by Ed Douglas
At the centre of this resurgence was another lost kingdom, one that sprang up from the ashes of the collapsed Tibetan Empire in the tenth century in the Sutlej valley, a few kilometres downstream of the abandoned capital of the Zhang Zhung. This was Guge and its influence on the future of a renascent Buddhist Tibet would be immense.
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On the Indian side of the border with western Tibet, buried in the mountains just south of where the mighty Sutlej meets the Spiti river, is a village called Pooh. Here there is a pillar of stone from around the late tenth century carved with the birth name of the king who would spark Tibet’s Buddhist revival: Khorre, better known by his spiritual name La Lama Yeshe O. This pillar marked the fringes of Yeshe O’s kingdom, a sphere of influence that extended west as far as Baltistan in Pakistan’s Karakoram mountains and Ladakh, the ‘Little Tibet’ within India’s modern border, and east to parts of what is now north-western Nepal, as well as to the northern fringes of the Indian Himalaya. It was called Ngari Khorsum, ‘the three circuits of Ngari’, Ngari likely being a reference to Kailas but implying western Tibet. This forgotten empire would mark a revival in the Yarlung dynasty from which Yeshe O sprang, the glory days of the great dharma kings Songtsen Gampo and Trisong Detsen.
In the middle of the ninth century Tibet had collapsed into chaos and clan rivalry. In 848, on the Silk Road, Dunhuang fell once more to the Chinese. Monasticism in central Tibet failed; the tombs of the Yarlung dynasty were robbed and desecrated. And so a branch of the family, still devoutly Buddhist, headed west, carving out a new kingdom with its capital at Purang, close to the border of modern north-west Nepal, where the town is known as Taklakot. The family controlled a large swathe of the western Himalaya: Ladakh and Zanskar, Spiti and the upper Sutlej valley. Yeshe O lived between 947 and 1024. He inherited a polity based on the Sutlej valley, the kingdom of Guge, ruling with his brother, a Buddhist monk who took charge of spiritual affairs. Their goals were political survival and spiritual renewal, working together to recreate the visionary world of their great predecessor Trisong Detsen from two centuries before. They made Buddhism their state religion, and in doing so, some scholars argue, provided a model for the synthesis of religious and political power under the Dalai Lamas.
The wider population supported religious institutions with produce and land; in return they were compensated when children joined the clergy and were given education and military training, the latter a pressing need in the face of Islam’s rapid progress through Central Asia. Yeshe O repressed or co-opted pre-Buddhist cults that would have been familiar to the Zhang Zhung. In the village of Pekar, located near Pooh in the Sutlej valley, but on the northern side of the Himalaya, Yeshe O suborned the local deity, a mythical warrior called Pehar whose origin was likely Central Asian and part of the narrative of the powerful local clan. Pehar’s new role was to control opposing demons, a tutelary spirit for the new ‘faith’ of Buddhism, a role depicted in astonishing and near-contemporaneous temple paintings in what are known as the Caves of Bliss, some thirty kilometres north of Yeshe O’s new capital at Tholing. The depiction of Pehar making an oath of protection to the dharma was in effect to show the old gods making a similar oath to the new king.
What constituted the true path of Buddhism obsessed Yeshe O. Central Tibet, as we have seen, had become an unruly spiritual frontier, where Indian tantric Buddhism was proving wildly popular, a school known in Tibet as Vajrayana, the thunderbolt vehicle, with its esoteric teachings and challenging ideas. Some practitioners took tantric visualisations about killing animals and even humans or taboo-breaking sexual behaviour literally. That was not what Yeshe O had in mind for Guge. He wanted a return to the supposed purity of Trisong Detsen, not modern heresies. To recapture that essence, he recreated another worthy aspect of Trisong Detsen’s legacy: translation. And to that end he sent twenty-one bright young men to Kashmir, still a centre of Buddhist learning in India, to bring back sacred texts to be translated from Sanskrit to Tibetan, and in doing so herald an age of spiritual renewal.
Such translators, lotsawa in Tibetan, are venerated in Buddhism, since the act of translation requires a profound understanding of the texts. The greatest of these at Yeshe O’s court was Rinchen Zangpo. He was born in 958 in Ngari, possibly in the village of Reni, also in the Sutlej valley, which in Tibetan is called the Langchen Tsangpo. As a two-year-old he was seen tracing Sanskrit letters in the dirt and despite his parents not being Buddhist was ordained as a monk at just thirteen. He spent many years in India studying tantric and non-tantric Buddhist texts in Sanskrit. When Rinchen Zangpo finally returned, he came to the attention of Yeshe O, according to legend, after winning a duel of magic with a charismatic trickster, whom Rinchen Zangpo swiftly exposed as a fake. How many of the stories that surround him are true isn’t so important; they simply illustrate that Rinchen Zangpo was a man of preternatural gifts dedicated to the true path of the dharma in a world where everyone and his yak thinks they’re a spiritual master. Yeshe O made him court chaplain and set Rinchen Zangpo to work translating Sanskrit texts, later sending him back to Kashmir, this time in some style, to gather more. The influx of this new scholarship, funded by Guge’s access to gold mines in the Indus valley and the musk trade with the Arab world, informed and developed Tibet’s understanding of Buddhism.
Rinchen Zangpo was also charged with recruiting artists for the substantial building programme Yeshe O initiated. In 996 he laid the foundations for four great temples: Tholing at the centre, Tabo to the west on the Spiti river, Nyarma to the north in Ladakh and Khorchag to the east, close to the former capital of Purang. Tholing was the mother temple, known as the Tsuglakhang, and among the cultural apogees of Tibetan art. It was from Tholing, as Giuseppe Tucci wrote following his visit in 1933, that ‘a crowd, today almost unknown, of thinkers and ascetics shed over the whole of Tibet a spiritual light which is not yet extinguished’. A British trade representative called Gerard Mackworth-Young who visited before the Great War captured the immense drama of Tholing’s location:
The riverbed is here a scorching waste of rocks and dust about a mile wide . . . The monastery of Tholing stands opposite, on a shelf overlooking the Sutlej. Its long crimson walls, set off by a few brilliant poplars in full leaf, its rows of white pure stupas, Buddhism’s signature hemispherical structure, high above, its gold roof sparkling in the haze, struck just that crowning note of unreality which the whole scene demanded.
Mackworth-Young’s vision is no longer there. Almost all of what time had spared of Guge’s early artistic glories was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, robbing the world of the brilliance of this remote Buddhist renaissance. Among the very few survivors are temple caves in the Khartse valley, where Rinchen Zangpo died a venerated figure in his nineties, decorated with exquisite illustrations of the lotsawa and his king, Yeshe O, both men painted with immense skill in the fourteenth century: their collaboration had transformed western Tibet and their legacy survived in the unique development of Tibet as a nation governed through the prism of spiritual faith.
For most of the eleventh century, Yeshe O’s successors maintained Guge’s spiritual vision and extended its political control, reuniting the various parts of the family’s kingdom from the capital Tholing. Most importantly, at least for the future of Buddhism in Tibet, when Yeshe O abdicated in favour of his nephew Changchub O, the new king made it a priority to persuade the dazzling Buddhist scholar Atisa Dipamkara to visit Guge. By now the Karakhanid Turks had spread east along the Silk Roads, converting its Buddhist centres to Islam and, so the legend has it, taking Yeshe O hostage. Rather than use his gold to pay off the Turks, Changchub spent it instead – at his uncle’s request – in prising Atisa away from his monastic university. This was Vikramasila, located in what is now the Indian state of Bihar but was then the Pala Empire, which stretched the length of the southern limit of the Himalaya – the final major Buddhist polity on the subcontinent.
Atisa’s arrival would be critical in the emer
gence of Tibet’s monastic tradition. One of many Indian scholars at work in Tibet in this period, he remains, like Guru Rinpoche, venerated for his role in establishing the nation’s spiritual identity, known by his Tibetan name Jowo Je. Born in 982 to a noble family, most probably in Bikrampur in modern Bangladesh, he was called Candragarbha before he arrived in Guge, where Changchub O hailed him as Atisa, meaning ‘lord’. By then, the year 1042, Atisa was widely regarded as one of the finest Buddhist scholars in the world, having spent a dozen years teaching in Sumatra before burnishing his reputation at Vikramasila. He was impressed by the Tibetan students he encountered there, sent to India from Guge to deepen their learning. The head of his institution was reluctant to lose his best teacher to ‘that yak pen’ of Tibet, making him promise to return in three years. Instead, Atisa would spend the remaining thirteen years of his life there.
While living at Tholing, Atisa wrote his greatest work, A Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment, and dedicated it to Changchub O. It was written in response to the Guge kingdom’s uncertainty about tantric practice. How should its complexities be reconciled? How did it relate to established methods? How should its shocking imagery be interpreted? Atisa’s great gifts, as related in Tibetan religious histories, were his depth of understanding and his humility in illustrating it. In Tholing he encountered the great translator Rinchen Zangpo, then in his mid eighties; it was he who had recommended Atisa be brought to Tibet. Despite being the older man, it was Rinchen Zangpo who learned more from the encounter, Atisa showing him how to break through the surface of the multifarious tantras to reach their single unified root.
After three years in Tholing, Atisa left with a group of his students for central Tibet and the border with Nepal, heading for home as he had promised. When they were delayed on the way, an argument broke out among his followers about which direction Atisa should take. Nagtso, the Tibetan translator who had persuaded him to come on Changchub’s behalf, thought Atisa should honour his promise to return. Another student, Dromton, who came to Guge to hear Atisa teach, persuaded him instead to come home with him to central Tibet, where monks from the north-eastern region of Amdo had been reformulating monasteries after Tibet’s dark ages. Discovering the library at Samye, with its huge resource of Sanskrit texts, Atisa understood the depth to which Buddhism had penetrated Tibet: it was too good an opportunity to miss. Over his lifetime, he wrote and translated more than two hundred books.
When Atisa died near Lhasa in 1054, his student Dromton established a new monastery at Reting to continue his teaching, which became known as the Kadam school, ka meaning ‘scripture’ and dam meaning ‘precept’. The Kadam-pa (-pa being a suffix that means ‘people’) were known for their asceticism and intellectual rigour, and their legacy is found not just at Reting but in the cave frescoes in Guge. In time, the Kadam school would evolve into a new school of Tibetan Buddhism, the Geluk, that of the Dalai Lamas. It was through Atisa and Dromton in the eleventh century that Avalokitesvara, bodhisattva (meaning ‘enlightenment seeker’) of compassion, became a protective spirit of Tibet, known there as Chenrezig, and that the Dalai Lamas would come to be regarded as incarnations of Chenrezig, thus making the Dalai Lamas an indivisible part of Tibetan identity.
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Despite its long dedication to the dharma, there would be no lasting monastic legacy in Guge. When Giuseppe Tucci arrived in 1933, Guge was desolate, the few inhabitants barely conscious of the great glories that had existed in their midst. In the 1100s, Turkic raiders overran the Guge kingdom, which fractured once more into its constituent parts. Its former capital Purang alone seems to have escaped the chaos, expanding into the north-western districts of Nepal. It was a monastic order from central Tibet, the Kagyu, that eventually established itself in the west, captured in legend with Milarepa’s famous triumph at Kailas. In the thirteenth century, Tholing’s holiest temple, the Tsuglakhang, was donated to the Kagyu, who renovated it in their central Tibetan style while keeping some of the Kashmiri aesthetic that had been the hallmark of Guge in its glory days.
When the Mongols arrived in the thirteenth century a different Buddhist lineage became pre-eminent: the Sakya, the only major school in Buddhism that is hereditary. As Mongol influence on Tibet faded in the fourteenth century, Guge enjoyed a magnificent renaissance. During this period, the reformist followers of the new Geluk school were invited to Guge, a natural fit for them given their origins in Atisa’s teachings. Tholing remained a great spiritual centre but Guge’s capital now moved elsewhere, to an astonishing palace fortress called Tsaparang. The openness to new ideas that had characterised Guge’s first golden age would be repeated in the second. And it was this willingness to engage with outside influences that explains in part how western Tibet experienced a concerted effort to be converted by a religion almost wholly foreign to it: Christianity.
Tibet’s elite must have been aware of Christ before Buddhism became the established religion. By the 700s, followers of the heretic archbishop of Constantinople Nestorius, having broken with Rome in the 420s, had established themselves among the Christians of Persia and expanded along the Silk Road, where Syriac was then the lingua franca, and into China. They flourished under the Tang dynasty; a famous Nestorian stele erected in 781 in Chang’an (now Xi’an) quotes the imperial edict from 635 that authorised Christ’s teaching: ‘The way has no unchanging name, sages have no unchanging method.’ The missionary who won that concession to preach the Gospel, Alopen, is named on the stele, and out of this striking example of Chinese ecumenical curiosity came the so-called Jesus Sutras discovered in the Dunhuang caves, a blend of Buddhist, Christian and Taoist philosophy, connecting the Buddhist concept of sunyata, loosely translated as ‘emptiness’, with Christian negative theology, the mystical ‘unknowability’ of God’s nature. The Nestorian patriarch in 781 was Timothy I, born in modern Iraq and elected in Baghdad; a great supporter of missionary work, he wrote that there were Christians in Tibet and intended to appoint a bishop there. Indeed, hints of Christian worship from this period have been found inside Tibet, but if it was practised, it didn’t gain a foothold. The stele at Chang’an was buried as Christianity was suppressed in China: Buddhism was the only ‘foreign’ religion permitted.
That there were many Christians in the further reaches of Asia, marooned behind a Muslim curtain, was well known in Europe if poorly understood. Concocted versions of a letter supposedly written to the Byzantine emperor Manuel I by the Christian Prester John, ‘supreme ruler of the Three Indies’, circulated in the courts of Europe in the latter part of the twelfth century. The letters supposedly described Prester John’s homeland, a place of immense wealth and no disease, blending familiar images of Eden with fantastical creatures and men from the works of Herodotus. What prompted most interest was Prester John’s offer to use his army to liberate Jerusalem, this in the aftermath of the failed second crusade. Although a forgery, the letter was set in a geographical context that had a foot in reality. Scholars have linked the myth with the military conquest in 1141 of the Seljuk Turks by the Central Asian Kara-Khitan tribe. Though largely Buddhist, their number included many Christians.
Such legends coincided with a growing appetite for travel writing. In the late thirteenth century Marco Polo satisfied that market at both ends of the Silk Roads, entertaining Kublai Khan with exotic yarns about Europe before returning to Italy to do the same about the Mongol emperor. An earlier traveller than Polo, the Franciscan William of Rubruck, published Itinerarium, a memoir of his mission for Louis IX in 1254, undertaken reluctantly, to deliver a letter to Kublai’s predecessor Mongke Khan at his capital of Karakorum. He was shocked at Mongke’s courtly entertainment: a three-way religious debate between Muslims, Buddhists and Nestorians. The notion of religious tolerance was unbearable to Rubruck, yet he gives us the first European reference to the sacred Sanskrit phrase om mani padme hum: most usually translated as ‘hail to the jewel in the lotus’, although its true meaning is both complicated and contested.
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sp; From the start, Europe’s discovery of Tibet was enmeshed with missionary intent. It was Franciscan friars who brought Europe many of the first descriptions of the country. In 1245 Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, a companion of St Francis of Assisi, was the first European to report back on the Mongol court in his Ystoria Mongalorum, having been sent east by the pope in the aftermath of the Mongol invasion of Europe. Like Marco Polo he noticed the Tibetans there, an intrinsic element in the spiritual life of the elite, and described aspects of their lives, including jhator, usually described in the West as sky burial, although not a term from Tibetan, the ritual dismemberment of the dead for consumption by carrion. (The origins of this practice are obscure but some have seen links with Persian Zorastrianism, from a common route in Central Asia. Tibetan kings were buried; lamas were cremated and their ashes incorporated into sacred architecture.) Another Franciscan, Odorico Mattiussi, better known as Odoric of Pordenone, included a whole chapter on Tibet in his account of visiting China in the 1320s: ‘Concerning the Realm of Tibet Where Dwelleth the Pope of the Idolators’. Odoric’s claim to have visited Tibet may be true, but much of his material was clearly gleaned from encountering Tibetans outside the country, and the suggestion he visited Lhasa is widely discounted.
It was the Jesuits, however, with their pragmatic zeal, who really got stuck in towards the end of the sixteenth century. Jesuits at the Mughal court of the emperor Akbar were well aware of Tibet. Rodolfo Acquaviva, shortly before he was butchered in Goa during the Cuncolim Revolt, wrote of the land of ‘Bottan’, meaning Tibet, beyond the Himalaya in 1582. In the Mongolicae legationis commentarius of 1591, Rodolfo’s companion Antonio Monserrate wrote of lost vestiges of Christianity hidden in the remote valleys of the Himalaya where priests read from the scriptures and distributed the bread and wine, although he discounts the possibility that these were Tibetans, whom he describes as being governed by magicians. Jesuits discovered the existence of Lake Manasarovar and of a city nearby: Monserrate’s book is accompanied with a crude map showing the lake with the legend Hic dicuntur Christiani habitare: ‘here there are Christians said to be living.’