are found in the eleventh-century missionary activity of Atiśa already noted above.

There were other movements, many later salvaged through the nonsectarian movement (ris med) of the nineteenth century, but that these four traditions have gone on to remain active in the twenty-first century is testament to the importance of the eleventh-century foundations of the Tibetan traditions. It may be one of the ironies of history that this flourishing was a result of the disappearance of strong centralized power.

At the end of the twelfth century India may have been declining as a source of Buddhist inspiration, but Tibet was poised to become the new nexus of Buddhist learning. Before long the increasingly powerful Mongolian khans and princes to Tibet’s north were taking an interest in Tibetan learning and territory.

A Mongol invasion of Tibet in 1244 resulted in an alliance between the Sakya order and Mongol power, with the Sakya hierarch Chögyal Pagpa (Chos rgyal ’Phags pa, 1235–80) becoming “imperial preceptor” (ti shri, Chinese dishi, 帝师) to Qubilai Qan [Kubla Khan?] (1215–94), and his nephew being made “chief ruler” (dpon chen) with authority over the thirteen “myriarchies” of Tibet under Mongol overlordship from 1268.

This was not the first time Tibetans had served as imperial preceptors in lands to their north (Sperling 1987: 34): the Kagyu order had been cultivating a relationship with the Tangut court (Mi nyag, Chinese Xixia, 西夏) just prior to the first attacks following Činggis Qan’s [Genghis Khan?] (1162–1227) coronation in 1206 (the Tangut capital eventually falling in 1227, the year of Činggis’s death).

It is probably no coincidence that at this time the Karmapa hierarchs of the Kagyu order emerged as a formal system of reincarnating lamas, the first such reincarnation line in what would become an institution that remains unique to Tibetan Buddhism.

It is difficult not to see the emergence of the tulku institution in terms of ongoing rivalry between the Kagyu and Sakya orders at this time in relation to larger powers outside Tibet... More