the later spread of buddhism in tibet 345
ments for Tibetan Buddhist history, since they believe that Buddhism
had never completely vanished from Tibet. (Not to speak of the Bon-pos,
Tibet’s biggest non-Buddhist minority, who structure Tibetan history
in a completely different way.)
This example demonstrates that history and its concepts—in the
example, the notion about what Buddhism “really” is—is subjected to
a social discourse, that creates and re-creates its objects with every act
of speech.^6 And this forming of objects—or making of meanings—is a
result of a complex constellation of the power displayed by the actors.
And even if we could utilise all works of Tibetan historiography—the
monuments of this discourse—for our presentation, we would still
hear only a few voices of the complex polyphone concert of Tibetan
history-making.
From the perspective of these re ections, my own presentation can
only be regarded as a radical reduction of the actual complexity of
the topic. It is con ned by a certain choice of original sources and
secondary literature. Furthermore, I choose only a few of the multitude
of narrations and statements given in the sources, namely those that I
deem to be representative and relevant for this survey. For example, the
reader should not expect a history and detailed explanation of Tibetan
Buddhist philosophy or doctrinal cycles. Methodologically, this paper
tries to give an impression of the perspective on Tibetan history from
the tenth through thirteenth century as represented by the group of
actors characterised above. Anyway, it is an interpretation, synthetically
constructed under the in uence of further evidence of other sources
and historic-critical re ection. And the fact that ancient Tibetan his-
toriographers are not able to react to my interpretation has to be kept
in mind, though this is surely a self-evident observation.
- The “Dark Age”
When in 842 the last Tibetan king Glang-dar-ma was assassinated,^7 the
large Tibetan empire quickly began to disintegrate. The strongholds in
the Turkestan and Chinese regions were soon lost, and Tibet proper
(^6) Cf. Foucault 1973, p. 74.
(^7) The regicide of Glang-dar-ma is a common mythological stereotype in Tibetan his-
tories. For a discussion of the ethical implications of this myth, see Schlieter 2003.