Interpreters in the Making of Global Buddhism

. 23) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-17732-1 (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. Tibet (China)—History. 2. Tibet (China)—Politics and government. I. Title. II. Title: 100,000 moons. DS785.S3813 2009 951'.5—dc22 2009035414 ISSN 1568-6183 ISBN 978 90 04 17790 1 SET ISBN 978 90 04

During his exiles from Lhasa in the 1910s, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama visited the holy places of Wutai Shan in China and Bodh Gaya in India. After his return, he commissioned paintings of these two places in cosmological mural programs of his palaces. While conforming to earlier iconographic traditions, these paintings employed empirical modes of representation unprecedented in Tibetan Buddhist paintings, revealing a close connection to the Dalai Lama's prior travels. This essay traces how these “modernized” renditions were incorporated into an existing pictorial template, and examines the deft rearticulation of a Buddhist cosmology in light of the Dalai Lama's own encounter with the shifting geopolitical terrains of the early twentieth century. I show that painting served as a powerful medium through which the Dalai Lama asserted his spiritual sovereignty and temporal authority over modernity's work of boundary making. The study elucidates a sphere of agency and creativity in the court of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama that has evaded historical inquiries to date.

Daichi Wada draws on Russian, Chinese, and Japanese sources to analyse the Thirteenth Dalai Lama’s diplomatic activities during his sojourn in Khalkha, Qinghai, and Mount Wutai (1904–1909). Daichi demonstrates how the Dalai Lama’s diplomatic efforts manifested both traditional and modern aspects that were deployed as appropriate, and how his worldview was enhanced by his travels. The author particularly focuses on the Thirteenth Dalai Lama’s relationship with the Buryat Buddhist community, which in some aspects represented Russian interests but also held traditional ties with the Tibetan Buddhist centre. The support he gained among the Buryats helped him survive in a dangerous situation as not only a ruler of Tibet but also as the highest authority over Tibetan Buddhists.

In 1904, when British-Indian forces invaded Tibet, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama travelled to Mongolia and subsequently to Beijing. As Ishihama Yumiko’s paper demonstrates, his sojourn in Mongolia connected the politically divided Tibetan, Mongol, and Buryat Tibetan Buddhist communities, activated their intercommunication, and contributed to the evoking of a national consciousness among them. While this consciousness failed to amalgamate Tibetan Buddhist communities into one entity, it did establish a nationalist movement that sought to resist Russian and Chinese control. Ishihama gives particular attention to the Dalai Lama’s relationship with three Mongol hierarchs from the Khalka, Kokonor, and Buryat Buddhist communities. His impact on identity formation among these groups resulted in them devoting themselves to forging unity among their people.

Britain's tentatively built diplomatic ties with Tibet received a jolt on 28 June 1913 when four Tibetan boys and their chaperone Kusho Lungshar went to meet George V, King of England and Emperor of India at Buckingham Palace. Lungshar and the boys brought with them an extensive range of gifts and letters from the thirteenth Dalai Lama, inadvertently giving the British government a diplomatic headache: not only could this potentially have been interpreted as a breach of the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention, but what should be given in return? By bringing together recently identified objects and archives now located in the British Museum, the British Library and the Victoria and Albert Museum, this paper will focus on the products of this encounter: the gifts. They will be considered here as statements of independence, signifiers of ‘Tibetanness’ and as examples of the developing protocols constructed by Britain in response to its encounter with Tibet.2

Reviewed by: Boy on the Lion Throne: The Childhood of the 14th Dalai Lama Hope Morrison Kimmel, Elizabeth Cody. Boy on the Lion Throne: The Childhood of the 14th Dalai Lama. Flash Point/Roaring Brook, 2009 [160p]. illus. with photographs ISBN 978-1-59643-394-6 $18.95 R Gr. 3–6 This very approachable biography of the fourteenth Dalai Lama begins with the stuff of legend: several Buddhist monks, disguised as simple travelers, head out to a remote region of Tibet in search of a boy, Lhamo Thondup, whom they believe to be the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama. The boy, not yet three, passes their series of tests, correctly selecting objects that had belonged to the thirteenth Dalai Lama from a larger group of items, and Lhamo’s life is never to be the same. While the biography covers the Dalai Lama’s life from toddlerhood up to his flight into exile in his twenties, the emphasis here is definitely on his youth. Kimmel does a solid job of putting the reader into the shoes of the young lama, called Kundun, including personable details such as his desire to play instead of study (he loved to run and slide over the freshly polished floors of the palace) and his boyish delight in technology (he once took the palace’s hand-cranked car out for a covert spin and hit a tree). There is lots of information about Tibet presented within the biographical format, and this would serve equally well as an introductory background on the region and on the Free Tibet movement. Kimmel is reverent without being adulatory, and her explanation of the Dalai Lama’s relationship with Maoist China is presented in simple, clear language. This is a strange and fascinating story told in an engaging style, and young readers will find lots to keep them turning the pages. Archival photographs, a selected bibliography, and a list of online resources offer further information. Copyright © 2009 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Reincarnation lineages, their traditions, and their institutions have been central to Tibetan religion, culture, society, and politics since the 13th century. They developed incrementally, dependent on doctrines from India and local precedents. From their Indian-Buddhist forebears, they took the tradition of past-life storytelling, the belief that celestial bodhisattvas constantly manifested to aid beings, and the practice of guru-yoga, which encouraged them to see their teachers as nirmāṇakāya (“creation bodies”; trülku [sprul sku] in Tibetan). From the 10th century in Tibet, they recognized an increasing number of beings as either bodhisattva emanations or prominent beings’ rebirths. Claiming rebirth status was particularly evident in the Nyingma school’s treasure tradition, whose visionaries claimed to be the rebirths of the 8th-century mahāsiddha Padmasambhava’s students. Treasure texts also contended that the celestial bodhisattva, Avalokiteśvara, constantly manifested in Tibet. During the 11th century, Kadam and Kagyü yogis made themselves jātaka protagonists, and the number of beings from all schools claiming to be emanations of celestial bodhisattvas increased. The Nyingma visionary Nyangrel Nyima Özer (Nyang ral nyi ma ‘od zer, 1124–1194) became the first to describe a series of his previous lives. The second and third Karmapas (13th century) developed on these precedents, adding future-life prediction and child recognition and linking rebirths to monasteries and inheritances. They combined the two ideas of rebirth and incarnation, claiming that the reborn Karmapas were a series of Avalokiteśvara’s emanations. After the Mongol emperors became the Karmapas’ students, their model was copied across Tibet. In the 16th century, the Dalai Lamas, aided first by Mongol rulers and then the Manchu-Qing Emperor, gained political supremacy in Tibet. This also enabled their school, the Geluk, to proselytize widely in the Mongol world and establish further guru-patron relationships. After an argument between two aristocratic reincarnates led to the Sino-Gurkha War in the late 18th century, the Qianlong Emperor mandated that Geluk reincarnates be chosen by drawing lots from a Golden Urn. The Geluks used the Golden Urn to establish many new reincarnation lineages but resisted its use to decide the Dalai Lamas or other highly ranked reincarnates. The Manchu-Qing had little influence on the non-Geluk lineages, who developed strongholds in the Himalaya and Kham in Eastern Tibet. After the Qing Empire fell, the thirteenth Dalai Lama declared Tibet independent. He did not live to see its dissolution into the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the 1950s. During the Mao period in Tibet and the Soviet period in Mongolia, reincarnates were first co-opted and then outlawed. They became refugees, and several became famous internationally. When the Soviet Union fell, and China opened, some reincarnates re-established their monasteries, but the PRC retained the authority to recognize reincarnates, including the next Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama, whose reputation underpins the entire reincarnation system, has refuted this claim. But as he single-handedly defends his institution against the PRC state and attempts to deal with a series of abuse and corruption scandals involving reincarnates—as perpetrators and victims—it appears certain the Dalai Lama’s next interregnum will challenge the entire reincarnation system.

abstract: This article presents and discusses dying, death, and the afterlife from the point of view of the twentieth-century German Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner and compares it to the Tibetan view of death and rebirth, represented by his Holiness, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. The driving question that gave rise to the discussion in the following pages is this: How does dying and death relate to life? I will attempt to address the question from both Christian and Buddhist views, then draw out their points of contact and differences. Both traditions share the view that death is not the end of life but signifies a new dimension of life. From this common ground, it can be argued that both Rahner and the Dalai Lama share a conviction that the human person is essentially an embodied-spirit, and thus, the human physical death is not the end of life, but a transition into a new dimension of life in which the human spirit continues its movement towards fulfillment .

According to custom, with the death of the thirteenth Dalai Lama, a regent was appointed to guide the government until the new Dalai Lama could be identified, educated, and established at the head of the government. As the search committee was formed to seek out the new incarnation of the Dalai Lama, Shakabpa himself accompanied the party seeking visions in the oracle lake called Lhamo Latso inhabited by Pelden Lhamo, the protector spirit charged with ensuring the well-being of the Dalai Lamas. The Regent Radreng Rinpoche had a tumultuous relationship with some segments of the government. In 1938, he managed to engineer the resignation of the Prime Minister Langdun Kunga Wangchuk, with whom he had until then shared power. Keywords: Dalai Lama; political conflict; Shakabpa

Sergey Kuzmin’s paper draws on Russian and Mongolian archives to discuss the relationship between the Thirteenth Dalai Lama and the Jebtsundamba Khutagtu in the context of their joint hopes for future independence. This was promoted by the prevalence of Tibetan Buddhism in Mongolia, the leadership of the Tibetan-born Jetsun Dampa Khutuktu, the influential Tibetan colony in the Mongolian capital of Niislel Khuree, and permanent contacts between Mongols and Tibetans. It demonstrates how the two states co-ordinated their independence struggle during the first half of the twentieth century. This association continued after the two states had broken away from China and continued into the 1930s, with individual Tibetan hierarchs becoming involved in local resistance to the Socialist suppression of Buddhism in Mongolia.

Between 1916 and 1924, a Tibetan public healthcare programme that focused on childcare and natal astrology comprised a central aspect of the mission of the Lhasa Mentsikhang (Institute of Medicine and Astrology). Assessing previously unused Tibetan language materials—including the Thirteenth Dalai Lama’s edict for implementation and an accompanying childcare manual—the programme is contextualized with regard to regional developments in British India and China. Like British ‘mothercraft’ education programmes of the same period, the Tibetan initiative links the health of the population (from infancy) to the health of the state and its economy. Rather than appealing to the authority of ‘scientific’ colonial medicine, however, this paper discusses how indigenous medical techniques and theories are put forward as effective means to prove the nascent Central Tibetan state’s benevolence, legitimacy and sovereignty via intervention in the domestic sphere. Such attention to medical reform and to the domestic sphere brings light to an underappreciated effort by the Thirteenth Dalai Lama to cultivate a sense of Tibetan subjecthood and to reconfigure the relationship between his government and various segments of society. Significantly, this childcare initiative was entrusted not just to mothers, and the category of class is here more germane than the category of gender central within British programmes. Various social groups within a specifically delineated Tibetan territory are assigned tasks in the programme’s implementation, illustrating the desire to incorporate each into a reorganised Tibetan state bound by a newly articulated Buddhist ideal of shared social responsibility.

The thirteenth Dalai Lama in Peking September – December 1908

The Thirteenth Dalai Lama on the Run (1904-1906) is a facsmile collection comprising over 900 original archival documents from Mongolia relating to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama’s exile in Mongolia in the aftermath of the British invasion of Tibet in 1904.

From the time Buddhism entered the mythical land of the snows, Tibetans have expressed their spiritual devotion and celebrated their culture with dance. Only since the diaspora of the Tibetan people have outsiders witnessed these performances and when they do, no one explains why these dances exist and what they really mean. Ellen Pearlman, who studied with Lobsang Samten, the ritual dance master of the Dalai Lama's Namgyal monastery in India, set out to discover the meaning behind these practices. She found the story of the indigenous shamanistic Bon religion being superseded by Buddhism - a story full of dangerous and illicit liaisons, brilliant visions, secret teachings, betrayals, and unrevealed yogic practices. Pearlman examines the four lineages that developed sacred cham - the secret ritual dances of Tibet's Buddhist monks - and achi lhamo storytelling folk dance and opera. She describes the mental and physical process of preparing for these dances, the meaning of the iconography of the costumes and masks, the spectrum of accompanying music, and the actual dance steps as recorded in a choreography book dating back to the Fifth Dalai Lama in 1647. Beautiful colour photographs from the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts and Pearlman's own images of touring monastic troupes complement the rare historic black-and-white photos from the collections of Sir Charles Bell, chief of the British Mission in Tibet during the life of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. - Lavishly illustrated with colour and rare historic photographs depicting the dances, costumes, and masks. - Looks at both sacred (cham) and folk (achi lhamo) forms and their role in the development, practice, and culture of Tibetan Buddhism.

Do followers of different religions share common ground at the level of their morality, despite their disagreements over doctrine and metaphysical beliefs? A typical statement of this view was made recently by the Dalai Lama.