312 karénina kollmar-paulenz
The Chinese princess, Wencheng , according to legend brought
to her marriage with the Barbarian king a statue of the Buddha in his
youth, the famous Jo-bo image which came to be the most sacred Bud-
dhist statue in Tibet. The Jo-khang temple, which still today remains
the country’s most sacred temple, was built to accommodate the image.
The Nepalese princess allegedly brought another statue, also highly
venerated by the Tibetans, and the Ra-mo-che temple in Lhasa was
later constructed to house this image. The two princesses and the king
himself were considered to be incarnations of Avalokitevara and his
two consorts, the Chinese wife being Green Tr, and the Nepalese
wife, the Buddhist goddess Bhkut.
Although later literary tradition sees Srong-btsan-sgam-po as the rst
of the three dharma-kings of Tibet, who actively promoted the estab-
lishment of Buddhism, the Dunhuang documents do not support this
assumption. Judging from them, the period of Srong-btsan-sgam-po was
still strongly governed by the pursuit of indigenous religious practices,
centring around the king’s person and his divine origin. The cult of
the divine kingship is well documented in the tombs of the kings in
the Phyongs-rgyas valley not far from Lhasa. The supernatural descent
of the kings claiming divine origin was ascertained, among others, in
titles like “god” (lha), “supernaturally wise divinity” (’phrul-gyi-lha), and
“son of the gods” (lha-sras), and con rmed in the origin myths of the
Tibetan people.
Far from being a devoted Buddhist, the king nevertheless set in motion
a cultural revolution which directly smoothed the path to the Buddhist
conversion of the country: he sent his minister Thon-mi-sa-bho-ta to
India with the order to bring back a script for the Tibetan language.
Literacy was thus inaugurated by this king. The old Tibetan chronicle
dBa’-bzhed informs us about this crucial moment for the cultural his-
tory of Tibet:
Thon-mi-gsam-po-ra was sent by royal order in order to get the Indian
doctrine and the model of the alphabet. [Returning to Tibet] he was
accompanied by Li-byin, an Indian versed in reading and writing, and
took with him some [texts] of the doctrine such as Chos-dkon-mchog-srin,^12
Pad-ma-dkar-po,^13 Rin-po-che-tog,^14 gZugs-grva-lnga and dGe-ba-bcu... As far(^12) Ratnameghastra.
(^13) Saddharmapuarkastra.
(^14) Mahsanniptaratnaketudhrastra.