1 00:00:14,980 --> 00:00:22,390 [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. 2 00:00:23,440 --> 00:00:29,380 Uh, there will be three more excellent talks coming up over this Hilary term and another four in Trinity term as well. 3 00:00:30,070 --> 00:00:36,780 You can keep up to date by checking the website. All our talks are published as video podcasts. 4 00:00:36,780 --> 00:00:44,160 They'll be freely available from our website at Wolfson, from the Oxford Podcast page, from Apple Podcasts and from other sites too. 5 00:00:44,670 --> 00:00:53,569 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. 6 00:00:53,570 --> 00:00:57,080 So please feel free to express yourselves and ask questions then. 7 00:00:59,450 --> 00:01:07,490 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. 8 00:01:09,230 --> 00:01:16,040 After completing his B.A. at Wesleyan, Brandon came to Oxford, where he completed an MPhil, a DPhil, and a postdoc. 9 00:01:16,760 --> 00:01:26,510 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. 10 00:01:28,470 --> 00:01:28,890 Currently, 11 00:01:28,890 --> 00:01:35,160 Brandon is the McKenna Chair of Buddhist Studies and professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Georgetown University. 12 00:01:35,850 --> 00:01:43,290 His research largely concerns seventh to 10th century Tibetan, Dunhuang, and the circulation of rituals and narratives in and out of Tibet. 13 00:01:43,320 --> 00:01:51,750 During this period, his publications include his well-known monograph on the Old Tibetan Annals of 2009 and the 14 00:01:51,750 --> 00:01:56,790 book Dyson Gods on the Silk Road Chinese Buddhist Studies Divination in Transcultural Context, 15 00:01:56,880 --> 00:02:04,709 published in 2021. His most recent works are Producing Buddhist Secrets in Ninth Century Tibet, The Search of Limitless Life, 16 00:02:04,710 --> 00:02:10,230 and its Dunhuang Copies kept at the British Library, published in 2025 jointly with Lewis Stoney. 17 00:02:10,950 --> 00:02:16,439 And Catastrophe and Prophecy in Tibetan Religious Contexts, which is a special issue of cohere. 18 00:02:16,440 --> 00:02:21,150 Text A-Z 2025, co-edited with Jetson della plunk. 19 00:02:21,870 --> 00:02:25,260 So, Brandon, many thanks indeed for taking the time to speak to us today. 20 00:02:25,530 --> 00:02:29,339 And over to you. All right. 21 00:02:29,340 --> 00:02:34,590 Well, thank you so much for inviting me back. It's nice to be back. Uh, in Oxford, if only virtually. 22 00:02:34,800 --> 00:02:38,420 And, um, good to be a part of this lecture series. 23 00:02:38,430 --> 00:02:44,430 Also, uh, it's it's fantastic also to have those recordings and the creation of this great resource, 24 00:02:44,580 --> 00:02:48,960 um, for other people who aren't able to make it, uh, for this event. 25 00:02:50,040 --> 00:02:57,389 All right. So I was setting myself the task after I was approached to give this talk of giving the context, 26 00:02:57,390 --> 00:03:05,430 the religious and political and social context for some of its period in Tibet, roughly the seven 70s to the seven 90s. 27 00:03:06,090 --> 00:03:12,680 Um, this is a pretty audacious thing to do. Or it's a tall task, uh, anyway, to achieve. 28 00:03:12,690 --> 00:03:18,599 So what I've done is try to do something modest about it and really look at a few of 29 00:03:18,600 --> 00:03:23,790 our assumptions around notions of popular religion and notions of royal religion, 30 00:03:24,150 --> 00:03:27,240 and how these relate to the introduction of Buddhism to Tibet. 31 00:03:27,570 --> 00:03:35,790 How these relate to Padma, some other, and the moments that I'm going to argue here represents this moment of transition that occurs, 32 00:03:36,240 --> 00:03:39,750 um, late eighth, early ninth century. 33 00:03:40,170 --> 00:03:46,739 So we'll get into that. But I want to, uh, present it in such a way that we're also interrogating our assumptions. 34 00:03:46,740 --> 00:03:50,280 And I'm laying there, uh, some of my own assumptions, too. 35 00:03:50,790 --> 00:03:54,720 So generally, what we're looking at is the period of the Tibetan Empire. 36 00:03:54,750 --> 00:04:03,420 You're familiar with this, perhaps? Um, 608 866 are some general dates that are used based on, uh, Chinese sources. 37 00:04:03,420 --> 00:04:08,100 Generally, um writing is introduced early to mid seventh century. 38 00:04:08,490 --> 00:04:14,010 The Tibetan Empire is really composed of a coalition of different clans, 39 00:04:14,010 --> 00:04:19,020 ministerial and natural lateral aristocracies that are holding this all together 40 00:04:19,230 --> 00:04:24,120 with the person of the king as the pivot around which all of them are moving. 41 00:04:24,420 --> 00:04:30,270 We'll get into what those aristocracies are and how they work in relation to the king, and some more detail. 42 00:04:30,990 --> 00:04:38,340 Big moments in terms of our narrative today and understanding some of, uh, Buddhism is adopted as an official religion of Tibet. 43 00:04:38,760 --> 00:04:45,930 In 779, I put it in boldface and, uh, the indefinite article rather than the definite article, 44 00:04:45,930 --> 00:04:50,910 just because there has been a tendency to be a little bit loose with language and to, 45 00:04:51,480 --> 00:04:58,770 um, imagine that this entailed a sort of conversion where there was an old official religion, 46 00:04:58,770 --> 00:05:01,980 and now there's a new official religion, and it is Buddhism. 47 00:05:03,350 --> 00:05:12,680 Um. One of the things, too, that you'll know is somebody familiar with Tibetan Buddhism is that within Tibetan religious memory, 48 00:05:13,340 --> 00:05:19,700 the Tibetan Empire is a golden age. It's a Buddhist golden age with three religious kings who are emanations of bodhisattvas. 49 00:05:20,090 --> 00:05:29,420 Um, all as part of a kind of providential history of generosity, helping the Tibetan people to move on the path towards Buddhahood. 50 00:05:30,020 --> 00:05:35,870 And also in the context of this series, in this series that has, uh, been preceding it, 51 00:05:36,350 --> 00:05:44,239 treasure recovery and treasure revelation as part of this ongoing narrative in terms of these new teachings appearing, 52 00:05:44,240 --> 00:05:51,110 these new revelations appearing, but going back to the period of Padma Sumba and this golden age of Empire. 53 00:05:56,610 --> 00:06:02,219 So to outline where I'd like to go with this lecture today, I wanted to, as I was mentioning, 54 00:06:02,220 --> 00:06:11,640 query some general assumptions that we tend to have that that I tend to have as well about popular religion and about religion. 55 00:06:11,790 --> 00:06:18,390 I just want to look at these categories a little bit and see what the costs and benefits are of our thinking about them. 56 00:06:19,710 --> 00:06:20,130 Um. 57 00:06:20,490 --> 00:06:29,650 Go into more detail about ministerial and metro lateral aristocracies, and how these are constitutive of the political system of the Tibetan Empire. 58 00:06:29,670 --> 00:06:36,510 Though the word system is a bit of an overstatement, and as much as the Tibetan Empire, like most um polities, 59 00:06:36,510 --> 00:06:41,040 was sort of a series of crashes and burns and experiments, um, there, 60 00:06:41,520 --> 00:06:47,580 despite the later providential history, um, it tended to be very circumstantial and experimental. 61 00:06:48,480 --> 00:06:56,190 Um, in locating the king in relation to these aristocracies, I'm going to emphasise what the king is and what the king does. 62 00:06:56,790 --> 00:07:01,470 Um, there we go. Sorry. The slides sometimes move by themselves. 63 00:07:02,280 --> 00:07:10,290 And also the role of the king and royal mythology and royalist mythology, self representations by the king and by the king. 64 00:07:10,290 --> 00:07:14,099 Circle of what the king is, is a god or a son of gods, um. 65 00:07:14,100 --> 00:07:19,409 And his role in building temples and in scriptural production and then getting to the pith of it. 66 00:07:19,410 --> 00:07:27,380 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 67 00:07:27,960 --> 00:07:33,150 and the emergence in the late eighth century and early ninth century of a new, 68 00:07:33,570 --> 00:07:40,020 um, embodiment, a new human embodiment of the sacred in the form of the monk counsellor, who is the, 69 00:07:40,020 --> 00:07:45,809 um, advisor to the Tibetan Emperor in Saint Paul, and the monk counsellor, 70 00:07:45,810 --> 00:07:52,140 which comes to be a position that the aristocracy I can use to get to the centre of the power, 71 00:07:52,440 --> 00:08:03,840 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. 72 00:08:05,570 --> 00:08:09,770 All right. So to query that first assumption it was about popular religion. 73 00:08:10,580 --> 00:08:20,540 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, 74 00:08:20,540 --> 00:08:28,370 where there's looking at like a tripartite world populated by humans, populated by various, um, 75 00:08:28,550 --> 00:08:33,550 spirits, you can call them, or beings, that's in those notions of what happens after death. 76 00:08:33,560 --> 00:08:41,240 You have ritual specialists who are engaged in expelling demons and taming and healing people and performing funerals. 77 00:08:41,690 --> 00:08:48,050 There is an imperative to gain the favour of the gods, to call in Chas and Yang good fortune to expel the demons. 78 00:08:48,590 --> 00:08:52,850 So in assuming this kind of baseline of Tibetan religion, 79 00:08:53,270 --> 00:08:58,729 and thinking of the ways that it's been presented, say, as the nameless religion or the religion of men, 80 00:08:58,730 --> 00:09:07,940 and surveys by science, or by touchy, or as popular religion or folk religion, or rethought as pagan religion or civil religion. 81 00:09:08,750 --> 00:09:13,490 There's there's many ways in which this can be articulated and imagined and studied. 82 00:09:13,520 --> 00:09:18,020 You have a kind of morphological approach from, you know, somebody like, um, 83 00:09:18,140 --> 00:09:22,370 the basket worker wits, where you see different types of loss in their in different texts. 84 00:09:22,370 --> 00:09:26,390 And sometimes that is this colour and sometimes the gift is that colour. 85 00:09:26,840 --> 00:09:31,790 Um, and you can see how that changes in different times and in different places. 86 00:09:32,270 --> 00:09:37,220 Then you also have ethnographic approaches where you can see how these different, 87 00:09:37,550 --> 00:09:42,740 um, these different practices operate in eastern Tibet, in the Himalayas, 88 00:09:42,980 --> 00:09:52,520 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. 89 00:09:53,210 --> 00:10:00,170 Now it's it's been problematise before that you can't simply take these current, uh, 90 00:10:00,950 --> 00:10:06,469 instances of the village religion or popular religion and then project them wholesale back in time, 91 00:10:06,470 --> 00:10:12,440 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. 92 00:10:13,040 --> 00:10:19,890 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. 93 00:10:19,910 --> 00:10:28,370 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. 94 00:10:29,360 --> 00:10:33,170 Um. And yet there is a tendency. 95 00:10:34,270 --> 00:10:39,249 Even when one does recognise change to assume this is a sort of baseline. 96 00:10:39,250 --> 00:10:41,559 And in that assumption, in that tendency, 97 00:10:41,560 --> 00:10:50,110 I guess one of the dangers would be assuming a timeless and unchanging character to buck religion or to popular religion. 98 00:10:50,920 --> 00:10:55,629 Uh, we see a nice expression of this in an essay by Jeffrey Samuel. 99 00:10:55,630 --> 00:10:56,950 I just wanted to quote it here. 100 00:10:56,980 --> 00:11:04,240 He says folk religion is key to what happened when the Vajrayana came to Tibet, because in the post 1840s period in particular, 101 00:11:04,720 --> 00:11:08,140 it was not as yet a question of Buddhism reshaping folk religion, 102 00:11:08,590 --> 00:11:14,530 but of Buddhism and primarily its Vajrayana component surviving as a part of folk religion. 103 00:11:15,400 --> 00:11:20,170 So that's an articulation that I generally go along with in terms of imagining a sort of 104 00:11:20,170 --> 00:11:25,780 baseline of Tibetan religion that other foreign religions like Buddhism have to fit into. 105 00:11:26,920 --> 00:11:31,600 Now I'm fully aware of the difficulties in terms of anachronism here. 106 00:11:32,080 --> 00:11:38,890 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? 107 00:11:39,610 --> 00:11:43,630 In point of fact, there are no pre Buddhist texts in Tibetan language. 108 00:11:44,080 --> 00:11:46,130 Every text that you find from doing Wong, 109 00:11:46,150 --> 00:11:54,040 every inscription that you find in central or eastern Tibet dates from a time when Buddhism was already well and truly present into that. 110 00:11:54,250 --> 00:12:00,790 So even if the content of it seems non Buddhist, it could be written in reaction to Buddhism. 111 00:12:01,060 --> 00:12:08,770 It could be using technologies like writing itself that have been instrumentalized in Buddhist ways, 112 00:12:08,770 --> 00:12:13,950 and that instrumental ization is now informing how they're being used in ostensibly non Buddhist ways. 113 00:12:13,960 --> 00:12:18,640 I say ostensibly because the line between what is Buddhist and what is non 114 00:12:18,640 --> 00:12:22,360 Buddhist when you're looking at a manuscript is very difficult to discern anyway. 115 00:12:22,690 --> 00:12:27,190 It could seem to have non Buddhist content, but it could be used by people who identify as Buddhists. 116 00:12:27,730 --> 00:12:30,040 Um, so all of that uh, 117 00:12:30,520 --> 00:12:38,319 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, 118 00:12:38,320 --> 00:12:43,480 ninth century manuscripts. And then the kind of leap I suppose, that one might make. 119 00:12:44,590 --> 00:12:54,280 Is by assuming that something like this maybe not exactly like it, but something like it in terms of exchanges with gods, expelling demons, 120 00:12:54,430 --> 00:13:00,730 summoning fortune, that's something like this was probably part and parcel of Tibetan religion before Buddhism came on the scene. 121 00:13:01,120 --> 00:13:08,830 So that's a kind of modest assumption that I'm fairly happy to go along with, um, 122 00:13:09,430 --> 00:13:15,850 alongside the general assumption that this is the baseline of Tibetan religion in terms of the costs and benefits. 123 00:13:15,970 --> 00:13:16,660 Um, I mean, 124 00:13:16,660 --> 00:13:24,520 the benefits are that you do find a lot of continuity between doing what manuscripts to do with popular religion and later popular traditions. 125 00:13:25,150 --> 00:13:31,660 Um, and this has been demonstrated by numerous studies, by something committed by Tony Hoover, by Charles Randall and others. 126 00:13:32,650 --> 00:13:38,530 One of the costs to it, because every methodology or every assumption that you care to make is going to have, uh, 127 00:13:38,530 --> 00:13:46,149 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, 128 00:13:46,150 --> 00:13:54,969 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, 129 00:13:54,970 --> 00:14:00,130 would have been brought up in these sorts of elite households very heavily into sized households. 130 00:14:00,460 --> 00:14:04,270 In those cases, yes, uh, this might not be so important to them. 131 00:14:04,600 --> 00:14:10,000 And assuming this is what religion is all about, you would be in danger of getting such people wrong. 132 00:14:10,300 --> 00:14:17,020 Um, so be it. Um, in terms of looking at early Tibet, the other alternatives are looking at, say, 133 00:14:17,020 --> 00:14:22,059 the seventh century of this tabula rasa where you have no purchase on what was there, 134 00:14:22,060 --> 00:14:29,890 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. 135 00:14:30,340 --> 00:14:36,340 So, um, that is to lay bare in what I hope is a fairly honest way, what some of my assumptions are, 136 00:14:36,340 --> 00:14:43,000 and how I see the strengths and weaknesses of some of the other assumptions in terms of early Tibet and early Tibetan religion. 137 00:14:43,630 --> 00:14:50,440 So just to flesh this out a little bit more, not just in then, um, you worship the gods, you suppress the demons. 138 00:14:50,770 --> 00:14:57,159 In terms of the organisation of space. We are together with that stand together and a lot of other, uh, 139 00:14:57,160 --> 00:15:02,080 beings in the middle up above you have the law, but you also have some demons like to do. 140 00:15:02,080 --> 00:15:05,860 Down below you have the new the Nagas. Uh, you've also got the sea. 141 00:15:06,310 --> 00:15:13,180 Um, so you're fairly familiar with this, this notion in terms of gods and what are the gods? 142 00:15:13,180 --> 00:15:18,399 I, I linger on this because it's pertinent to the career of Padma of, of course, 143 00:15:18,400 --> 00:15:23,620 and his relation to deities like mentioned power and the stories of his taming of the demons, 144 00:15:23,980 --> 00:15:27,310 um, and also the process of creating a Buddhist protector. 145 00:15:27,820 --> 00:15:38,500 So we have named gods, uh, for example, in ninth century dice divination texts, and these names of the gods who are pronouncing uh, 146 00:15:38,500 --> 00:15:44,440 oracular verses, uh, very often correspond to the names of mountains names and mountain gods. 147 00:15:44,440 --> 00:15:51,820 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, 148 00:15:52,180 --> 00:15:57,639 and that is the same name as, say, a mountain god like cooler curry, uh, or indentured tongue or yada. 149 00:15:57,640 --> 00:16:02,620 Ciampa. So you can make the modest assumption that, yes, there were mountain gods in early Tibet. 150 00:16:02,620 --> 00:16:10,750 And of course, archaeological evidence bears that out, uh, as well, that there was a mountain cult on the Tibetan Plateau in prehistoric times. 151 00:16:11,260 --> 00:16:15,879 So you have named gods. You also have named classes of gods like the cha gods, for example, 152 00:16:15,880 --> 00:16:22,150 who were associated with the Tibetan emperors in terms of what a god is in this context and what they do, 153 00:16:22,630 --> 00:16:27,310 uh, there are sources of fortune, sources of protection, sources of favour. 154 00:16:27,310 --> 00:16:30,730 So the God can favour you, uh, as in the verb go on. 155 00:16:31,060 --> 00:16:38,920 But God can also abandon you. Um, and you know this, this can be as a result of your misdeeds or your failures. 156 00:16:39,400 --> 00:16:42,550 This, uh, creates a compound. Go and pong. Go, pong. 157 00:16:42,700 --> 00:16:49,450 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. 158 00:16:50,970 --> 00:16:56,450 So in the classical, um. Formulation of sacrifice. 159 00:16:56,660 --> 00:16:58,240 I give so that you may give. 160 00:16:58,250 --> 00:17:05,840 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, 161 00:17:05,840 --> 00:17:13,840 drink offering, um, offerings of clothing and silks that are given to them, where you're aiming to please them and ensure their favour. 162 00:17:13,850 --> 00:17:18,380 So you're giving these gifts and in turn, you might receive their favour. 163 00:17:20,360 --> 00:17:22,340 In terms of fleshing out this, um. 164 00:17:23,360 --> 00:17:29,299 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. 165 00:17:29,300 --> 00:17:34,150 And indeed, there are many, um, funerary texts among the dead Wrong manuscripts. 166 00:17:34,160 --> 00:17:40,370 We also have tombs all across the Tibetan Plateau that have been studied by Goodson, Hazzard and others. 167 00:17:40,880 --> 00:17:48,500 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. 168 00:17:48,500 --> 00:17:58,430 The land of the dead. Uh, the. It's about where you go when you die tend to be, um, layered and somewhat promiscuous, 169 00:17:58,430 --> 00:18:03,710 with lots of different ideas that say, don't necessarily hold together from a logical perspective. 170 00:18:04,250 --> 00:18:09,140 Um, but in any case, you do have inklings of where this land of the dead might be. 171 00:18:09,590 --> 00:18:17,450 Um, there are lots of metaphors involving stars, um, and ancestors, um, uh, establishing your ancestors in the beyond. 172 00:18:18,290 --> 00:18:24,229 Uh, but that's for for another day. Now, in terms of this tradition, also, you'd want to ask about. 173 00:18:24,230 --> 00:18:30,709 So teleology, um, which is mentioned one through death you can become an ancestor also through a millenarian cult, 174 00:18:30,710 --> 00:18:32,150 where you look to the end of the world. 175 00:18:32,150 --> 00:18:39,620 Coming up, something I've just written about and that issue of, of somebody that, uh, that Rob mentioned in the introduction, 176 00:18:40,070 --> 00:18:45,049 um, you're praying for the end of the world so that you can be reborn at the start of a new good age. 177 00:18:45,050 --> 00:18:49,580 So that's a kind of social rheology, but it's also theology of time as well, 178 00:18:49,580 --> 00:18:54,140 where you're using the moral cosmology of time to be reborn at a certain time. 179 00:18:54,680 --> 00:19:01,219 Then also, as in many situations, there may be a different destination for, say, the bull and the Shem, the priests. 180 00:19:01,220 --> 00:19:08,450 Then there would be for your normal person, who is, um, I think, a ritual performed for them having a funeral performed for them. 181 00:19:09,840 --> 00:19:16,749 All right. So. The second assumption I wanted to query is about royal religion. 182 00:19:16,750 --> 00:19:27,190 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. 183 00:19:27,190 --> 00:19:28,420 This comes from Ron Davidson. 184 00:19:29,230 --> 00:19:35,950 He writes that there appears to be no exception to the rule that when the monastery becomes culturally important outside India, 185 00:19:36,370 --> 00:19:43,120 it is principally through the agency of official patronage, either aristocratic or imperial. 186 00:19:44,110 --> 00:19:51,849 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, 187 00:19:51,850 --> 00:20:01,150 to Mongolia, to China, to Japan and across Southeast Asia, where you see various royal adopters, um, of these technologies. 188 00:20:02,110 --> 00:20:09,430 Um, but this also puts the focus on the king, puts the focus on the court, puts the focus on the aristocracy. 189 00:20:09,440 --> 00:20:16,690 When we're thinking about the assimilation of Buddhism, that, in turn, has led to an emphasis on. 190 00:20:18,250 --> 00:20:26,360 The existing say non Buddhist or possibly non Buddhist sources from June Wong as perhaps also being royal. 191 00:20:26,380 --> 00:20:35,230 Indeed you have uh, at least one manuscript that deals with royal funerals and you have some divination texts that mention Tibetan emperors. 192 00:20:35,860 --> 00:20:40,509 Uh, so we do have some notion that many of these are royal documents, 193 00:20:40,510 --> 00:20:44,979 your prayers for Tibetan emperors, for example, among the Duke Huang manuscripts. 194 00:20:44,980 --> 00:20:48,670 And of course, many of the inscriptions are, uh, 195 00:20:48,670 --> 00:20:55,660 supposedly authored by the emperors or are by uh councillors who are referring to grants given to them by emperors. 196 00:20:57,360 --> 00:21:04,950 But there is a tendency to think of all of these sources, or most of the Dunhuang manuscripts, as if they are raw material. 197 00:21:05,310 --> 00:21:16,410 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, 198 00:21:17,280 --> 00:21:24,890 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. 199 00:21:24,900 --> 00:21:32,450 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. 200 00:21:32,460 --> 00:21:40,710 This is probably not, um, royally sponsored. On the other hand, we have so many of the the vast majority of the, uh, 201 00:21:40,710 --> 00:21:45,830 Tibetan do in one manuscripts are sutras that were commissioned, uh, as a gift for the Tibetan emperor. 202 00:21:45,840 --> 00:21:57,240 So those can be said to be royal documents. Now in Overemphasising the royal nature of a lot of these early Tibetan rituals, 203 00:21:57,900 --> 00:22:06,030 there's been a kind of blurring of the lines between royal religion and popular religion, such that one takes divination, 204 00:22:06,030 --> 00:22:10,350 one takes collagen, gong, one takes around some rites, healing rites, 205 00:22:10,560 --> 00:22:17,280 funeral rites that we find in the Duke one manuscripts and refer to this as a body of royal religion. 206 00:22:18,610 --> 00:22:22,120 Um, and that's probably hard to justify. 207 00:22:22,280 --> 00:22:26,170 Uh, we do have polemics against certain funeral rites. 208 00:22:26,200 --> 00:22:27,760 Uh, from the Buddhist perspective, 209 00:22:28,030 --> 00:22:35,740 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. 210 00:22:36,640 --> 00:22:42,520 Um, this also brings up a question just about history and social history. 211 00:22:42,550 --> 00:22:47,410 You know, how much can we say about popular religious practices? 212 00:22:47,410 --> 00:22:56,140 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, 213 00:22:56,590 --> 00:23:05,770 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. 214 00:23:06,040 --> 00:23:09,820 Some of the Messier texts, and this time around notwithstanding. 215 00:23:10,270 --> 00:23:13,479 So what can we really know about the grass roots of Buddhism? 216 00:23:13,480 --> 00:23:21,940 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? 217 00:23:23,980 --> 00:23:31,270 So. Looking at. Some of the sources from doing well and some of the inscriptions as well. 218 00:23:31,280 --> 00:23:38,989 We see a royal mythology, and as part of the, um, it's part of the text book genre, or, say, 219 00:23:38,990 --> 00:23:45,890 the clearing of one's throat genre, where we, we repeat inherited truisms but don't interrogate them. 220 00:23:46,280 --> 00:23:52,520 There's been a tendency to say things like, well, the Tibetans believe that the king was a god who descended from the heavens, 221 00:23:53,090 --> 00:23:56,810 um, and that he conquered the 12 Minor Kingdoms and united the plateau. 222 00:23:58,440 --> 00:24:07,799 What we should say is that the royalist authorised sources present the Tibetan king as a god who descended from the heavens, 223 00:24:07,800 --> 00:24:13,950 and as the king who united the 12 kingdoms under the Tibetan Plateau or under himself on the Tibetan Plateau. 224 00:24:14,610 --> 00:24:23,670 Um, even in some of these. Uh, ostensibly authorised documents like the Old Tibetan Chronicle. 225 00:24:23,730 --> 00:24:30,190 We find some interesting rough edges. There is one episode, for example, where, uh, Joe Groza, 226 00:24:30,210 --> 00:24:36,990 who is the wife of one of the defectors who's fighting a civil war against traders on the emperor, 227 00:24:37,590 --> 00:24:44,910 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. 228 00:24:45,330 --> 00:24:54,000 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. 229 00:24:54,300 --> 00:25:03,290 And of course, the tale of Brigham Temple, uh, one of the most famous old Tibetan myths recounts how King Brigham lost his divinity, 230 00:25:03,300 --> 00:25:07,080 how he was no longer able to move between the heavens and the earth. 231 00:25:07,470 --> 00:25:14,549 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, 232 00:25:14,550 --> 00:25:18,370 sort of in an intermediate state between gods and humans. 233 00:25:18,390 --> 00:25:25,480 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. 234 00:25:25,500 --> 00:25:35,970 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. 235 00:25:37,070 --> 00:25:40,969 Intermediate title in the sense that it's not a Buddha, it's a Buddha to be. 236 00:25:40,970 --> 00:25:51,840 It's a Buddha in the becoming. All right, so another thing about, uh, royal religion is we have. 237 00:25:52,900 --> 00:25:59,830 Evidence. Archaeological evidence from the similar sized tomb fields all over the Tibetan Plateau dating from the fourth to the 10th centuries, 238 00:26:00,310 --> 00:26:08,920 and then also in one of the inscriptions at Shaila Kong, which seems to have the genealogy of a young clan ancestor. 239 00:26:08,920 --> 00:26:14,530 And of course, later clan history is that have their own ancestral tales of descent from heavens. 240 00:26:15,010 --> 00:26:20,680 It's fairly clear that this notion of the Tibetan king descending from the heavens as a god, 241 00:26:20,680 --> 00:26:26,049 to bring the ways of gods to humanity was not, um, was not something unique. 242 00:26:26,050 --> 00:26:30,730 It was something that probably every other kingdom on the Tibetan Plateau had for their own king. 243 00:26:31,180 --> 00:26:35,559 Uh, the Yarloop king just happened to conquer the Tibetan Empire and unite. 244 00:26:35,560 --> 00:26:40,090 And their mythology came to a for where their mythology sort of wins out. 245 00:26:40,870 --> 00:26:44,799 Um, but what happens to all of those others, all of those, uh, 246 00:26:44,800 --> 00:26:51,370 other local kings who are now councillors, now vassals of the yard of King is now the Tibetan emperor. 247 00:26:51,940 --> 00:26:56,640 There's various ways one can think about this or overthink about this. 248 00:26:56,650 --> 00:27:07,090 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. 249 00:27:07,330 --> 00:27:12,760 But yes, this used to be common property of a widespread cult where each had a kind of local cult. 250 00:27:12,970 --> 00:27:18,940 Uh, very similar to one another. But now, with the royal monopoly on this, those become taboo. 251 00:27:19,240 --> 00:27:24,060 This is now the property of the Emperor. And this is something the Emperor does and you don't do. 252 00:27:24,070 --> 00:27:29,980 So this is a kind of thing that's been articulated by Maurice Bloch in the context of, uh, Madagascar. 253 00:27:30,160 --> 00:27:38,110 Um, and that sort of idea of a royal monopoly on certain rituals that that could be a useful way, for example, 254 00:27:38,110 --> 00:27:43,670 for looking at by rotation of symbolism and the analogy between the emperor and by Roach now, 255 00:27:43,690 --> 00:27:49,000 which would presumably be an analogy that you wouldn't be so happy about others making. 256 00:27:50,110 --> 00:27:55,120 Now, other ways that this has been thought of in terms of the transformation of these 257 00:27:55,120 --> 00:28:00,370 local cults and their descent myths in light of the victorious central cult, 258 00:28:01,060 --> 00:28:08,830 um, something Carmen Goodrum has would have written about this, about the creation of a sort of fictive family tree where, say, the chimney. 259 00:28:09,840 --> 00:28:13,560 The Chin clan head, who used to be the king of this area around the library. 260 00:28:13,950 --> 00:28:22,499 Now, um, instead of perpetuating his deity, or instead of there being mythology about him descending, he's perpetuating his deity. 261 00:28:22,500 --> 00:28:25,860 But that deity is now reckoned as a son of the central deity. 262 00:28:26,400 --> 00:28:33,600 Uh, so in a way, his worship of his own deity, his continuation of that old cult, has been subordinated. 263 00:28:33,600 --> 00:28:37,530 And all of that worship sort of trickles up to the Emperor. 264 00:28:38,040 --> 00:28:39,640 So that's another way of thinking about it. 265 00:28:39,660 --> 00:28:47,170 Nathan Hale articulates it such that these local cults of the Kula were worshipping the emperors, God worshipping the imperial cult. 266 00:28:47,190 --> 00:28:51,390 So there you have another sense in which this might be transformed. 267 00:28:52,230 --> 00:28:55,290 But however one imagines this or over thinks it. 268 00:28:55,710 --> 00:29:03,570 We do have an interesting picture of how these local cults, uh, around their own descent myths could transform. 269 00:29:04,080 --> 00:29:12,239 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 270 00:29:12,240 --> 00:29:17,309 as these transform and become parts of other networks with Buddhist influence and influence, 271 00:29:17,310 --> 00:29:28,219 etc. Okay, so I wanted to get on to what constitutes the social and political system of the Tibetan Empire, 272 00:29:28,220 --> 00:29:32,270 and how this constructs a figure in the kingdom. You're all familiar with Shang. 273 00:29:32,270 --> 00:29:39,740 Learn the term Shang and the term learned ministerial aristocracy and natural lateral aristocracy is how I will gloss it here. 274 00:29:39,770 --> 00:29:42,800 Look. Just means Councillor Xiang means maternal uncle or father in law. 275 00:29:43,490 --> 00:29:49,970 So the ministerial aristocracy is formed through the expansion of the urban kingdom. 276 00:29:50,540 --> 00:29:57,889 Uh, once it's going across, uh, um, across the sample and going into the kind of plaza area you have, 277 00:29:57,890 --> 00:30:03,020 clans like the way and the Yang who defect and join the Harlem Kingdom. 278 00:30:03,500 --> 00:30:08,720 And the way that defection happens, that's what precipitates the conquest that creates the Tibetan Empire. 279 00:30:09,080 --> 00:30:12,830 And they get rewarded for their defections by being appointed as councillors. 280 00:30:12,830 --> 00:30:16,250 As ministers, they become the ministerial aristocracy. 281 00:30:16,250 --> 00:30:26,059 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. 282 00:30:26,060 --> 00:30:32,510 But now you have these new, uh, folks coming in from the north, coming in from the West, people, like you would say, 283 00:30:32,510 --> 00:30:38,360 and guard tongues and come out of the Kupo and Nagara clans and their activities in the north and in the west. 284 00:30:39,230 --> 00:30:45,330 Um, so. Here you have a quotation, for example, that just shows how this happens. 285 00:30:45,330 --> 00:30:49,530 You have the defectors who join, uh, the Tibetan king. 286 00:30:49,890 --> 00:30:56,070 They give him the grants, they give him what they've conquered, they make these gifts to him, and then he gives them back. 287 00:30:56,610 --> 00:31:05,070 So the paradigmatic act that creates them as ministerial aristocrats is they're receiving a gift from the king generally of lands and subjects, 288 00:31:05,340 --> 00:31:16,110 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, 289 00:31:16,110 --> 00:31:21,749 it's not a kind of providential system or a coherent system that's imported from somewhere else. 290 00:31:21,750 --> 00:31:25,500 It's more like try and find out and see what works and see what doesn't work. 291 00:31:26,100 --> 00:31:30,120 You see at the bottom of the slide what didn't work with the ministerial aristocracy, 292 00:31:30,120 --> 00:31:38,400 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. 293 00:31:38,670 --> 00:31:44,040 Long and the Bell clan rose up and killed, uh, tree some victims father, in the seven 50s. 294 00:31:44,340 --> 00:31:51,180 So you have instances in which, rather than conquering for the Tibetan emperor and receiving back what they've conquered, 295 00:31:51,540 --> 00:31:56,729 they decide not to go through that route and just keep it for themselves and then precipitate a civil war. 296 00:31:56,730 --> 00:32:05,250 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, 297 00:32:05,520 --> 00:32:12,120 it really becomes articulated in the wake of the Civil War with the gar and the period where the, 298 00:32:12,630 --> 00:32:19,370 uh, is the empress of Tibet ruling Tibet from the early eighth century for the first decade of the eighth century. 299 00:32:19,380 --> 00:32:24,240 So she's from the royal clan, and the royal clan had help to push back against the gar, 300 00:32:24,300 --> 00:32:32,430 along with the chimp clan and these, um, these alliances between them and with others who had provided, 301 00:32:32,910 --> 00:32:38,610 um, a mother for the Tibetan emperor, who would provide an air bearing queen for the Tibetan emperor, 302 00:32:39,090 --> 00:32:44,700 come to be institutionalised as the Shang, the Shang, the maternal uncle clans. 303 00:32:44,700 --> 00:32:53,460 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. 304 00:32:54,060 --> 00:33:02,050 Um, and they end up populating also the. The political councils along with the ministerial aristocracy. 305 00:33:02,410 --> 00:33:08,440 So from the um. From the early eighth century, they're really growing up as a power to be reckoned with. 306 00:33:08,440 --> 00:33:15,489 And throughout the eighth century, they're extremely strong. Uh, they they're, um, powerful to the end of the Empire. 307 00:33:15,490 --> 00:33:21,520 And even afterwards, you have to draw as kingmakers, as fulfilling that role for the kingdoms of could get power. 308 00:33:21,520 --> 00:33:24,790 Um, now you have cautionary tales there as well. 309 00:33:24,880 --> 00:33:29,380 Um, and you have a few would be Shang clans. 310 00:33:29,500 --> 00:33:35,409 You know, people who did provide, uh, a prince did provide an heir to the throne in the time of Nozick, 311 00:33:35,410 --> 00:33:40,390 in the time of London, where they kidnapped the king or killed the king, or tried to kill the king. 312 00:33:40,690 --> 00:33:44,530 You know, you have cautionary tales, uh, here as well, 313 00:33:44,530 --> 00:33:53,320 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. 314 00:33:57,160 --> 00:34:03,910 So the process of ministerial aristocracy and noblemen is what transforms these local kings, the councillors. 315 00:34:04,300 --> 00:34:09,790 Um, in the process that we talked about, uh, with the ancestral cult as well. 316 00:34:10,390 --> 00:34:13,990 So what does this mean for the king and how is he defined? 317 00:34:14,140 --> 00:34:18,580 Well, I mentioned that the ministerial aristocracy is defined by receiving gifts from the king. 318 00:34:19,270 --> 00:34:24,430 So in that sense, we can say that they are made noble by what the king does. 319 00:34:24,940 --> 00:34:32,830 Um, and here the king gives. And of course, this is, um, this is paradigmatic of Indian kings granting and giving. 320 00:34:33,220 --> 00:34:41,200 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, 321 00:34:41,200 --> 00:34:47,010 by contrast, they're defined by their proximity to the king and what they give, namely birth. 322 00:34:47,020 --> 00:34:48,310 They give birth to the king. 323 00:34:48,880 --> 00:34:55,420 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. 324 00:34:55,430 --> 00:35:01,270 It is what the king is that a nobles that shun, that a nobles, the natural lateral aristocracy. 325 00:35:02,020 --> 00:35:06,850 So here, just spotlighting what the king is a giver and what the king, 326 00:35:06,980 --> 00:35:11,500 a sacred being who's given birth to by the Shang and what the king does, he gives. 327 00:35:12,040 --> 00:35:15,790 Those two things are co constitutive. Also, the king is sacred. 328 00:35:15,790 --> 00:35:22,270 He is um, what he is because of what he does, and he is able to give because of his sexuality as a king. 329 00:35:22,810 --> 00:35:30,700 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, 330 00:35:30,700 --> 00:35:37,930 on the part of, say, the natural lateral aristocracy, on the part of the ministerial aristocracy and boogieing the kingship. 331 00:35:40,540 --> 00:35:45,009 Also constituting the king is um. Patronage. 332 00:35:45,010 --> 00:35:49,320 So there was no capital in, uh, the Tibetan Empire. 333 00:35:49,330 --> 00:35:53,770 You had, on the other hand, uh, a mobile court where the king went from one place to another, 334 00:35:53,770 --> 00:36:00,580 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. 335 00:36:00,940 --> 00:36:05,410 And what this did is it created an opportunity for local clans to offer patronage. 336 00:36:05,830 --> 00:36:13,090 You invite the Emperor and his huge court, full of ritual specialists, full of guards, full of his coterie of servants. 337 00:36:13,420 --> 00:36:16,240 You have to feed all of them. So you have to have a good place to do it. 338 00:36:16,630 --> 00:36:22,840 You invite them, they come, you welcome them, you fed them, face them, and then you bid them goodbye. 339 00:36:23,020 --> 00:36:26,470 Does that sound familiar? That's a puja. That's what you do to a god. That's no. 340 00:36:26,890 --> 00:36:34,870 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. 341 00:36:34,870 --> 00:36:39,310 In this case, the prestige that you're getting from hosting the Emperor should help, 342 00:36:39,730 --> 00:36:45,190 uh, the careers of your, uh, your counsellors in the decades that follow. 343 00:36:46,530 --> 00:36:55,590 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. 344 00:36:55,860 --> 00:37:02,370 Um, there had been a law passed to prevent people from practising Buddhism as a young man. 345 00:37:02,370 --> 00:37:09,660 Actually, some that's in promotes Buddhism with the foundation and consecration of Samuel Monastery, probably around 779. 346 00:37:09,990 --> 00:37:12,540 He's reaffirming that support for Buddhism, 347 00:37:12,540 --> 00:37:19,559 and he's making sure that all of his counsellors and generals are going to go along with this through the technology of thing, 348 00:37:19,560 --> 00:37:23,370 which, of course, is a very serious and solemn thing to do. 349 00:37:23,970 --> 00:37:33,209 So it is the same inscription that records this advance the consecration of the monastery, the um binding of his administration to protect Buddhism, 350 00:37:33,210 --> 00:37:38,820 to never persecute Buddhism, to never reduce the requisites that are given to the three Jewels. 351 00:37:39,600 --> 00:37:47,009 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. 352 00:37:47,010 --> 00:37:53,940 Going back to, um, what was on the previous slide about his embrace of Buddhism earlier in the persecution of Buddhism, 353 00:37:53,940 --> 00:37:57,450 that he was reacting against the cut seek. 354 00:37:57,450 --> 00:38:01,310 And the cut sheet is written documents preserved in Portugal like Chang was it 355 00:38:01,380 --> 00:38:06,330 begotten are very helpful for looking at the Buddhist milieu of this time, 356 00:38:06,330 --> 00:38:13,170 and what Buddhism was for tracing that Zen, or what the Buddhism was that he was presenting to his subjects. 357 00:38:13,680 --> 00:38:22,920 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. 358 00:38:23,070 --> 00:38:33,270 There are other passages that, um, talk about the contradictions between the, uh, traditional religion and practices of Tibet and, and Buddhism and, 359 00:38:33,270 --> 00:38:40,650 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. 360 00:38:41,790 --> 00:38:45,879 So from, uh. From early on. 361 00:38:45,880 --> 00:38:48,430 We have an engagement with Buddhism from at least the seventh century. 362 00:38:48,430 --> 00:38:55,209 When you think about the Nepalese court in exile, uh, there and the construction of the Jo Pong, 363 00:38:55,210 --> 00:39:00,790 and you see the symbolism of the Jo Khong and the woodwork there, the Tanjung Temple as well. 364 00:39:01,120 --> 00:39:05,440 You have temple building, Buddhist temple building going on from at least the seventh century in Tibet. 365 00:39:06,310 --> 00:39:13,150 Translation efforts gain pace. Um, in the late eighth century, if we go by some of her showbiz dates, 366 00:39:13,150 --> 00:39:18,280 it goes back to the middle of the eighth century in terms of heavy translation work, 367 00:39:18,700 --> 00:39:27,490 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. 368 00:39:28,710 --> 00:39:32,640 There's a network of temples that is being built across the Tibetan Empire. 369 00:39:33,150 --> 00:39:40,500 You have political structures, but you also have these temples and these overlap, of course, as centres of gravity. 370 00:39:40,980 --> 00:39:47,820 But these temples are um, besides being a network, they're also amplifiers. 371 00:39:47,820 --> 00:39:50,970 They're amplifying protection and they're amplifying blessing. 372 00:39:51,600 --> 00:39:57,750 The technology of an image, the technology of a book is a technology of blessing and protection. 373 00:39:58,140 --> 00:40:06,660 And that power is properly. The Joe Rogan the Joe com or, um, the shuttles are now part of me time. 374 00:40:06,670 --> 00:40:11,860 A temple allows those blessings to radiate more effectively across this network, across the empire. 375 00:40:12,610 --> 00:40:18,600 Um, besides that, we also have titles that are being adopted by the Tibetan emperors in the time of some. 376 00:40:18,640 --> 00:40:22,780 That's an onward. You find these used in prayers to down, prayers for their enlightenment, 377 00:40:22,780 --> 00:40:26,859 prayers for their health and confession prayers as well, where they're referred to as Dharma. 378 00:40:26,860 --> 00:40:31,960 Roger the referred to as Chuck Robertson from the first ordinance that same year. 379 00:40:31,990 --> 00:40:37,299 Monastery. You have a growing sangha and now you have monks, uh, at the Tibetan court, 380 00:40:37,300 --> 00:40:43,780 travelling with the Tibetan emperor from place to place, along with, um, all of the other parts of his retinue. 381 00:40:45,120 --> 00:40:52,380 Now. Getting to, um, getting to the main point and connecting this with Guru Rinpoche in. 382 00:40:53,410 --> 00:40:56,490 I want to spotlight the person of young kids. Example. 383 00:40:57,620 --> 00:41:00,860 Now the inscriptions at Shay Temple are. 384 00:41:01,990 --> 00:41:10,540 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, 385 00:41:10,630 --> 00:41:13,060 um, Wang Yarrow and many others. 386 00:41:13,780 --> 00:41:23,200 And these were there a few different inscriptions there, and two of them are made as grants for the monk young example. 387 00:41:23,770 --> 00:41:28,810 So he's a with a young clan, and he was a tutor and a spiritual guide to Emperor tree based. 388 00:41:28,840 --> 00:41:36,000 Um, and that's the son of Tree Song that said. So he says these are in the words of the Emperor. 389 00:41:36,010 --> 00:41:38,440 He says from my childhood until I obtain the kingdom. 390 00:41:38,680 --> 00:41:45,909 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. 391 00:41:45,910 --> 00:41:55,000 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. 392 00:41:55,420 --> 00:42:01,930 So back to them. So here we're talking about, um, years sort of 798 to 802 around that time. 393 00:42:02,320 --> 00:42:09,969 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. 394 00:42:09,970 --> 00:42:14,850 And it's true uncle. This phrase, true Uncle Shang June is a kind of shot across the bow, 395 00:42:14,860 --> 00:42:20,620 is also at the natural lateral aristocracy who enjoyed these positions of power and privilege. 396 00:42:20,980 --> 00:42:27,340 But now, just in this simple phrase, Shang drum, here's the real Shang, here's the real maternal uncle. 397 00:42:27,490 --> 00:42:31,510 It's a monk of the young clan who are kind of reversed and have never really. 398 00:42:31,870 --> 00:42:40,510 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. 399 00:42:40,660 --> 00:42:46,810 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. 400 00:42:48,100 --> 00:42:58,690 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. 401 00:42:58,690 --> 00:43:02,049 That's. And he, uh, has this cartoon inscription, 402 00:43:02,050 --> 00:43:10,420 which is basically a repetition of this subscription or ratification of his father's support for Buddhism and the extension of this. 403 00:43:10,810 --> 00:43:19,420 And in this, perhaps as a result of his close relationship with his advisor, with his spiritual advisor, and to Santo, uh, 404 00:43:19,420 --> 00:43:28,210 the Emperor institutes uh practice whereby from among the most capable monks there will be appointed a royal gateway Shingen, 405 00:43:28,390 --> 00:43:34,840 a royal kind of mature, a spiritual friend. Now this term can be used in lots of different ways across Buddhist cultures. 406 00:43:35,260 --> 00:43:42,880 Uh, here. This. Is, it seems to me like it's fairly close to a lama or a guru. 407 00:43:43,420 --> 00:43:48,129 Um, besides that, among the capable monks, there'll be a chomp digi ring. 408 00:43:48,130 --> 00:43:51,950 Luke, the head of the sangha in Tibet. And they'll be a royal chimney. 409 00:43:51,970 --> 00:43:56,980 So the royal preceptor, of course, we we know this term very well from later Tibetan history, 410 00:43:56,980 --> 00:44:01,660 and lots of writings about China had been dug from David rather than others. 411 00:44:02,440 --> 00:44:07,460 Um, so looking back to his song to to 2% repetition. 412 00:44:08,680 --> 00:44:15,640 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. 413 00:44:15,880 --> 00:44:23,920 But now this person is at the very centre of politics, ratifying the treaty with the town, um, and Solemnised in that treaty. 414 00:44:24,370 --> 00:44:28,390 So he is the chief councillor. He is the first signatory to that treaty. 415 00:44:28,780 --> 00:44:32,800 He has usurped the place that had been held by secular councillors. 416 00:44:33,130 --> 00:44:39,130 So you have this entire paradigm shift that's happened over the course of a few decades, right? 417 00:44:39,130 --> 00:44:47,370 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, 418 00:44:47,770 --> 00:44:54,850 as being at the very centre of power and is creating a new model of the embodied right. 419 00:44:56,260 --> 00:45:01,900 Now, to put this in a little bit of perspective in terms of the process of Tibetan rising Buddhism. 420 00:45:02,410 --> 00:45:08,080 Uh, I mentioned already the the Nepalese court being in exile in Tibet in the six 20s. 421 00:45:08,290 --> 00:45:11,379 So you've got, um, you've got some notions of Buddhism coming in. 422 00:45:11,380 --> 00:45:15,880 Then you have monks from Central Asia and Khotan, uh, 423 00:45:15,880 --> 00:45:22,150 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, 424 00:45:22,990 --> 00:45:27,490 going to the time of Padma. Some of them. We have temple bodhisattvas on the. 425 00:45:27,930 --> 00:45:33,230 Uh, we have his disciple. Come on, a sheela. Uh, from the Chinese side, we have Shang Mahayana. 426 00:45:33,250 --> 00:45:37,440 Hassan. Mohsen. We have Padma, some of it himself during this period. 427 00:45:37,450 --> 00:45:43,690 So there is a lot of emphasis on foreign teachers, on Indian teachers, Chinese teachers. 428 00:45:44,200 --> 00:45:52,839 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. 429 00:45:52,840 --> 00:45:57,130 So we have Indian and Tibetan translation teams, and we see this partnership. 430 00:45:58,030 --> 00:46:06,070 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. 431 00:46:07,310 --> 00:46:11,080 Traditions around the Council of Tibet, for example, 432 00:46:11,090 --> 00:46:19,940 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. 433 00:46:20,690 --> 00:46:26,360 We have over a generation the replacement of Shankaracharya to by Yasha Wang Bo. 434 00:46:26,900 --> 00:46:30,680 Um, we have Tibetans taking these rules of habit. 435 00:46:30,680 --> 00:46:37,290 So then they ring the head of the sangha, and you see that then with going into the early 19th century, 436 00:46:37,290 --> 00:46:45,710 with young in example and with junket, you intend with the, uh, rise and domination of the figure of the monk, counsellor. 437 00:46:47,280 --> 00:46:53,280 So this is all to make, uh, a suggestion or to open up for discussion. 438 00:46:53,730 --> 00:46:58,590 The question of whether Guru Rinpoche marks a transitional moment here, 439 00:46:59,100 --> 00:47:06,060 a transitional moment in sort of a long and winding Tibetan assimilation of the Indian notion of guru. 440 00:47:06,990 --> 00:47:14,729 And maybe that's too specific. We can talk about new, similar overlapping models for embodied sacred power, 441 00:47:14,730 --> 00:47:19,470 not just the term lama, but also we're looking at the West Indian, we're looking at China. 442 00:47:19,800 --> 00:47:25,410 We're looking at. In the case of the young Dickinson's uncle, a figure who, 443 00:47:25,410 --> 00:47:32,490 in kinship terms is placed in a superior position to the Tibetan emperor, or to the princess, father, mother, and true uncle. 444 00:47:33,060 --> 00:47:39,540 So all of that does seem to be suggestive of this new model of the embodied sacred. 445 00:47:41,460 --> 00:47:47,690 One thing to just in terms of the social and political situation is that this was adopted. 446 00:47:47,700 --> 00:47:56,990 The early adopters were people like the young, the Janka, but very quickly the natural lateral aristocracy, the draw, the chin, the on. 447 00:47:57,360 --> 00:48:02,790 They, along with the more successful ministerial aristocratic clans like the war, 448 00:48:03,180 --> 00:48:09,900 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. 449 00:48:10,110 --> 00:48:16,800 And they, uh, they quickly start to, um, position themselves in in this matter. 450 00:48:17,670 --> 00:48:27,030 Now, we were talking about, um, where these models of ministerial aristocracy and natural lateral aristocracy can go wrong 451 00:48:27,030 --> 00:48:32,550 or usurp the throne to the point where you have emperors being assassinated or kidnapped, 452 00:48:32,760 --> 00:48:41,309 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, 453 00:48:41,310 --> 00:48:47,100 just as a lot of other Tibetan political structures went too far and were corrected, went too far again, and then were corrected again. 454 00:48:47,490 --> 00:48:54,360 And this could be in the position of Junker Pilkington himself and his ratification of the the treaty. 455 00:48:54,840 --> 00:49:00,090 Um, one thinks of the image of the wooden League that you find in the case. 456 00:49:00,090 --> 00:49:05,790 They got turned in other later Tibetan histories where repetition has these locks, these long locks. 457 00:49:05,790 --> 00:49:12,240 That's for his name. Rebellion that go out and spread, uh, upon the cushions of two monks who sit on them. 458 00:49:12,510 --> 00:49:16,680 So is the you. They need these these two sections of the head. So they're sort of above his head. 459 00:49:17,370 --> 00:49:26,220 Um, that that's a fairly, um, clear expression of this going a bit too far where the Emperor almost like, um. 460 00:49:27,190 --> 00:49:33,910 Uh, almost like by river is trampled down by and Buddhist figures, in this case, monks who are sitting on his loks. 461 00:49:35,690 --> 00:49:39,920 So in any case, all of this unravels. The Tibetan Empire collapses. 462 00:49:40,040 --> 00:49:45,920 Uh, Richardson. She took medicine, is chronically ill, as we know from the tongue Annals. 463 00:49:46,430 --> 00:49:54,020 Um, this can account, perhaps, for the, um, commissioning of many thousands of copies of the future of limitless life for him. 464 00:49:54,710 --> 00:49:57,290 Um, we have a struggle for succession after his death. 465 00:49:57,920 --> 00:50:08,390 And then the unravelling of the Tibetan Empire, uh, devolving into different small kingdoms, um, some overlapping with previously existing kingdoms, 466 00:50:08,750 --> 00:50:20,420 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. 467 00:50:20,900 --> 00:50:26,930 So you have various people claiming to be the emperor, various people claiming to have legitimacy. 468 00:50:27,530 --> 00:50:31,790 Um, you also have this network of monasteries and temples. 469 00:50:32,210 --> 00:50:36,140 So this. Creates the kind of aftermath. 470 00:50:36,160 --> 00:50:40,239 You can see how with the rise of the monk counsellor, with the natural aristocracy, 471 00:50:40,240 --> 00:50:44,050 with the ministerial aristocracy, and with the pretenders to the throne. 472 00:50:44,290 --> 00:50:48,670 You have a lot of different ingredients, some of which are dependent upon one another, some are not. 473 00:50:49,030 --> 00:50:53,349 Right. So the drawer want to continue to be the Shang, the natural lateral aristocracy. 474 00:50:53,350 --> 00:50:57,249 Well, then they need a legitimate king, uh, to continue that rule. 475 00:50:57,250 --> 00:51:02,200 So this is what happens. And in western Tibet, for the ministerial aristocracy, 476 00:51:02,200 --> 00:51:07,509 who are defined by the gifts that they receive from the emperor, that doesn't quite work anymore. 477 00:51:07,510 --> 00:51:12,069 They're really sort of left in the lurch in terms of how their model of power works. 478 00:51:12,070 --> 00:51:18,250 Is it going to devolve to back how it was before, when they were rulers of local areas associated with clans, 479 00:51:18,520 --> 00:51:21,940 or are there going to be new, uh, centres of power that grew up, 480 00:51:21,940 --> 00:51:23,530 for example, around temples, 481 00:51:24,010 --> 00:51:33,190 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. 482 00:51:33,640 --> 00:51:39,520 So you see those as various nine to 11th century strategies that, uh, many of us are familiar with from, 483 00:51:39,700 --> 00:51:45,430 you know, reading about the Tibetan Renaissance and looking into the social and political milieu of that time. 484 00:51:46,360 --> 00:51:52,900 Um, one of the things that happens here, too, is that you have the rise of. 485 00:51:53,970 --> 00:51:58,410 The figure of the llama. You know, I mentioned it as a sort of long and winding road. 486 00:51:59,100 --> 00:52:09,270 And to open for discussion, I wanted to see if, um, we might identify two critical moments or Guru Rinpoche, 487 00:52:09,540 --> 00:52:19,050 if we take Guru Rinpoche in terms of precious guru and the rise of the guru being paramount above all else in Tibetan Buddhism. 488 00:52:20,190 --> 00:52:26,010 So we have the rise of the royal chaplain in the monk Tudor, epitomised in the person of its example. 489 00:52:27,000 --> 00:52:30,600 Um, this is preceding a reliance on foreign teachers. 490 00:52:30,600 --> 00:52:34,200 We have a somewhat displacement of the king in that metaphor of repentance. 491 00:52:34,200 --> 00:52:40,120 Loks. And then in the early cheddar, we have another rise in the llama. 492 00:52:40,960 --> 00:52:48,250 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 493 00:52:48,250 --> 00:52:54,880 tales and kind of it's all emphasising the position of the lava and devotion to the lava and reliance on the lava. 494 00:52:55,750 --> 00:53:01,900 This, um, you know, drawn to the, um, being preceded by a T-shirt, etc. 495 00:53:02,460 --> 00:53:09,330 We have, um, we have foreign teachers preceding these Tibetan teachers as well. 496 00:53:09,340 --> 00:53:12,999 So you've got the foreign teachers in this context, in the current context, 497 00:53:13,000 --> 00:53:16,900 in the new context, and then you've got the Tibetan teachers displacing them. 498 00:53:17,260 --> 00:53:23,020 Also, um, you have a displacement of the Qing in the Chronology of treasure texts, 499 00:53:23,020 --> 00:53:26,350 where the early treasure texts tend to focus on the person of Soames and Gamble, 500 00:53:26,740 --> 00:53:31,000 and the later treasure texts shift to a focus on the person of Padma, some of them. 501 00:53:31,120 --> 00:53:40,080 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, 502 00:53:40,090 --> 00:53:47,680 another country song that's in now being a disciple, now being under Padma, some other, um, as one of the Guru's disciples. 503 00:53:49,370 --> 00:53:55,370 All right. So I will leave you with that. And I hope that, uh, that's given you something to think about. 504 00:53:55,370 --> 00:53:57,380 And maybe some questions to raise for our discussion.