280 CHAPTER ELEVENDzogchen tradition, but early Dzogchen documents from the tenth and
eleventh centuries were careful to point out the very real differences between
their school and Ch'an, which was also practiced in Tibet at that time. For
their part, the Ch'an adepts had derived their doctrine of spontaneity from
the Taoists, and it may be that the doctrine of spontaneous nonstriving had its
roots ultimately in shamanic traditions common to Tibet, China, and central
Asia. Thus the relation between Dzogchen and Ch'an may have been one of
common ancestry rather than direct influence.
Thus, by the end of the Second Propagation, there were four major schools
of Buddhism in Tibet-Kadam, Sakya, Kagyii, and Nyingma-with a fifth off-
shoot school, Bon, which maintained that it was a separate religion even though
it held many doctrines in common with the Nyingma school. Kadam, Sakya,
and Kagyii had well-established monastic orders for both men and women.
Nyingma and Bon did not develop monastic orders until the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, and even then their monastic impulse was never strong.
As was the case with the schools of early Buddhism, no hard-and-fast lines
existed between the various Tibetan schools, largely because of the tendency
for individual monks, nuns, and lay adepts to travel about, gathering up in-
structions and initiations from as many authorized teachers-termed lamas
(bla-mas)-as possible, regardless of affiliation. The Kadams retained their rep-
utation as the strictest in terms of celibacy, but otherwise the schools were dis-
tinguished primarily by which Tantra they followed and which Cosmic
Buddha they regarded as the source of their particular lineage.
11.3-THE PERIOD OF CONSOLIDATION
During the first two centuries after the demise of Buddhism in northern India
in the early thirteenth century, the Tibetans succeeded in consolidating their
religion into the form it was to maintain, largely unchanged, until the early
twentieth century. This involved four processes: studying the history of Bud-
dhism so as to provide a background for textual study, gathering texts to form
a standard canon, establishing doctrinal syntheses to interpret and accommo-
date the many schools of thought inherited from the two propagations, and
forming a political system that reflected the increasing institutional power of
'\:he monastic communities.
11.3.1 Historical Issues
The first task confronting the scholars of this period was to establish a stan-
dardized canon from the mass of texts they had inherited from the two propa-
gations of Dharma; this, in turn, required that they research the history of
Buddhism, both in India and Tibet, so as to provide a framework for their
textual studies. In part, their research was motivated by a genuine quest for
historical truth, and the resulting histories remain among the most reliable
sources for modern historical study of Buddhism's last centuries in India.