286 CHAPTER ELEVENintentionally reincarnate in such a way that he would resume leadership after
his reincarnated form, a tulku (sprul-sku), gained maturity. The story of how
this tradition developed is a fascinating study of how shamanic and Buddhist
strands combined in the development of Tibetan Buddhist traditions.
The tiilku tradition originated in the Karma subschool of the Kagyiis. One
of Marpa's reputed magical skills had been the ability to transfer his spirit to
animate the body of a person newly dead. The purpose of this skill, aside from
its entertainment value, was to cheat death. If one were approaching death
oneself, one could continue life in a younger body of one's choosing. Marpa
had been unable to pass along this particular skill to any of his followers, but
the tradition of its existence led the second hierarch of the Karma school,
Karma Paksi (1204-83)-reputedly skilled at both Mahamudra and Dzogchen
practices-to attempt to inject his spirit at death into the corpse of a boy. He
failed in his attempt and ended up injecting his spirit into the womb of an ex-
pectant mother. Mter his rebirth, he was able to recount the details of his ex-
perience and was ultimately accepted as the next leader of the Karma school.
As this tradition became standard in the Karma school, it spread to other
orders and monasteries as well, until eventually Tibet had more than three
hundred recognized tiilkus. The dying leader would leave signs to indicate the
location of his/her next rebirth; followers would attempt to interpret the signs
and find the child who matched them, and then bring up the child until it
was old enough to resume authority. This method had a number of advan-
tages in that it freed the school or monastery from having to depend on the
uncertain ability of a single family to provide it with a string of suitable in-
cumbents, at the same time arranging for talented children to be groomed for
leadership from an early age. However, it also was open to serious abuses, es-
pecially in the case of wealthy or politically powerful institutions, within which
differing factions might propose different children as the genuine tiilku, or the
regents might refuse to pass power along to the tiilku when the latter reached
maturity (Strong EB, sec. 7.8).
The tiilku tradition has been explained as an application of the doctrine of
rebirth, and in its early years it may have been rationalized with Buddhist doc-
trine in those terms. However, in the seventeenth century, the tradition began
to combine with the tradition ofbodhisattva emanations, and thus was ex-
plained in terms of the nirma!fakaya theory (see Sections 4.3, 5.5.1). This
proved expedient in a number of ways. Tiilkus who turned out to be obvious
poor choices could be removed from office on the grounds that their bodhi-
sattva had abandoned them. If several tiilkus were proposed for the same posi-
tion, an arrangement could be worked out to accommodate the political
interests of all the parties in the dispute. The most striking example of this was
a case in Bhutan where three children were proposed by different factions as
the rightful hierarch of the Drugpa ('Brug-pa) branch of the Kagyiis in charge
of that country. Finally the decision was made that the previous hierarch had
split his body, speech, and mind among three incarnations, and that the speech
and mind incarnations should assume authority. From that point onward, this
tiilku developed a habit of making this three-way split.