326 karénina kollmar-paulenz
that despite the negative propaganda following the debate of bSam-yas
at the end of the eighth century this doctrine is even nowadays being
followed within the main stream of Tibetan Buddhism, brings us to the
interesting question about the role Buddhist teachers other than Indians
played during the royal period in Tibet. Apart from Indian monks and
scholars who travelled to Tibet, there is textual evidence that, even
before the arrival of Indian Buddhists, Tibet was regularly visited by
Chinese Buddhist monks as well as Buddhists from the surrounding
Central Asian areas which were widely in uenced by Buddhism.
Buddhism, when it was brought to Tibet by monks from India, was
in all probability not a new religion, but already known through Chi-
nese mediation. Not only did Chinese monks visit Tibet and translate
Buddhist scriptures into Tibetan, but also Tibetan nobles received their
education partly in China. Between 705 and 710 AD an imperial decree
was issued by the Chinese emperor that allowed the admission of the
sons and grand-sons of the Tibetan nobility to the imperial state-school
in order to study the Chinese classics.^40 Not only from China, but
also from the regions bordering on Western Tibet Buddhist in uence
was observable in these early times. Ananta, who served as personal
translator of ntarakita on his rst visit to Tibet around 763, came
from Kashmir. Many of the rst translations of Buddhist scriptures
were prepared from Chinese, Khotanese and Bengali originals, as
Bu-ston tells us in his Chos-’byung.^41 For a long time scholars neglected
the evidence of the Buddhist transmission via China and Central Asia
in favour of the “Indian angle”, but textual evidence points to a multi-
faceted picture. Tibet during the royal period was in no way a secluded
country, and the in uence of the surrounding cultures is noticeable in
the textual and archaeological sources.
- Indigenous Religious Traditions in the Royal Period
We can only gain glimpses of the traditional Tibetan beliefs of the royal
period from texts written in Old Tibetan and fragments that survived,
mostly from Dunhuang. There are, of course, many remnants of the
traditional religious concepts in the so-called mi-chos, the “religion of
(^40) Demiéville 1952, p. 188 (note).
(^41) Chos-’byung, fol. 891 (lines 4–5): rgya dang li dang za hor la sogs pa sna tshogs nas bsgyur
bas...