BUDDHISM IN THE TIBETAN CULTURAL AREA 27311.2 The Conversion of Tibet
What little is known of pre-Buddhist Tibetan religion indicates that it dealt
with what were later called the four ways of gods and men: divination, exor-
cism, magical coercion, and the guidance of the human spirit after death. A
cult centering on the divinity of the king involved elaborate sacrifices for the
maintenance of the king's power while he was alive, and for the provision of
his eternal happiness in the heavenly world after death. Ritual experts were
hired for both sorts of occasions, and some seem to have acted as the king's
advisers in the day-to-day running of the kingdom. Scholars have suggested
that this pattern, which focused political and sacred power on a single figure,
set the stage for the later period in Tibetan history when monasteries assumed
the role of noble families and their abbots the role ofkings, but as we shall see,
there were also economic reasons for this later development.
Considering Tibet's proximity to India, Buddhism reached it remarkably
late. The Tibetans themselves recorded that Buddhism was introduced twice
into their country, first in the seventh to ninth centuries, and then again begin-
ning at the end of the tenth, with a dark period of anti-Buddhist persecution
in between. We must qualify this scenario, however, by noting that it covers
only the periods in which the rulers of Tibet took an active interest in the
propagation ofBuddhism, and that the persecution was more antimonastic than
anti-Buddhist. From the seventh century to the Muslim conquest of India at
the beginning of the thirteenth century, a fairly constant stream of individual
Tibetans filtered down through the Himalayan passes to acquire initiations and
instructions from the Buddhist Tantric adepts in northeastern India and Kash-
mir. Their inte~;:est in Tantric powers, as opposed to Buddhist philosophy, played
a major role in shaping Tibetan Buddhism.
11.2.1 The First Propagation
The first king credited with bringing Buddhism to Tibet was Song-tsen Gam-
po (full transliterated form: Srong-brtsan sgam-po; d. circa 650). King Song-
tsen inherited a united Tibetan kingdom from his father and started Tibet on
a campaign of imperial conquest that made it the dominant power in central
Asia, with control over the Silk Road, until the middle of the ninth century
(see Section 8.1.3). He had two Buddhist wives, a princess from China and
one from Nepal. To please them, he built Tibet's first Buddhist temple, the
Jo-khang in Lhasa (Strong EB, sec. 7.1). Later Tibetan historians identified
King Song-tsen as an emanation of Avalokitesvara, and his Chinese wife as an
emanation of Tara (see Section 5.4.4). After his reign, Lhasa began to attract
Buddhist monks whose homelands had been decimated by the Tibetan con-
quests, but these monks, along with the handful of Tibetan monks they had
managed to ordain, were later forced to leave Tibet when they were blamed
for a smallpox epidemic in the capital. Nevertheless, they left behind a legacy
of texts that served to convert Tibet's first truly Buddhist monarch, Trhisong
Detsen (Khri-srong Ide-brtsan; r. 755-circa 797).