[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] So welcome everyone to this, which is the first talk in the third series of our partner, some of the intimate seminar.
Uh, there will be three more excellent talks coming up over this Hilary term and another four in Trinity term as well.
You can keep up to date by checking the website. All our talks are published as video podcasts.
They'll be freely available from our website at Wolfson, from the Oxford Podcast page, from Apple Podcasts and from other sites too.
So please try not to interrupt during the recording. But the discussion periods of the talk will not be podcasts and are open to everyone.
So please feel free to express yourselves and ask questions then.
So today we are really delighted to welcome Professor Brendan Dotson, who's widely recognised as one of the leading scholars of the Tibetan Empire.
After completing his B.A. at Wesleyan, Brandon came to Oxford, where he completed an MPhil, a DPhil, and a postdoc.
He also taught and research that shows at GCS, at UCSB and at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, as well as in China and Tibet.
Currently,
Brandon is the McKenna Chair of Buddhist Studies and professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Georgetown University.
His research largely concerns seventh to 10th century Tibetan, Dunhuang, and the circulation of rituals and narratives in and out of Tibet.
During this period, his publications include his well-known monograph on the Old Tibetan Annals of 2009 and the
book Dyson Gods on the Silk Road Chinese Buddhist Studies Divination in Transcultural Context,
published in 2021. His most recent works are Producing Buddhist Secrets in Ninth Century Tibet, The Search of Limitless Life,
and its Dunhuang Copies kept at the British Library, published in 2025 jointly with Lewis Stoney.
And Catastrophe and Prophecy in Tibetan Religious Contexts, which is a special issue of cohere.
Text A-Z 2025, co-edited with Jetson della plunk.
So, Brandon, many thanks indeed for taking the time to speak to us today.
And over to you. All right.
Well, thank you so much for inviting me back. It's nice to be back. Uh, in Oxford, if only virtually.
And, um, good to be a part of this lecture series.
Also, uh, it's it's fantastic also to have those recordings and the creation of this great resource,
um, for other people who aren't able to make it, uh, for this event.
All right. So I was setting myself the task after I was approached to give this talk of giving the context,
the religious and political and social context for some of its period in Tibet, roughly the seven 70s to the seven 90s.
Um, this is a pretty audacious thing to do. Or it's a tall task, uh, anyway, to achieve.
So what I've done is try to do something modest about it and really look at a few of
our assumptions around notions of popular religion and notions of royal religion,
and how these relate to the introduction of Buddhism to Tibet.
How these relate to Padma, some other, and the moments that I'm going to argue here represents this moment of transition that occurs,
um, late eighth, early ninth century.
So we'll get into that. But I want to, uh, present it in such a way that we're also interrogating our assumptions.
And I'm laying there, uh, some of my own assumptions, too.
So generally, what we're looking at is the period of the Tibetan Empire.
You're familiar with this, perhaps? Um, 608 866 are some general dates that are used based on, uh, Chinese sources.
Generally, um writing is introduced early to mid seventh century.
The Tibetan Empire is really composed of a coalition of different clans,
ministerial and natural lateral aristocracies that are holding this all together
with the person of the king as the pivot around which all of them are moving.
We'll get into what those aristocracies are and how they work in relation to the king, and some more detail.
Big moments in terms of our narrative today and understanding some of, uh, Buddhism is adopted as an official religion of Tibet.
In 779, I put it in boldface and, uh, the indefinite article rather than the definite article,
just because there has been a tendency to be a little bit loose with language and to,
um, imagine that this entailed a sort of conversion where there was an old official religion,
and now there's a new official religion, and it is Buddhism.
Um. One of the things, too, that you'll know is somebody familiar with Tibetan Buddhism is that within Tibetan religious memory,
the Tibetan Empire is a golden age. It's a Buddhist golden age with three religious kings who are emanations of bodhisattvas.
Um, all as part of a kind of providential history of generosity, helping the Tibetan people to move on the path towards Buddhahood.
And also in the context of this series, in this series that has, uh, been preceding it,
treasure recovery and treasure revelation as part of this ongoing narrative in terms of these new teachings appearing,
these new revelations appearing, but going back to the period of Padma Sumba and this golden age of Empire.
So to outline where I'd like to go with this lecture today, I wanted to, as I was mentioning,
query some general assumptions that we tend to have that that I tend to have as well about popular religion and about religion.
I just want to look at these categories a little bit and see what the costs and benefits are of our thinking about them.
Um.
Go into more detail about ministerial and metro lateral aristocracies, and how these are constitutive of the political system of the Tibetan Empire.
Though the word system is a bit of an overstatement, and as much as the Tibetan Empire, like most um polities,
was sort of a series of crashes and burns and experiments, um, there,
despite the later providential history, um, it tended to be very circumstantial and experimental.
Um, in locating the king in relation to these aristocracies, I'm going to emphasise what the king is and what the king does.
Um, there we go. Sorry. The slides sometimes move by themselves.
And also the role of the king and royal mythology and royalist mythology, self representations by the king and by the king.
Circle of what the king is, is a god or a son of gods, um.
And his role in building temples and in scriptural production and then getting to the pith of it.
And the main point that I'll leave you with today, I want to draw a sort of analogy or a line between the precious guru guru reputation
and the emergence in the late eighth century and early ninth century of a new,
um, embodiment, a new human embodiment of the sacred in the form of the monk counsellor, who is the,
um, advisor to the Tibetan Emperor in Saint Paul, and the monk counsellor,
which comes to be a position that the aristocracy I can use to get to the centre of the power,
as in the case of Drunk Appellate Unit, and the monk counsellor, who was, uh, involved in the treaty with the tongue in a 21, a 22 and a 23.
All right. So to query that first assumption it was about popular religion.
Now the assumption here is that there's a kind of baseline of Tibetan religion that when I say Tibetan religion, what I imagine as a sort of baseline,
where there's looking at like a tripartite world populated by humans, populated by various, um,
spirits, you can call them, or beings, that's in those notions of what happens after death.
You have ritual specialists who are engaged in expelling demons and taming and healing people and performing funerals.
There is an imperative to gain the favour of the gods, to call in Chas and Yang good fortune to expel the demons.
So in assuming this kind of baseline of Tibetan religion,
and thinking of the ways that it's been presented, say, as the nameless religion or the religion of men,
and surveys by science, or by touchy, or as popular religion or folk religion, or rethought as pagan religion or civil religion.
There's there's many ways in which this can be articulated and imagined and studied.
You have a kind of morphological approach from, you know, somebody like, um,
the basket worker wits, where you see different types of loss in their in different texts.
And sometimes that is this colour and sometimes the gift is that colour.
Um, and you can see how that changes in different times and in different places.
Then you also have ethnographic approaches where you can see how these different,
um, these different practices operate in eastern Tibet, in the Himalayas,
among different Tibetan Burman ethnic groups, um, so as to give colour in a way to what we assume might have been the case in early Tibet.
Now it's it's been problematise before that you can't simply take these current, uh,
instances of the village religion or popular religion and then project them wholesale back in time,
just like you can't take one articulation of the class and dig from one place in time and say, well, this is how it was.
Or that say it was always the case that you've got your chancla under your armpit and your mouth out here, and you're pulled by there.
We've seen from the kind of morphological vantage point how that changes, how that's different from one text in one place and one time to the next.
Um. And yet there is a tendency.
Even when one does recognise change to assume this is a sort of baseline.
And in that assumption, in that tendency,
I guess one of the dangers would be assuming a timeless and unchanging character to buck religion or to popular religion.
Uh, we see a nice expression of this in an essay by Jeffrey Samuel.
I just wanted to quote it here.
He says folk religion is key to what happened when the Vajrayana came to Tibet, because in the post 1840s period in particular,
it was not as yet a question of Buddhism reshaping folk religion,
but of Buddhism and primarily its Vajrayana component surviving as a part of folk religion.
So that's an articulation that I generally go along with in terms of imagining a sort of
baseline of Tibetan religion that other foreign religions like Buddhism have to fit into.
Now I'm fully aware of the difficulties in terms of anachronism here.
How is it that we're going to talk about pre Buddhist religion and what there was back in the seventh century or the sixth century?
In point of fact, there are no pre Buddhist texts in Tibetan language.
Every text that you find from doing Wong,
every inscription that you find in central or eastern Tibet dates from a time when Buddhism was already well and truly present into that.
So even if the content of it seems non Buddhist, it could be written in reaction to Buddhism.
It could be using technologies like writing itself that have been instrumentalized in Buddhist ways,
and that instrumental ization is now informing how they're being used in ostensibly non Buddhist ways.
I say ostensibly because the line between what is Buddhist and what is non
Buddhist when you're looking at a manuscript is very difficult to discern anyway.
It could seem to have non Buddhist content, but it could be used by people who identify as Buddhists.
Um, so all of that uh,
does give you evidence for many of these sorts of things that we're looking at in terms of popular religion in the ninth century,
ninth century manuscripts. And then the kind of leap I suppose, that one might make.
Is by assuming that something like this maybe not exactly like it, but something like it in terms of exchanges with gods, expelling demons,
summoning fortune, that's something like this was probably part and parcel of Tibetan religion before Buddhism came on the scene.
So that's a kind of modest assumption that I'm fairly happy to go along with, um,
alongside the general assumption that this is the baseline of Tibetan religion in terms of the costs and benefits.
Um, I mean,
the benefits are that you do find a lot of continuity between doing what manuscripts to do with popular religion and later popular traditions.
Um, and this has been demonstrated by numerous studies, by something committed by Tony Hoover, by Charles Randall and others.
One of the costs to it, because every methodology or every assumption that you care to make is going to have, uh,
a drawback to it is that it does give one a blind spot if you assume this is what Tibetan religion is all about when you're looking at, say,
18th century literati who were steeped in caviar and really haven't had too much of this, um, popular religion imbibed along with their mother's milk,
would have been brought up in these sorts of elite households very heavily into sized households.
In those cases, yes, uh, this might not be so important to them.
And assuming this is what religion is all about, you would be in danger of getting such people wrong.
Um, so be it. Um, in terms of looking at early Tibet, the other alternatives are looking at, say,
the seventh century of this tabula rasa where you have no purchase on what was there,
and you can project Buddhism backwards further, as some scholars do, or you can take aerial models and allow them to fill up that lacuna.
So, um, that is to lay bare in what I hope is a fairly honest way, what some of my assumptions are,
and how I see the strengths and weaknesses of some of the other assumptions in terms of early Tibet and early Tibetan religion.
So just to flesh this out a little bit more, not just in then, um, you worship the gods, you suppress the demons.
In terms of the organisation of space. We are together with that stand together and a lot of other, uh,
beings in the middle up above you have the law, but you also have some demons like to do.
Down below you have the new the Nagas. Uh, you've also got the sea.
Um, so you're fairly familiar with this, this notion in terms of gods and what are the gods?
I, I linger on this because it's pertinent to the career of Padma of, of course,
and his relation to deities like mentioned power and the stories of his taming of the demons,
um, and also the process of creating a Buddhist protector.
So we have named gods, uh, for example, in ninth century dice divination texts, and these names of the gods who are pronouncing uh,
oracular verses, uh, very often correspond to the names of mountains names and mountain gods.
So it doesn't say this is a mountain god in the text, but here's a named God who's part of this divinatory pantheon,
and that is the same name as, say, a mountain god like cooler curry, uh, or indentured tongue or yada.
Ciampa. So you can make the modest assumption that, yes, there were mountain gods in early Tibet.
And of course, archaeological evidence bears that out, uh, as well, that there was a mountain cult on the Tibetan Plateau in prehistoric times.
So you have named gods. You also have named classes of gods like the cha gods, for example,
who were associated with the Tibetan emperors in terms of what a god is in this context and what they do,
uh, there are sources of fortune, sources of protection, sources of favour.
So the God can favour you, uh, as in the verb go on.
But God can also abandon you. Um, and you know this, this can be as a result of your misdeeds or your failures.
This, uh, creates a compound. Go and pong. Go, pong.
That's your status in relation to the gods, what they think of you, whether they're favouring you or whether they are abandoning you.
So in the classical, um. Formulation of sacrifice.
I give so that you may give.
That's fairly relevant to the exchanges that are made with God's in terms of the juniper smoke offering the same offerings food offering,
drink offering, um, offerings of clothing and silks that are given to them, where you're aiming to please them and ensure their favour.
So you're giving these gifts and in turn, you might receive their favour.
In terms of fleshing out this, um.
Uh, Religion of Man or some of these practices that we find you'd also expect there to be some notion of what happens when you die.
And indeed, there are many, um, funerary texts among the dead Wrong manuscripts.
We also have tombs all across the Tibetan Plateau that have been studied by Goodson, Hazzard and others.
Um, there's a notion of the land of the dead that can be a happy and pleasant land, also referred to as the land of the corpse.
The land of the dead. Uh, the. It's about where you go when you die tend to be, um, layered and somewhat promiscuous,
with lots of different ideas that say, don't necessarily hold together from a logical perspective.
Um, but in any case, you do have inklings of where this land of the dead might be.
Um, there are lots of metaphors involving stars, um, and ancestors, um, uh, establishing your ancestors in the beyond.
Uh, but that's for for another day. Now, in terms of this tradition, also, you'd want to ask about.
So teleology, um, which is mentioned one through death you can become an ancestor also through a millenarian cult,
where you look to the end of the world.
Coming up, something I've just written about and that issue of, of somebody that, uh, that Rob mentioned in the introduction,
um, you're praying for the end of the world so that you can be reborn at the start of a new good age.
So that's a kind of social rheology, but it's also theology of time as well,
where you're using the moral cosmology of time to be reborn at a certain time.
Then also, as in many situations, there may be a different destination for, say, the bull and the Shem, the priests.
Then there would be for your normal person, who is, um, I think, a ritual performed for them having a funeral performed for them.
All right. So. The second assumption I wanted to query is about royal religion.
And as I was using a quotation from Jeffrey Samuel about popular religion or folk religion, I wanted to also use a quotation about royal religion.
This comes from Ron Davidson.
He writes that there appears to be no exception to the rule that when the monastery becomes culturally important outside India,
it is principally through the agency of official patronage, either aristocratic or imperial.
So this puts the focus in, of course, you know, this this insight is gleaned from the study of the transmission of Buddhism to Tibet,
to Mongolia, to China, to Japan and across Southeast Asia, where you see various royal adopters, um, of these technologies.
Um, but this also puts the focus on the king, puts the focus on the court, puts the focus on the aristocracy.
When we're thinking about the assimilation of Buddhism, that, in turn, has led to an emphasis on.
The existing say non Buddhist or possibly non Buddhist sources from June Wong as perhaps also being royal.
Indeed you have uh, at least one manuscript that deals with royal funerals and you have some divination texts that mention Tibetan emperors.
Uh, so we do have some notion that many of these are royal documents,
your prayers for Tibetan emperors, for example, among the Duke Huang manuscripts.
And of course, many of the inscriptions are, uh,
supposedly authored by the emperors or are by uh councillors who are referring to grants given to them by emperors.
But there is a tendency to think of all of these sources, or most of the Dunhuang manuscripts, as if they are raw material.
This can be problematic in the sense that we do find plenty of not very prestigious or royal looking documents, from the formats to their orthography,
um, to their subject matter, where we can say, you know, this, this doesn't seem like, uh, this was had anything to do with the emperor.
You know, this is a scurrilous, uh, jotting about, you know, gossiping about your, your neighbouring scribe and what they get up to on the weekend.
This is probably not, um, royally sponsored. On the other hand, we have so many of the the vast majority of the, uh,
Tibetan do in one manuscripts are sutras that were commissioned, uh, as a gift for the Tibetan emperor.
So those can be said to be royal documents. Now in Overemphasising the royal nature of a lot of these early Tibetan rituals,
there's been a kind of blurring of the lines between royal religion and popular religion, such that one takes divination,
one takes collagen, gong, one takes around some rites, healing rites,
funeral rites that we find in the Duke one manuscripts and refer to this as a body of royal religion.
Um, and that's probably hard to justify.
Uh, we do have polemics against certain funeral rites.
Uh, from the Buddhist perspective,
but we don't have those addressed as being royal funeral rites until later works like the, uh, CPA at the end of the year.
Um, this also brings up a question just about history and social history.
You know, how much can we say about popular religious practices?
How much can we say about the lower classes at this time, when we only have inscriptions that tend to be, uh, high value productions,
and we only have the long manuscripts which are reliant on the technology of paper and ink and literacy, which is already a fairly high bar for entry.
Some of the Messier texts, and this time around notwithstanding.
So what can we really know about the grass roots of Buddhism?
Is is it not the case that our view is only about the emperor, the court and the generals and the counsellors who swore to uphold Buddhism?
So. Looking at. Some of the sources from doing well and some of the inscriptions as well.
We see a royal mythology, and as part of the, um, it's part of the text book genre, or, say,
the clearing of one's throat genre, where we, we repeat inherited truisms but don't interrogate them.
There's been a tendency to say things like, well, the Tibetans believe that the king was a god who descended from the heavens,
um, and that he conquered the 12 Minor Kingdoms and united the plateau.
What we should say is that the royalist authorised sources present the Tibetan king as a god who descended from the heavens,
and as the king who united the 12 kingdoms under the Tibetan Plateau or under himself on the Tibetan Plateau.
Um, even in some of these. Uh, ostensibly authorised documents like the Old Tibetan Chronicle.
We find some interesting rough edges. There is one episode, for example, where, uh, Joe Groza,
who is the wife of one of the defectors who's fighting a civil war against traders on the emperor,
uh, pokes fun at him when she's welcoming him, when when he's coming along and pokes fun at the notion that he's really a god.
So you have this princess, this woman who's really kind of giving him a dressing down about the royalist mythology, about him not really being a god.
And of course, the tale of Brigham Temple, uh, one of the most famous old Tibetan myths recounts how King Brigham lost his divinity,
how he was no longer able to move between the heavens and the earth.
So you can see a kind of transformation of the person of the king from being a god to being a God whose descendant is now stuck on earth,
sort of in an intermediate state between gods and humans.
One of the ways that this is expressed is, as I say, son of gods or in data Putra corresponds to and in the title.
But then you have other sort of hybrid titles that the Emperor begins to accrue with the advent of Buddhism, like Buddhism, which is again a kind of.
Intermediate title in the sense that it's not a Buddha, it's a Buddha to be.
It's a Buddha in the becoming. All right, so another thing about, uh, royal religion is we have.
Evidence. Archaeological evidence from the similar sized tomb fields all over the Tibetan Plateau dating from the fourth to the 10th centuries,
and then also in one of the inscriptions at Shaila Kong, which seems to have the genealogy of a young clan ancestor.
And of course, later clan history is that have their own ancestral tales of descent from heavens.
It's fairly clear that this notion of the Tibetan king descending from the heavens as a god,
to bring the ways of gods to humanity was not, um, was not something unique.
It was something that probably every other kingdom on the Tibetan Plateau had for their own king.
Uh, the Yarloop king just happened to conquer the Tibetan Empire and unite.
And their mythology came to a for where their mythology sort of wins out.
Um, but what happens to all of those others, all of those, uh,
other local kings who are now councillors, now vassals of the yard of King is now the Tibetan emperor.
There's various ways one can think about this or overthink about this.
One, is that there comes to be a sort of royal monopoly on this particular claim of descent from the gods and the rituals that surround it.
But yes, this used to be common property of a widespread cult where each had a kind of local cult.
Uh, very similar to one another. But now, with the royal monopoly on this, those become taboo.
This is now the property of the Emperor. And this is something the Emperor does and you don't do.
So this is a kind of thing that's been articulated by Maurice Bloch in the context of, uh, Madagascar.
Um, and that sort of idea of a royal monopoly on certain rituals that that could be a useful way, for example,
for looking at by rotation of symbolism and the analogy between the emperor and by Roach now,
which would presumably be an analogy that you wouldn't be so happy about others making.
Now, other ways that this has been thought of in terms of the transformation of these
local cults and their descent myths in light of the victorious central cult,
um, something Carmen Goodrum has would have written about this, about the creation of a sort of fictive family tree where, say, the chimney.
The Chin clan head, who used to be the king of this area around the library.
Now, um, instead of perpetuating his deity, or instead of there being mythology about him descending, he's perpetuating his deity.
But that deity is now reckoned as a son of the central deity.
Uh, so in a way, his worship of his own deity, his continuation of that old cult, has been subordinated.
And all of that worship sort of trickles up to the Emperor.
So that's another way of thinking about it.
Nathan Hale articulates it such that these local cults of the Kula were worshipping the emperors, God worshipping the imperial cult.
So there you have another sense in which this might be transformed.
But however one imagines this or over thinks it.
We do have an interesting picture of how these local cults, uh, around their own descent myths could transform.
But then, with the collapse of the empire, could also devolve and transform over time and be kind of the seeds for local mountain cults
as these transform and become parts of other networks with Buddhist influence and influence,
etc. Okay, so I wanted to get on to what constitutes the social and political system of the Tibetan Empire,
and how this constructs a figure in the kingdom. You're all familiar with Shang.
Learn the term Shang and the term learned ministerial aristocracy and natural lateral aristocracy is how I will gloss it here.
Look. Just means Councillor Xiang means maternal uncle or father in law.
So the ministerial aristocracy is formed through the expansion of the urban kingdom.
Uh, once it's going across, uh, um, across the sample and going into the kind of plaza area you have,
clans like the way and the Yang who defect and join the Harlem Kingdom.
And the way that defection happens, that's what precipitates the conquest that creates the Tibetan Empire.
And they get rewarded for their defections by being appointed as councillors.
As ministers, they become the ministerial aristocracy.
And of course, they had their own. Jordan had its own, you know, the coup in the clans and others, uh, the long egg in, uh, in the Arden area.
But now you have these new, uh, folks coming in from the north, coming in from the West, people, like you would say,
and guard tongues and come out of the Kupo and Nagara clans and their activities in the north and in the west.
Um, so. Here you have a quotation, for example, that just shows how this happens.
You have the defectors who join, uh, the Tibetan king.
They give him the grants, they give him what they've conquered, they make these gifts to him, and then he gives them back.
So the paradigmatic act that creates them as ministerial aristocrats is they're receiving a gift from the king generally of lands and subjects,
which they've just happened to give him. Now, the Shang are articulated a little bit later, and as, as I was mentioned mentioning before,
it's not a kind of providential system or a coherent system that's imported from somewhere else.
It's more like try and find out and see what works and see what doesn't work.
You see at the bottom of the slide what didn't work with the ministerial aristocracy,
where the Gar clan got to be too powerful and took over Tibet in the um, late seventh century and had to be put down in the Civil War.
Long and the Bell clan rose up and killed, uh, tree some victims father, in the seven 50s.
So you have instances in which, rather than conquering for the Tibetan emperor and receiving back what they've conquered,
they decide not to go through that route and just keep it for themselves and then precipitate a civil war.
Or they go after the king and try to kill him. Now, uh, for the natural lateral aristocracy and the sort of incidental nature of it,
it really becomes articulated in the wake of the Civil War with the gar and the period where the,
uh, is the empress of Tibet ruling Tibet from the early eighth century for the first decade of the eighth century.
So she's from the royal clan, and the royal clan had help to push back against the gar,
along with the chimp clan and these, um, these alliances between them and with others who had provided,
um, a mother for the Tibetan emperor, who would provide an air bearing queen for the Tibetan emperor,
come to be institutionalised as the Shang, the Shang, the maternal uncle clans.
And there's four main maternal uncle clans who basically take turns each generation in terms of who is going to give birth to the Tibetan emperor.
Um, and they end up populating also the. The political councils along with the ministerial aristocracy.
So from the um. From the early eighth century, they're really growing up as a power to be reckoned with.
And throughout the eighth century, they're extremely strong. Uh, they they're, um, powerful to the end of the Empire.
And even afterwards, you have to draw as kingmakers, as fulfilling that role for the kingdoms of could get power.
Um, now you have cautionary tales there as well.
Um, and you have a few would be Shang clans.
You know, people who did provide, uh, a prince did provide an heir to the throne in the time of Nozick,
in the time of London, where they kidnapped the king or killed the king, or tried to kill the king.
You know, you have cautionary tales, uh, here as well,
where the the system breaks down and what's supposed to be an alliance that's protecting the king and the kingship, um, threatens to destroy it.
So the process of ministerial aristocracy and noblemen is what transforms these local kings, the councillors.
Um, in the process that we talked about, uh, with the ancestral cult as well.
So what does this mean for the king and how is he defined?
Well, I mentioned that the ministerial aristocracy is defined by receiving gifts from the king.
So in that sense, we can say that they are made noble by what the king does.
Um, and here the king gives. And of course, this is, um, this is paradigmatic of Indian kings granting and giving.
That's part and parcel of what constitutes a king. It works well also, once we get to building soft kingship, um, the natural lateral aristocracy,
by contrast, they're defined by their proximity to the king and what they give, namely birth.
They give birth to the king.
So it is the substance of the king, the existence of the king, the person, the birth of the king that makes them what they are.
It is what the king is that a nobles that shun, that a nobles, the natural lateral aristocracy.
So here, just spotlighting what the king is a giver and what the king,
a sacred being who's given birth to by the Shang and what the king does, he gives.
Those two things are co constitutive. Also, the king is sacred.
He is um, what he is because of what he does, and he is able to give because of his sexuality as a king.
Um, so you see to with this emphasis on what the king is, where there might be a strong investment in royal mythology, you know,
on the part of, say, the natural lateral aristocracy, on the part of the ministerial aristocracy and boogieing the kingship.
Also constituting the king is um. Patronage.
So there was no capital in, uh, the Tibetan Empire.
You had, on the other hand, uh, a mobile court where the king went from one place to another,
the put on the court at one place in the summer, one place in the when, sir, when the king was young, it would stay in just one place.
And what this did is it created an opportunity for local clans to offer patronage.
You invite the Emperor and his huge court, full of ritual specialists, full of guards, full of his coterie of servants.
You have to feed all of them. So you have to have a good place to do it.
You invite them, they come, you welcome them, you fed them, face them, and then you bid them goodbye.
Does that sound familiar? That's a puja. That's what you do to a god. That's no.
No accident there. And you, as in the case of your relationship with the God, are going to be hoping for some sort of return.
In this case, the prestige that you're getting from hosting the Emperor should help,
uh, the careers of your, uh, your counsellors in the decades that follow.
All right. So coming to, um, the time period in question of seven 70s to seven 90s, we've got a song that said his father was assassinated.
Um, there had been a law passed to prevent people from practising Buddhism as a young man.
Actually, some that's in promotes Buddhism with the foundation and consecration of Samuel Monastery, probably around 779.
He's reaffirming that support for Buddhism,
and he's making sure that all of his counsellors and generals are going to go along with this through the technology of thing,
which, of course, is a very serious and solemn thing to do.
So it is the same inscription that records this advance the consecration of the monastery, the um binding of his administration to protect Buddhism,
to never persecute Buddhism, to never reduce the requisites that are given to the three Jewels.
Now, along with this, you have background accompanying documents that give the rationale for this and give a little bit more of the history of it.
Going back to, um, what was on the previous slide about his embrace of Buddhism earlier in the persecution of Buddhism,
that he was reacting against the cut seek.
And the cut sheet is written documents preserved in Portugal like Chang was it
begotten are very helpful for looking at the Buddhist milieu of this time,
and what Buddhism was for tracing that Zen, or what the Buddhism was that he was presenting to his subjects.
Uh, and in this passage you can see that it's really emphasising, um, moral cosmology, karma and rebirth in the six classes of beings.
There are other passages that, um, talk about the contradictions between the, uh, traditional religion and practices of Tibet and, and Buddhism and,
um, how some people say that Buddhism should not be practised or they see signs that say, well, this this is detrimental to the kingdom.
So from, uh. From early on.
We have an engagement with Buddhism from at least the seventh century.
When you think about the Nepalese court in exile, uh, there and the construction of the Jo Pong,
and you see the symbolism of the Jo Khong and the woodwork there, the Tanjung Temple as well.
You have temple building, Buddhist temple building going on from at least the seventh century in Tibet.
Translation efforts gain pace. Um, in the late eighth century, if we go by some of her showbiz dates,
it goes back to the middle of the eighth century in terms of heavy translation work,
and we can talk about the production of a cannon or a proto cannon in terms of different karma, the pong, Tama and the chimp catalogues also.
There's a network of temples that is being built across the Tibetan Empire.
You have political structures, but you also have these temples and these overlap, of course, as centres of gravity.
But these temples are um, besides being a network, they're also amplifiers.
They're amplifying protection and they're amplifying blessing.
The technology of an image, the technology of a book is a technology of blessing and protection.
And that power is properly. The Joe Rogan the Joe com or, um, the shuttles are now part of me time.
A temple allows those blessings to radiate more effectively across this network, across the empire.
Um, besides that, we also have titles that are being adopted by the Tibetan emperors in the time of some.
That's an onward. You find these used in prayers to down, prayers for their enlightenment,
prayers for their health and confession prayers as well, where they're referred to as Dharma.
Roger the referred to as Chuck Robertson from the first ordinance that same year.
Monastery. You have a growing sangha and now you have monks, uh, at the Tibetan court,
travelling with the Tibetan emperor from place to place, along with, um, all of the other parts of his retinue.
Now. Getting to, um, getting to the main point and connecting this with Guru Rinpoche in.
I want to spotlight the person of young kids. Example.
Now the inscriptions at Shay Temple are.
Um, in in disrepair. But we have earlier records of them and they've been translated by numerous folks from Hugh Richardson to Leon Copeland,
um, Wang Yarrow and many others.
And these were there a few different inscriptions there, and two of them are made as grants for the monk young example.
So he's a with a young clan, and he was a tutor and a spiritual guide to Emperor tree based.
Um, and that's the son of Tree Song that said. So he says these are in the words of the Emperor.
He says from my childhood until I obtain the kingdom.
He that's young took the place of father and mother and acted with devotion to what is good, taking the place of a true uncle.
He cared for me, and it also says that he gave him advice when there was, um, kind of contention between his elder brother and and his father.
So back to them. So here we're talking about, um, years sort of 798 to 802 around that time.
So he is a young prince. He's got a young thing. And then his uncle, the monk who is his tutor, his spiritual guide, acting as father and mother.
And it's true uncle. This phrase, true Uncle Shang June is a kind of shot across the bow,
is also at the natural lateral aristocracy who enjoyed these positions of power and privilege.
But now, just in this simple phrase, Shang drum, here's the real Shang, here's the real maternal uncle.
It's a monk of the young clan who are kind of reversed and have never really.
I mean, they go back to the early Tibetan Empire, but they've not been populating the ranks of the, um, important counsellors for quite a long time.
So now you have this young figure who's right at the centre and he's acting with the king's ear, is a true counsellor.
So this only gained steam, uh, in the decades that follow, once we get to, um, we're still looking at Tree Day songs and the sign of tree song.
That's. And he, uh, has this cartoon inscription,
which is basically a repetition of this subscription or ratification of his father's support for Buddhism and the extension of this.
And in this, perhaps as a result of his close relationship with his advisor, with his spiritual advisor, and to Santo, uh,
the Emperor institutes uh practice whereby from among the most capable monks there will be appointed a royal gateway Shingen,
a royal kind of mature, a spiritual friend. Now this term can be used in lots of different ways across Buddhist cultures.
Uh, here. This. Is, it seems to me like it's fairly close to a lama or a guru.
Um, besides that, among the capable monks, there'll be a chomp digi ring.
Luke, the head of the sangha in Tibet. And they'll be a royal chimney.
So the royal preceptor, of course, we we know this term very well from later Tibetan history,
and lots of writings about China had been dug from David rather than others.
Um, so looking back to his song to to 2% repetition.
We have drunk a Peggy. He's a the drunk, a clown. Another fairly arriviste clown who hadn't really made a lot of noise up until then.
But now this person is at the very centre of politics, ratifying the treaty with the town, um, and Solemnised in that treaty.
So he is the chief councillor. He is the first signatory to that treaty.
He has usurped the place that had been held by secular councillors.
So you have this entire paradigm shift that's happened over the course of a few decades, right?
In the wake of the time of Guru Rinpoche, whereby now you have the figure of the monk councillor and the figure of the royal Tyana Mitra,
as being at the very centre of power and is creating a new model of the embodied right.
Now, to put this in a little bit of perspective in terms of the process of Tibetan rising Buddhism.
Uh, I mentioned already the the Nepalese court being in exile in Tibet in the six 20s.
So you've got, um, you've got some notions of Buddhism coming in.
Then you have monks from Central Asia and Khotan, uh,
fleeing and staying in the Rama in the seven 30s until the plague breaks out and they're expelled at the end of the seven 30s,
going to the time of Padma. Some of them. We have temple bodhisattvas on the.
Uh, we have his disciple. Come on, a sheela. Uh, from the Chinese side, we have Shang Mahayana.
Hassan. Mohsen. We have Padma, some of it himself during this period.
So there is a lot of emphasis on foreign teachers, on Indian teachers, Chinese teachers.
And of course, when we look at the call, the forms of a lot of our translations, we find plenty of Indian pundits alongside Tibetan translators.
So we have Indian and Tibetan translation teams, and we see this partnership.
But one of the other things that we find and here we are looking to, you know, later sources like The Watcher and the basher, um, and the.
Traditions around the Council of Tibet, for example,
but also some old Tibetan manuscripts that talk about who had jurisdiction over the temples from uh, Samu to, uh, to Lhasa and so forth.
We have over a generation the replacement of Shankaracharya to by Yasha Wang Bo.
Um, we have Tibetans taking these rules of habit.
So then they ring the head of the sangha, and you see that then with going into the early 19th century,
with young in example and with junket, you intend with the, uh, rise and domination of the figure of the monk, counsellor.
So this is all to make, uh, a suggestion or to open up for discussion.
The question of whether Guru Rinpoche marks a transitional moment here,
a transitional moment in sort of a long and winding Tibetan assimilation of the Indian notion of guru.
And maybe that's too specific. We can talk about new, similar overlapping models for embodied sacred power,
not just the term lama, but also we're looking at the West Indian, we're looking at China.
We're looking at. In the case of the young Dickinson's uncle, a figure who,
in kinship terms is placed in a superior position to the Tibetan emperor, or to the princess, father, mother, and true uncle.
So all of that does seem to be suggestive of this new model of the embodied sacred.
One thing to just in terms of the social and political situation is that this was adopted.
The early adopters were people like the young, the Janka, but very quickly the natural lateral aristocracy, the draw, the chin, the on.
They, along with the more successful ministerial aristocratic clans like the war,
are seeing that they stand to lose quite a lot if they don't adopt this new model of the monk minister of the monk councillor.
And they, uh, they quickly start to, um, position themselves in in this matter.
Now, we were talking about, um, where these models of ministerial aristocracy and natural lateral aristocracy can go wrong
or usurp the throne to the point where you have emperors being assassinated or kidnapped,
you have civil war with the GA. With the case of the monk councillor two, an argument could be made that it went too far as well,
just as a lot of other Tibetan political structures went too far and were corrected, went too far again, and then were corrected again.
And this could be in the position of Junker Pilkington himself and his ratification of the the treaty.
Um, one thinks of the image of the wooden League that you find in the case.
They got turned in other later Tibetan histories where repetition has these locks, these long locks.
That's for his name. Rebellion that go out and spread, uh, upon the cushions of two monks who sit on them.
So is the you. They need these these two sections of the head. So they're sort of above his head.
Um, that that's a fairly, um, clear expression of this going a bit too far where the Emperor almost like, um.
Uh, almost like by river is trampled down by and Buddhist figures, in this case, monks who are sitting on his loks.
So in any case, all of this unravels. The Tibetan Empire collapses.
Uh, Richardson. She took medicine, is chronically ill, as we know from the tongue Annals.
Um, this can account, perhaps, for the, um, commissioning of many thousands of copies of the future of limitless life for him.
Um, we have a struggle for succession after his death.
And then the unravelling of the Tibetan Empire, uh, devolving into different small kingdoms, um, some overlapping with previously existing kingdoms,
uh, some being new, uh, new groupings formed by the ways in which Tibetan troops and um, uh, groups were moved around the Tibetan Plateau.
So you have various people claiming to be the emperor, various people claiming to have legitimacy.
Um, you also have this network of monasteries and temples.
So this. Creates the kind of aftermath.
You can see how with the rise of the monk counsellor, with the natural aristocracy,
with the ministerial aristocracy, and with the pretenders to the throne.
You have a lot of different ingredients, some of which are dependent upon one another, some are not.
Right. So the drawer want to continue to be the Shang, the natural lateral aristocracy.
Well, then they need a legitimate king, uh, to continue that rule.
So this is what happens. And in western Tibet, for the ministerial aristocracy,
who are defined by the gifts that they receive from the emperor, that doesn't quite work anymore.
They're really sort of left in the lurch in terms of how their model of power works.
Is it going to devolve to back how it was before, when they were rulers of local areas associated with clans,
or are there going to be new, uh, centres of power that grew up,
for example, around temples,
temples that had worked also as administrative hubs and now can be used in a more modest way as areas for local taxation and trade.
So you see those as various nine to 11th century strategies that, uh, many of us are familiar with from,
you know, reading about the Tibetan Renaissance and looking into the social and political milieu of that time.
Um, one of the things that happens here, too, is that you have the rise of.
The figure of the llama. You know, I mentioned it as a sort of long and winding road.
And to open for discussion, I wanted to see if, um, we might identify two critical moments or Guru Rinpoche,
if we take Guru Rinpoche in terms of precious guru and the rise of the guru being paramount above all else in Tibetan Buddhism.
So we have the rise of the royal chaplain in the monk Tudor, epitomised in the person of its example.
Um, this is preceding a reliance on foreign teachers.
We have a somewhat displacement of the king in that metaphor of repentance.
Loks. And then in the early cheddar, we have another rise in the llama.
Um, and, you know, we see this over and over again and in the tales of the cargo transmissions and the tales of the early saga in the
tales and kind of it's all emphasising the position of the lava and devotion to the lava and reliance on the lava.
This, um, you know, drawn to the, um, being preceded by a T-shirt, etc.
We have, um, we have foreign teachers preceding these Tibetan teachers as well.
So you've got the foreign teachers in this context, in the current context,
in the new context, and then you've got the Tibetan teachers displacing them.
Also, um, you have a displacement of the Qing in the Chronology of treasure texts,
where the early treasure texts tend to focus on the person of Soames and Gamble,
and the later treasure texts shift to a focus on the person of Padma, some of them.
So a shift from the the king to the guru. And of course, concomitant with that in the stories of Padma, some of the you have the demotion of the King,
another country song that's in now being a disciple, now being under Padma, some other, um, as one of the Guru's disciples.
All right. So I will leave you with that. And I hope that, uh, that's given you something to think about.
And maybe some questions to raise for our discussion.