And we're good to go. OK. Fantastic.
I thought today I would start the session with a little anecdote as our last week speaker, Kate Fitzgerald and today's speaker in the comic,
I met both of them in St. Petersburg at the Ice White Tea Conference and to celebrate a team.
And back then I remember that Ian was just about to finish his speech. He was clean shaven back then.
And I think he was a bit on the verge of going a bit mad.
He was just like, let us all be over with and now skipping forward.
Two years later, PTSD submitted. One of his supervisors is also turning to talk.
So probably seems to be quite a success.
And also this coming months, we will hear more about or read more about it in a few subsequent articles that it's going to publish.
And one of these articles, which is still in draught form, will be titled The Mortality of the Dalai Lama and its scriptural sources.
A study in Tibetan Buddhist political theology, which he will talk about today.
Yeah. Right now, he's having his post doctorate in Berkeley from.
Right. Yes. Yes. And until everything's back to normal, he is in lockdown and beautiful Florida and.
Well, that's that's me. Take it away. Yeah.
Hello to everybody. Thanks, Daniel. So much for putting us together. And thank you to all of you for coming.
This is a really deep and robust audience. I don't think I've ever talked to this many Tibetan studies people at one time.
So I don't know if it makes it easier or stranger to do it over a video screen.
I apologise. My laptop is a little bit on the low tech side. And there are a couple of kind of specific things about this particular talk that are.
I should just kind of give these caveats in advance.
I was really grateful that Daniel reached out to me when he did because I've been working on this article for really since January.
In another sense, it goes all the way back to my dissertation and it's kind of an elaboration of stuff I first picked up there.
But for reasons I'll explain in a second. It's actually a two part article and the first part is done and kind of in the machinery at this point.
And this is the second half of it. So for one thing, it's it's really quite it's rough around the edges and a little bit on alongside.
So I'm going to try to jump back and forth between my draught and speaking more extemporaneously.
But I'll try my best to kind of keep it at 40 minutes and I might have to jump over some sections here and there.
And secondarily, being the basically the second half of a two part study of these arguments about the fiscal allama.
You know, I mean, I kind of bracket the first half of that and I'll give you a kind of an on ramp into what I'm talking about.
But it's going to be a little bit of a steep on ramp because I'm sort of dropping you in media race and talking about this.
The second part of of a kind of like a one two punch that he gives one one half
being about divinity in the second half being about the Dalai Lama's mortality.
And it's really the mortality I want to talk about because. Well, I'm still working on it at the moment.
And it's beating my head against a little bit.
So it's a perfect opportunity for me to show you exactly what he's saying and why I think it's so interesting.
So because this is a I'm going to jump my screen over here to a PowerPoint.
Given the video nature of this talk,
I'm going to talk over the PowerPoint and instead of just kind of audio visual supplement to actually deposited quite a bit of text in this slideshow,
and at times it's just gonna kind of map what I'm talking about myself.
And partly I'm doing this because I have the understanding that this is being recorded.
And therefore, if I jump over something really quickly here, you don't have time to kind of take in everything I'm saying at once.
You can go back later and posit and take another look at it.
So I'm trying to take advantage of that to sort of get away with saying more than I really have time to say.
OK, so let's let's just jump right in here. Haddaway.
And. There you go. OK.
Just some basic context for this talk.
As most of you, I'm sure you're aware that the fist Ilyana Nilo son got, so was the inaugural role of the central Tibetan state founded in 60-40 to.
And like other rulers across Asia, he assumed a royal persona defined in Buddhist terms here,
refracted by the particulars of Tibet's own history, institutions and doctrines.
Now, of course, the basis for the Dalai Lama's kingship was his identification with Tachira,
who had longstanding associations with past Tibetan rulers and was the motive force
in national narratives about the genesis and salvation of the Tibetan people.
So building on these inherited connexions to look at TESHA over the next half century,
this course of divine kinship developed around the fifth Ilyana in large part through his own efforts.
But nowhere did it attain more elaborate and manifest expression than at the hands of the deceased.
So his pupil, lieutenant and successor and power.
In the aftermath of a dilemmas death, the Dessy worked together various ideas about the dying llama into a single vast tapestry.
You combine illogical doctrines with cosmological frameworks, historical narrative, geneology and prophecy,
promoting an official portrait of the Dalai Lama as both Buddha Bodey saw the reborn human being and religious ruler of Tibet.
Now for the Dalai Lama, for the Dessy, the Dalai Lama's identity being both of Tachira and Tibet's king was a complex phenomenon
rather than a simple equation between the God on one side and the ruler on the other.
In the deputy's text, when he represented the Dalai Lama,
to speak of the king at all was to speak a long, continuous Kosmo theological historical narrative.
One that began with the unseen more than human forces that stood behind an animated Tibetan kingship and
proceeding through a sequence of steps to end on the active and embodied life and death of a human king,
which by nature of being human, was also corrupted and finite.
Now, as I mentioned, pay developing my presentation of this argument in two parts,
and this is simply because the account the DSE gives us so extensive and so versed in various bodies of Buddhist thought and
collections of texts that really do justice to the depth of his argument and all that he had to say about the Dalai Lama.
It helps to break it apart and kind of treat separately these two halves of this larger spectrum of the narrative of the Dalai Lama as Tibet's king.
So I devoted the entire article to working out the basically the argument for divinity.
And this has to do primarily with.
Sitting together, a pastiche of different ways of talking about Tachira as Buddha as body sort or technically as multiple bodhisattvas,
and then the various ways that those bodhisattvas engaged with the human world through projections and rebirths.
So now we turn to the second half of this, and that's what I'm going to talk about today.
This is something I'm kind of a work in progress at the moment.
These are the deaths, these arguments about what I would just refer to us as the mortality of Tibet's kin,
namely his existence as a living human being who appears to suffer and die.
And really, everything hinges on what that means to appear to suffer and die.
And so that the discourse in this case is basically taking up various ideas about karma and purification.
This is one of the slides I'm just gonna dump in and move on very quickly.
You can go back over this later in the queue and I am happy to get into some of the details.
But just to give you a sense, these are the the main texts of the is all written in the 16 nineties where you you
find in sort of shorter or longer form a version of this narrative of the Dalai Lama.
It's both divine and mortal. And so each text has its own particularities and addresses different topical matters.
But all of them typically at the beginning of the text, but in various ways reiterate in some form the same argument.
Both the contents of the argument and the kind of the form of how it's put together.
So when we talk about mortality, it's really these four text in particular that you find the most robust versions of this argument.
And I'll just say, like a couple of things about each of these in turn, that such a charge.
This is the text that really woke me up to this argument. And I dealt with this to some extent, my dissertation.
This is a Dusty's instructions for a holiday that he designed as a kind of a capstone to his larger
efforts to purify the the karma of the fifth Dalai Lama through various works and productions,
which I'll talk about in a second.
So most of this text is basically how to put together this holiday, but about twenty to twenty five folios of it is the theory behind it,
which basically means how the Dalai Lama is about his sort and how this body, Soffer, also appears to grow sick,
feel pain, die and require some kind of response on account of the karma that that indicated the the really the richest
and most textually sourced form of the argument is going to be in this text that jumbling in chief carjack.
And that's that's what I gave you the outline of as a handout.
This is his catalogue of the post to the palace to put on my bow and all the chapels and statuary
inside centring on the jumbling and cheek the stupa that the Dalai Lama's remains were interred in.
And the entire second chapter of this, which addresses basically the purpose for producing all these works,
is itself the argument for the Dalai Lama's divinity and mortality over about 60, 65 folios or so, 30 of which cover this topic of mortality.
I'm going to talk about today.
They lost, of course, a is a slightly shorter text that that recapitulates the same structure of a downlinking sheet car shock.
It's set up in 13 sections and reiterates a lot of the same arguments and in greatly condensed form.
And then it goes on to talk about the the the various core that this the Barkhor and the link for and so forth, circumambulation routes around LOSSA.
And then probably the most accessible version of this is the Bidar Serbo,
which I think is a pretty well-known text and includes a long appendix on the fifth Dalai Lama.
That's structured around the rubric of the sort of 12 deeds of the life of a Buddha.
And so this is prefaced with a long discussion of the question of divinity, of who and what Lukie Tachira is.
And when you get to the 12th of those twelve deeds, the kind of final act of a dying Lama's life,
that's where he inserts the version of this, argued about mortality.
So I'm going to be providing quotes from these texts throughout what I talk about here.
So if I could basically summarise the overall thesis in the broadest possible strokes,
it would go something like this starts from the claim that architecture is, in fact already a Buddha.
You know, he's already attained Buddhahood. And the DSU meant that both in a kind of absolute sense.
That's where he typically starts. Hit. He'll say something like, yeah, dominance on games.
And he's always already sort of primordia primordial.
He already became a Buddha.
Possessed of all before Chi is of a Buddha, but typically he focussed more on the fact that even historically, albeit very, very long ago.
Nine hundred and ninety one Mohawk Helper's ago, he also publicly tests are also basically became a a some Yorkston Buddha.
And that's that's an idea that he has basically derived from one of the past life stories of something Gompa that's found in the money Cumbo.
And one of the consequences. So then it's only second that this this being who already became a Buddha,
then kind of provisionally readapting Bodies' outperforms one of them being the Makana Telstra who took
on an eleven headed form and went to Portilla and then started to act upon jump with people in Tibet.
All that is kind of secondary to this prior Buddhahood.
And so one of the callers of this is is that it basically bifurcates, I believe you, tesha, as role and allows.
Absolutely. Tachira to kind of cover Tibetan kingship both in a direct and indirect fashion.
So in one sense, the Dessy was really arguing that every past Tibetan king, all 46, according to the formulation that he uses, was absolutely Tachira.
And that the theological basis for this is and that is in the current like bomb.
Actually, one of the one of the stories in the current BOM.
And then a narrower subset of that is what we would call the direct reverse of Abdollahi TESHA Equality Cipha.
And that's the. This is the kind of familiar list that you'll find in some of the desis texts.
And he counted 36 lives outside of Tibet. 34 of them basically coming out of the current bomb, maybe 33, I forget.
And then in Tibet, you have this formulation of 10 of the Pergo kings and then seven a dozen cities after that.
And those seven Punti dozen cities are basically a combination of a series of four projections of
tree song descent that are all sort of based on readings of basically prophecies in the ending.
So that's younger around, you know, assayer Guru Chong thing, not the pension.
Penny Wong Girl and the Uncle Day, Tashi Tokyo. So that's a formulation that actually antedates the Dalai Lama.
And he was slotted in as the fifth of those five projections of three song ditzen.
And then you add to that Pocker. And John Donne.
And then somebody named PAMA Vadra, who is basically dreamed about by the third Dalai Lama.
And that's how you get seven. And then this would be followed in turn by seven consecutive Dalai Lama's.
This is a really common formulation in this period that there would be kind of
an uninterrupted series of of dramatic displays and in the robes of a monk.
This is something that a person it's published on already. Do you find a lot in the desis texts?
So all that I'm basically going to bracket and just remember in the back of your head,
that sort of behind the body life of the fifth time on as a human being is this kind of large apparatus of divinity,
starting with Buddhahood in its most absolute sense. And moving up to the projected active work of Bodhisattvas.
Now, the argument from Natality basically sets up a kind of a dialectic thesis and antithesis where the Dessy says,
well, given that divinity, as everybody knows, perfective beings are essentially,
by definition incapable of bearing karma, the very what it means to sort of attain that state is to have uprooted ones,
the causes of one's birth and ageing and sickness and death.
And therefore, one only takes Berthon and appears to die as a kind of a wilful act.
Nevertheless, he insisted, even Buddhism bodhisattvas still exhibit signs of suffering.
And he meant that in a realistic way, not just as a mere appearance, but as something that had some kind of an ontological purchase in the world,
and at least to the extent that it demanded some response on the part of the state.
And the key term he used to explain this was this term residual karma, laggy karma.
But the apparent suffering of embodied deities, namely the fifth Dalai Lama, was proof that they still had laghi dogma or leftovers of their karma.
Yet to be purified. And that's an ongoing process.
So that's what I'm gonna try to I'll step you through the testes argument of how he basically puts together this claim.
First, let me show you how he says this himself. This is. So these are ideas that are reiterated throughout his corpus.
But usually it takes him 10, 15 folios to put it all together.
And it's easy to lose the thread of the argument in the meantime. Occasionally, he says everything in one place.
This is a good example of that. So this is from the top to Chatree. And I'll just read this.
It's great being is essentially at a level of perfection equivalent to all Buddhas.
However, apart from that, as he appears before others in the purview of those, he's to tame as the body sort of blokey Tachira,
he puts on performances that accord with whomever he is taining for the sake of beings here in Tibet,
amongst whom the five forms of degeneracy are rampant.
He has assumed the form of an intentionally reborn projection as the Dalai Lama in the garb of over yet king.
So that's basically the divinity side of the equation.
And I'm happy to clarify there's a lot of technical terminology there that has a kind of meaning behind it,
which I can clarify in the Q&A if you're interested. So this brings us to the second half, by the way.
As you can see, if you're following along in the Tibetan, this is basically one long sentence.
I've broken it apart just to make it easier to understand. But this flows as is like one coherent idea.
So he says as such, in so far as all great arias have utterly relinquished the causes of affliction.
Therefore, their effects, like birth, ageing, illness and death do not obtain and acts of accumulation and purification are therefore unnecessary.
Nevertheless, an indirect sense in they art sense, as was the case for our own,
but the shocking many who gave predictions about his own residual karma in the
veneer of a of us do and proclaimed as much in scriptures like the rotten occlude,
the collection. It is thought that there may be some quantity of residual karma that still requires purification.
So the Dalai Lama is a deity who has utterly relinquished all causes of suffering.
And there's no sense in which any kind of karmic purification is necessary.
However, at the same time, it absolutely is necessary and there is some residual karma that still requires purification.
So here's just another quick example. This is this is how the Dessy.
This is the topic statement of his entire discussion of this issue in the tumbling Ganesha carjack.
The sort of supreme area obloquy Castra,
who intentionally comes into the world on behalf of living beings and who has assumed the persona of a annunciate king as the fifth Dalai Lama,
in the true sense, lacks any calming observations that are yet to be cleansed. However, it is explained in many sutures and tantrums.
Basically, he's saying,
I'm going to now lay out all the sources where this is talk about it is still explained that they will still purify minor things,
for instance, by physical ailments like headaches or limb and joint pain, even bad dreams.
So so this is basically how he sets up. This is like the hinge between the two sides of his argument.
And like I said, it's kind of a punch counterpunch where he he advances a very well sourced and deep series of claims
about the perfection standing behind the Dalai Lama and then rolls it all back again and says,
actually, it's entirely the opposite. He absolutely still needs purification.
And so what I'm going to do now is basically first give you a little bit of historical
context as to what the Dessy was up to in these two decades at the end of the 17th century.
And that's both for clarification and just simply also because it directly relates
to the decisions he made about how to articulate the Dalai Lama's mortality. And then I'm going to step through this three.
There's three parts of his argument for basically this claim that purification is still necessary.
He kind of brings together three different ways of talking about karma. And I'll I'll just talk a little about each of those in turn.
And so for me just to step back and explain some of the stakes of this, for me,
obviously the the primary objective is just to shed some light on on this really rich body of materials
that talk about the fifth Dali Lama as Tibet's ruler and as an embodiment of Telstra in ways that can,
I think, add to our general understanding of the central Tibetan state.
To give some back onto some of the works that they performed and to try to start to do
the work of tying this kind of ideological legacy into the 18th century and beyond.
Secondarily, I'm interested in in trying to make a case at that.
Basically, the question of kingship for the Dessy was an intellectual and a practical concern, not just a means to other ends.
And what I mean by that is simply that the very presence of this kind of level of detail in his argument for me raises questions
that are kind of insufficiently addressed by taking an instrumental or a functionalist approach to the fact of divine kingship.
In other words, it's one thing to say that the ruler is a duty.
But but it raises this question of why did he do it this way? Why did he put together this constellation of tax?
The way he did, what was he actually trying to say? Bye bye.
Why did he devote so much effort and attention and kind of intellectual energy to to stitching together the case in the way that he did?
So it's really the meaning of the particularity of the case. It has has kind of transfixed me.
And so in reviewing these sources, I kind of want to make the case this is something I'll try to get to in the end of the talk if there's time.
I want to make a case of reading that Jesse is a theorist of what is kingship.
And what I mean is that it's, of course, true that he devoted much of his energy to promoting the image of the king.
And kind of embellishing and elaborating and speaking on behalf of the authority of the king.
But in the process, he also availed himself of the rich intellectual resources of the Buddhist tradition
in order to think in creative ways about the very possibility of royal authority.
But the very question of what it means that a king is both himself and more than himself at the same time.
And for me, that's a really fascinating question, because it's it's kind of a perennial issue.
The duality of kingship is very well known from the from the European case, of course.
But it's a great object of interest in anthropological literature as well.
And one finds instances of dual kingship in many manifestations across the world.
And it's still kind of a theoretical question today that we find various articulations of.
And I see the DSE is in his own way, speaking not in a Buddhist way, to those theoretical conversations about kingship that he was trying to clarify.
The general problem at stake in even talking about the king.
We're talking about the authority wielded by the king is is something that's both more than human and nothing other than human at the same time.
So that's kind of a personal interest of mine. And I see the DST as a good interlocutor in that point.
So with that being said, let me step through some of the kind of historical background here.
And again, I'll basically bracket the deeper history of the links between TESHA and the Dalai Lama,
which are well-known from a lot of other scholarship, including by many people who were privy to this conversation today.
So I'll just take up the picture where it sort of enters, where the Dessy enters the picture in roughly seven, sixteen seventy nine.
So the Dessy is as a ruler who is both ruling and writing in the interregnum between the death of the fifth Dalai Lama,
the centre, the sixth Dalai Lama. You could say that he faced two connected tasks,
one being to promulgate the official narrative of the Dalai Lama and the other to come to terms somehow with his decline and death.
Knowing in his writings that there's a pattern that death after the Buddha, shocking when he's part in your vonna.
And this is a political statement as much as a theological one. And what I mean by that is that it's not just that the Dessy sort of put forward
the book of Shocking Money is kind of the archetypal model for conceiving of
the sort of dual nature of a divinity who lives and dies and therefore is a model
for how to understand the Dalai Lama's own sort of decision to end his life.
But equally, at the same time, it was a model for the transfer of authority that occurred from the fifth Ikoma to the DSE.
And so so the basically the DSE drew a parallel between, for instance, if you look at the part of onis future,
this shocking many anticipating his own demise, transfers authority or responsibility for his teachings to his disciple.
My Cacioppo and says you will become the. He says you will become the ground and the support on which these teachings will flourish.
And the.
He said that's exactly what's happening again here, that the Dalai Lama is sort of bequeathing upon me responsibility for the Tibetan government.
So in a sense that he saw a direct kind of morphological equivalency between the Buddha's,
bequeathed all of his religion to his disciples in anticipation of death and the Dalai Lama's sort of transfer of
political authority over both administrative sides of government to the Dessy in anticipation of his own death.
So, of course, this has a lot of hindsight in it.
This is the Dessy writing in the sixty nineties saying that it was clear to him that the Dalai Lama knew
he was going to die and mirrored shocking when he put it by passing on political authority to the Dessy.
So upon receiving his mandate in sixty seventy nine, the Dessy then ruled more or less singlehandedly over the last two decades of the 17th century.
And as is well known, he was a prolific author. Not only wrote field changing works on astronomy and medicine,
but he also commented extensively in the Dalai Lama, including on the circumstances of his decline in death.
Amongst other things,
he noted the debilitating pain in his extremities and joints that had sporadically afflicted the Dalai Lama over the last decade of his life,
calling for bouts of convalescence, medical treatments and longevity rituals.
And also that the Dalai Lama's deathbed instructions, including the instruction to conceal his death,
the circumstances of his last meditation, his comportment at the moment of departure, and all the attendant signs and omens.
So the fact that this death was kept a secret is also very well known.
The death he does, he does give some details about what took place.
But, you know, so they they always alleged that the Dalai Lama was the one who instructed them to do so.
But sort of rather awkwardly, nobody ever thought to ask or how long they should do this.
So while the Dalai Lama was in his took down, they actually DSE and the other confidence.
Picked four possible options and then performed the divination to decide what to do.
And the way the decision came down was to wait until the enthronement of the next Dalai Lama.
Now, in his text, I'll just add as a kind of parenthetical.
In some of his Texas Dessy says that actually he was really thinking of a 12 year interval, one full cycle of years.
And he he tried to give a precedent for this in stories of tree song gets.
And his son, Moonah Tempo is as a kind of a model for sort of keeping secret the death of one king over a certain period of time.
And he noted basically that by by 60, 94, four people were already starting to get word of this news.
And so this was his way of justifying some of the major acts that he took starting around sixteen ninety four,
including implementing the top to chairman holiday.
That that this was in some ways the kind of formal culmination of of keeping the secret, although, of course,
as is well known, it's really only in 60, 90, 60, 60, 97 that he had officially addressed this issue.
So I can't really get into that more here, unfortunately.
What I really want to do is go back and come back to April 16, eighty two, and point out that really.
As soon as the Dalai Lama entered his final meditation, they launched a practical programme for dealing with his death.
And this included a series of responses that included prayers, rites and sponsored offerings at various sites.
Now, of course, in the beginning, the need to keep the secret drastically limited the size and the scope of what they performed.
Now, this is something that Jesse mentions a large tax and a they sort of hid the fact that they were performing
rights for a dead person by insisting that these were basically pujas on behalf of somebody who was still alive.
Nevertheless, the Dessy kept accounts of what they were up to in all of these intervening years and
how much it cost to sort of undertake this overall effort to do right by the deceased.
And this included not just ritual services, but also material productions, especially Kexin and statues.
So just to give you an example, from the period 16, eighty two to sixty ninety three,
the sum total, everything that they did on behalf of the Fifth Allama was just about.
It was about nine hundred and fifty thousand song of Silver. And by the valuation of the Silver Song is equal to 18 Kele by the green standard.
So that's roughly 17 million cattle equivalent of green. And then for the sake of comparison.
The labourers who are constructing the Poterba Palace were basically divided into different artisans guilds,
and that sort of supervisors are headmen of each of those groups.
So the carpenters or the coppersmiths or the stone masons, they had a monthly allotment of about six to 10 kallikrein per month.
And so that's for the bosses in charge. Everybody else got less.
So not only is this a pretty extra having an expense, but actually what they did after the fact,
starting in sixteen ninety four was even more extravagant than that. And the central contributions were the stumbling and cheap stupor that was built
inside the reconstructed part of the palace and enshrined the Fifth Island's remains.
And that Soacha shammo the great worship assembly holiday, which was effectively a giant act of puja to worship.
But I'll honour and purify his karma. And so that stupa alone cost another million song right off the bat.
And then when you add up all the other expenses, it goes way higher. Just a quick audio visual, very quick visual interlude here.
Just this is a really wonderful mural from inside the hotel, the palace.
This is the torture chamber. Holiday. And kind of in a sort of hypothetic.
So this is the event that took place on the last day of of a week long holiday where there was a
procession of monks starting from the the Joe Kong and then basically circling all the way around Lhasa.
Out to the post below where they would kind of be can't for the day and perform rituals.
And then back by way of Rama a and ending at the joking again.
So so this kind of envisions you can see the end of the parade is just coming out of the of the courtyard,
the same Tarawa and the banners at the front have made it more or less all the way back again.
This would have taken about a thousand people to perform. And this is a little bit of a digression.
I shouldn't waste time on this, but since given the context of this talk, I think it's nice to just show that the Pitt Rivers Museum has some really
wonderful photos of performances of this exact ceremony in the 20th century,
both in the Chatmon project, Spencer Chapman photographs and Hugh Richardson's photographs as well.
And you can actually pretty easily match up parts of the photographs with parts of this mural from roughly sixteen ninety five.
So here you have the drummers who were in the vanguard of the procession.
Here you have the banners. Basically, I think there were fifteen people holding each of five colours of different banners.
Now, this is the very end of the procession where you have these great masked.
These are the four Guardian kings and the 12 Yorkshire generals from the the biological researcher, I believe.
And here's my favourite. This is. There's several places where the the searching the procession amongst is basically
a kind of amalgamation of different ritual systems from various bodies of texts.
And several of them called for an elephant, which I believe in the Desi's time they used puppets or paper maché.
But the in the 20th century, the Dylon actually had an elephant that was a gift from the Maharajah.
And so here's a great photograph where you can actually see the elephant in the ceremony.
So there are a lot more photos of this in the Oxford collection, which are really, really interesting photographs.
In here, this is just a rare image from the murals in the hotel. This is an image where you can see the pope on marble still in construction.
You almost always see it in its completed form. So it's it's very hard to find images of what the palace looked like beforehand.
And you can see here's the roof of the pop block on which would have been the original
kind of cresting element of the palace with the Popolo Cacheris statue inside.
And ultimately with the Red Palace. The fifth all along this tomb would have its own roof right here.
And we can actually date is pretty well, because you see here,
there's a there's an incident where somebody dropped a rock in it and it killed a guy, fell on his head.
And that happened in September 16, 92. So this is roughly how far along they were in September of sixteen ninety two.
OK, so now back to my blocks of text. Now, the reason I've gone through all this historical material is,
is that it really has a crucial lesson for our purposes of thinking about the theoretical side of this discussion.
And that's that doesn't justify this entire Cornucopia productions as a necessary means of dealing with the enormous debt.
In Buddhist parlance, their combined function was the purification of his karmic observations.
All of these large scale works and all the accompanying objects that were constructed, such as statues, text scrolls, murals, chapels,
ritual implements, sponsored rites and so on, comprise one monumental judged gesture of worship for the sake of the departed ruler.
So to put this another way, the state was pouring its resources into forms of public participation in the fate of the king.
The Dessy was making a strong case that the Dalai Lama's divinity in no way negated the felt reality of his suffering and death,
nor the accompanying obligation to recognise that death and ensure a TESHA is continuing attention to Tibet through petitions, praises and offerings.
Such as to acknowledge that the king's human life was something real, or at least as real as the responses it demanded,
which employed physical bodies and tangible things, erected lasting edifices of brick and stone, and expended staggering quantities of gold and great.
But it bears repeating that this forthright investment in the Dalai Lama's identity as
a human being runs directly counter to the bedrock assertion that the king is a god.
The state's efforts to elevate the ruler precipitated a seemingly intractable conflict between theory and practise.
In other words, in so far as the king was really a god, no responses ought to have been necessary at all.
But how in that case, was that higher power ever to become visible?
After all, it's precisely through discourse, monument and spectacle that royal superiority manifests itself as might wealth,
beneficence, grandeur, Air Edition and so on. And there's the reverse problem, too.
If these lavish contributions by state and society and more poignantly, the Dalai Lama's own personal suffering and death,
if these were to have any meaning and purpose than in what sense could this king still be a got?
So this, in a nutshell, is the political theological problem that the DNC confronted, given the cosmic agency standing behind both Crown and King.
In what sense could the human Dalai Lama also grow old, suffer and die? In specific terms, this was a question of karma.
How is it that a being who is beyond karma can still exhibit all the telltale signs of karma?
And as a kind of a corollary, what ought to be done about it?
What sort of response was necessary? Now, to generalise the point, there is kind of a larger question behind this.
How is it that true divinity and apparent mortality relate to one another such that they qualify the same being without contradiction,
but also without obscuring or assimilating one another in the process?
And what I mean by that is that the sort of fundamental problem of the duality of kingship is, as I mentioned, the perennial problem.
And and there's many ways of articulating and resolving that problem in many such solutions,
so to speak, involve essentially describing one side of this issue in terms of the other.
And that involves both. But a logical explanations, for instance,
that would take the incarnate form of the dedi and presented as essentially the wilful self presentation of divinity.
In other words, resolving mortality back into divinity.
Most kind of contemporary, critical academic theory is take the opposite approach and basically explain.
Divinity is a kind of a manmade production, whether through a kind of a critique of religion or through a sort of a sociological functionalism,
taking it as basically a kind of a mask for other desires. Or is it as just a natural reflex of society becoming aware of itself?
Now,
what's interesting about the Dessy for me is that he actually took a more difficult and more challenging and for that reason more interesting route,
which was to try to uphold the truth of both sides of this duality that he sought the terms to to
articulate the mutual dependence and the mutual translate ability of both sides of dual kingship.
I mean, simply that neither can ultimately be explained entirely in the terms of the other.
So he affirmed on one hand that divinity does exceed and then enter into an act meaningfully upon human life.
And this is the ultimate source of of the king's authority.
But at the same time, he tried to argue the opposite, that the human condition itself poses an absolute constraint.
And this is no minor concession from a Buddhist perspective, because it essentially means that everybody up to an including a Buddha,
can justifiably suffer not just as a mere appearance, but in a meaningful way.
So that's what he was trying to.
This is how he phrased the problem and this is how he tried to come to terms with the Dalai Lama being able to be
Telstra and the Dalai Lama being somebody who dies and who's deaf calls for some response on the part of the state.
And so he did this. So this is actually what the bulk of my paper is addressing.
He did this by by putting together three separate strains of discourse.
And as a kind of a shorthand, you can think of these as basically a mile high on a strain of discourse, tantric strand.
And then one that came out of narrative literature about the Buddha, shocking money. So let me just summarise each of these quickly in turn.
So the first is what I would refer to as disproportionate purification.
And the basic idea here is, is that certain beings at least have us the means to take retributions, that they're owned,
they're owed on account of past evil and drastically reduce the ways that those evils are retributive.
It's kind of like putting your thumb on the karmic scales.
And the catch phrase of this is this notion of purification by headache goal, and that's now what's wrong.
And so this is a phrase that's kind of threaded surreptitiously through all kinds of
on a text and treatises and Dessy use it as a way to stitch together various claims.
But the basic idea is advanced beings can can take lifetimes that they're owed and
Hels and and vaporise them instantaneously with something as simple as a headache.
And so for him, this, of course, the Dalai Lama had joint pain and headaches and so forth.
And this could then therefore double as a sort of a sign of one being in advance.
Being that this is precisely the sort of thing that that body suffers, do they they instead of going to hell, they have headaches.
The second strain of discourse is the contract one,
and this has to do with the kind of common refrain that the result is really the ground and purified
states are actually prior to the ostensibly pure factory practises that are supposed to bring them about.
So he again, phrase this in terms of karma by essentially saying that, truthfully speaking, the ground is actually already karmically completely.
The accumulations are already perfected and the observations are already purified.
But for the Dessy specifically,
he took this as implying that there's ways of describing advanced beings who are on the boonies at a very advanced stage of practise,
but who still in justifiable ways can experience real pain and pleasure.
Another third strand of this argument is, for me, the most interesting one, and this is the doctrine of calm of a Shakespeare or Lady Hikma.
And in this, in effect, is a kind of a synthesis of both of the prior two things.
And it takes it says that that Buddhas and other advanced beings, including Bodhisattvas, is in our hearts and even other deities.
There's a certain way that they can experience suffering that that is attributable to their own karma, which is a very heterodox thing to say.
But it only occurs after their karma has already ripened,
which is a very paradoxical thing to say that that it's precisely beings like shocking Wendy,
who have finished the price process of ripening their karma,
who then appear to suffer in ways that speak to the kind of echo or after effect or residue of karma.
And has this term leggy Fatima, which which is taken from from narrative literature about the sufferings of the Buddha,
shocking many, which I'll talk about if I have a little bit of time.
And so this is the key term for the Dessy, because it it kind of holds intention, both of those other two pieces.
And that's what he really wanted to say about the authority of the poet Dali Lama.
That is, that it's both already something perfect and it's something that meaningfully exhibits all the signs of being human.
So I'm really not gonna have time, regrettably, to get into this all say about, oh,
I'll go through these slides just so you can get a sense of some of the techs involved.
But the only one I'll point out for this first body of discourse on disproportionate purification,
the core of the disease argument was this text, the chatterer Dharmendra Dacian Sugiura, or the discourse on the four powers.
Which spelled out a sort of for pure bigotry remedies that his office could could apply in order to,
as I said, drastically mitigate the retribution that they're owed due to their past karma.
And this itself became the source of a kind of a line of commentary that you see in in the long run, General Tonkawa and then Tonko,
but in turn draws on very long discussions of this possibility of of disproportionate purification in the target Davola.
Bobby Baker and in the I.B. Smile and Carra Aloka of Harry Badra.
So those are really fascinating discussions that I could give a whole talk on just those.
But you should just know this is the kind of core source for the desis argument.
And this doctrine also featured prominently in the Schick's US much of Shanthi Diva.
And with kind of echoes in the body charged with horror as well. And I'm just gonna have to skip this, I'm sorry.
Here's here's the desis engagement with Maha Moksha Sutro, which is another. This is a Chinese Lutron purification.
I'll just mention that.
One of the reasons he was so interested in this literature on purification by way of headaches is that it gave him a kind of a language.
You're talking about the Dalai Lama's pain. And he also came through the kind of secret biography of the fifth lama, the Sangwa Gretchen,
which records all kinds of prophetic visions that the Dalai Lama had undertaken in throughout his career.
And there was one vision in particular that was especially important, really kind of a weeklong retreat that he took in sixteen fifty nine.
And in the process, he had this he was given this prophecy that he would have to pay karmic retribution for the fact that as a past life,
he was a king and Banaras and basically dismembered somebody and that that's why he was going to suffer his rheumatism.
And so this became important for the for the Dessy to say not only did the death did the Dalai Lama have serious karma still to pay off.
But he was also exactly this sort of a dance being described in all these texts who
would take criminal retributions and kind of downgrade them to mere aches and pains.
Now that discourse and prior perfection,
I think I'm just gonna skip the key source here that there's a really fascinating kind of exegesis of a passage from the college chocker,
which which I can talk about, really bizarre reading that he gave of that. His key source was the clear Garba and kind of a series of commentaries,
Stickley Gaba by Molik to vydra by youngling and especially by Longchamps and the Chosen One cell.
And this gave him a kind of vocabulary for talking about beings who are very
advanced and the pygmies who were already innately in a state of primordial purity,
but who nevertheless had a kind of a adventitious or superficial experiences of purification.
This is probably most fascinating part of his argument. This is kind of a riff he takes on Tulk upon Longchamp.
I mean, and the idea of of four different types of video dhara on the boonies.
And he bifurcates these four types of video dhara into three of a greater mental capacity who basically,
once they reach the Darshana Margo, are entirely incapable of expressing any kind of pleasure or pain.
And then there's a fourth type of somebody, basically a low towa, somebody who's a little less intellectually advanced.
And this is somebody referred to as a as a developed or a matured.
Bidjara nomine vixen in the Dessy took this idea to say that these are people who have reached the Darshan of Marga, an irreversible state.
And they've basically they have no more.
They're on Ostrava, but they they have this locked my country. But this residue left over that they could not fully purify with their yesterday.
And so even though they've completely abandoned grasping at the clashes,
which is the cause of their somsak existence, and even if they come, they ought not to come back in a second life.
Still, it will sometimes appear as if these outflows, which are the source of a physical body, are still present.
This is just like the stench that remains behind in an empty mosque.
And it's also possible, therefore, that there will be some very minor intonations of pleasure and pain.
So, again, he takes that kind of a discourse and turns it towards his argument,
which is a way of saying that that which is already entirely perfected and purified in advance.
Nevertheless, in a very meaningful sense, exhibits pleasure and pain. Daniel, how I doing a time here?
The let's say former womanist says yes.
OK, I'll race through the calm observation and then we'll go to Q&A and then I can pick up whatever I didn't get to there.
So this is this third strand of his argument, as I mentioned, is a kind of a synthesis of the other two.
And for me, this is the most interesting part. This almost gives a precise name to the kind of political theology that the desk is trying to advance,
which is holding intention is simultaneously true and mutually dependent,
both state of prior perfection and divinity and a real and not merely apparent subsequent state of condition humanity,
which exhibits CAAMA and calls for a response.
And so he found this language to talk about this in these narratives of the Buddha, shocking many suffering.
And so this is a very famous body of literature that goes very, very far back in the tradition.
And it made its way into the Tibetan canon through a variety of sources.
One of them being a text called another type of to. And in the Tibetan Buddhist have asked about a veneer.
This is basically kind of sandwiched inside the Meningie or that by some of us do the section on medicine.
And it's a text in thirty seven chapters about the Buddha and five hundred of his arhats,
telling stories to each other about their past evils and their present retributions.
And the thirty seventh chapter of this is about the photographer. And he gives 10 stories about times that he suffered.
So this is a really familiar list. You find it in Chinese sources like the Dodgers de Lune.
You see it in the Mahaba, Donna, literature and Poly. You see it in Mahayana literature like you.
I'll show you Sugiura. And you see it in this in this video text that another topic got, huh?
And the reason that text appeal to the Dessy is because really it's only in that text
that you have this term Ligi dogma that's used to explain what's going on that.
So rather than get into this list, these are pretty familiar episodes.
Most of them are kind of, David, data inspired maladies that the Buddha suffered, stepping on a thorn, having a rock, Pierce's foot.
You slandered various times and so on and so forth.
So I'll probably end on this slide. And this is just an example of the language of this text.
Each of these stories that the Buddha tells ends with a formula more or less equivalent to this.
So the Buddha's imagining he's just told a story about some evil that he committed in the past life.
In this case, he killed his brother with a rock. And so he ends by saying it's due to the ripening of that karma or the karma epoch.
From when I was that person for many years, many hundreds, many thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, I cooked in the health.
It is due to nothing. It is due to the residue of nothing other than that evil act teenager Karma Avishay Sheida,
leggy floc with de Kooning is due to that nothing other than the residue of that evil act that I,
as a targeter, despite already being awakened, had a sliver of rock.
Here's my hope. So for the Dessy, he really leaned on this fact that there's this bifurcation between Karma Depok or karmic ripening,
which is prior to one's awakening to perfection and in a sense participates in bringing it about.
And a subsequent provisional karma of Asia, which which by definition occurs after one is already attained, is a weakened state.
And so he goes through a huge body of literature on this and pulls together all kinds of stories from narrative literature and
effectively to say that that there are ever so many stories like this which show how calm of Asia was purified in the wrongdoing.
And then they are the sense which proves that Bodhisattvas on the first coming up, still have karmic observations that are yet to be purified.
And then here he is again, even a Buddha who has abandoned both of the two observations without anything remaining still in the common indirect sense,
have karma of Ishizuka yet to be purified. So let me go back to video here.
I could go on with this for another hour, but I think. I'll wrap up here and essentially what I do with the rest of the paper is,
is I take some of his examples of how he talks about this idea of calm of Asia and try to read it in terms of this underlying political theology,
theological problem of of the kind of duality of kingship,
of the king being both an individual institution and authority being both something that comes from outside of the human realm and
something that's necessarily active within and conditioned by the human realm and the way he tries to not explain one in the others terms,
but to take on the more difficult task of holding both together and explaining how each, in a sense, depends on the other.
And just in the most practical sense, this basically is a way of knitting together both his affirmation of the kind of ideological
supports of the kingship of the Dalai Lama and to justify all the actual active,
creative, productive works that he undertook himself as Tibet's ruler, all of which, you know,
seemed to undermine that very fact of divinity by calling explicit attention both to the death of the Dalai
Lama and to the fact that it's precisely through human activities and the participation of state and society,
that kingship is itself recognised and affirmed. So so that's the kind of arc of my papers to carry that the Dalai Lama's own Buddhist
ideas into conversation with kind of contemporary discourse on divine kingship,