the buddhist way into tibet 317
and the secondary document which was composed at the same time
were sent. The names of the temples and communities enable us to
get an impression of the expansion of Buddhism in the royal period.
The second document, the bka’-mchid, narrates the history of the intro-
duction of Buddhism to Tibet, and may thus, as Hugh Richardson
stresses, be seen as the rst example of the literary genre of “religious
history” (chos-’byung) which in later times became so popular in Tibet.^20
The text describes the founding of the Pe-har temple at Ra-sa as the
starting point of Buddhism in Tibet and also stresses that there was a
persecution of the doctrine after the death of Khri-lde-gtsug-btsan. It
is a curious coincidence that the temple of Pe-har should have been
the starting point of the establishment of Buddhism in Tibet, accord-
ing to this old document from the royal period. The guardian deity
Pe-har was to play a crucial role throughout the history of Tibetan
Buddhism, especially in the conversion of the Mongols to Buddhism in
the late sixteenth century, and it is still today one of the most power-
ful guardian deities of the dGe-lugs-pa order of Tibetan Buddhism.
From a political point of view it may well be the most important deity,
because through the oracle of gNas-chung, the state-oracle of the
dGe-lugs-pa residing in the gNas-chung monastery near ’Bras-spungs
in Central Tibet, Pe-har still in uences processes of political decision
in the Tibetan exile government.
6.2. Buddhism at the Royal CourtKhri-srong-lde-btsan supported the spread of the new religion by invit-
ing Indian Buddhist masters to the royal court at Lhasa. The two most
famous teachers who went to Tibet in this time were ntarakita and
his disciple Kamalala. Unfortunately we do not know much about the
great Mahyna scholar ntarakita (ca. 723–787 AD), who is said to
have come from Za-hor.^21 The dBa’-bzhed tells us that dBa’-gsal-snang
(belonging to the dBa’ clan, as his name suggests) went to Nepal and
invited ntarakita to Mang-yul. After a stay in Mang-yul the mKhan-
po Bo-dhi-sa-tva, as he is usually called in Tibetan sources, was invited
to come to Central Tibet. He stayed at the Pe-har-gling temple of
Lhasa, where he was examined for two months by three ministers of
the king, who suspected the Indian master’s teachings to be black magic.
(^20) See Richardson 1980, pp. 62–73.
(^21) dBa’-bzhed, fol. 5v, see Wangdu & Diemberger 2000, p. 41.