556 shen weirong
chub grags pa from dBus gtsang who “came to China on tributary
mission in the thirty-eighth year of Wanli reign (1610) told the fol-
lowing story:
The people in that country refer to their king as bla ma rin po che who
changes every three to five years. When he is about to die, he says to his
ministers, “I will be born on such and such day at such and such place,
and my parents will be who and who. You should come to welcome
me by that time.” Then he indeed died on the said day and was reborn
in the said place. He was born from under the armpit and could speak
after three days. He told his parents, “I was originally the king of dBus
gTsang, when I died I had told officials and they knew to come welcome
me.” After he was welcomed back, he grew rapidly into an adult in five
to six months. He could ascend altars to preach Buddhist teaching, and
there was nothing about past and future that he did not know. He was
automatically able to understand Buddhist sūtras. The only distinction
was that the new kings’ appearance was different from the old kings’. In
less than five years he was again born in another place, mostly he was
born in Tibet. Tibetan people call him the living Buddha and they always
welcomed and sent him off with respect. Tibetans cannot move when the
king chants mantras. Thus do they revere him extremely. When the old
king died, he is not buried. It is not until after the arrival of the new king
that the old king’s corpse is burned. There are relics in the corpse and
precious stones among his teeth. It is so miraculous. But living Buddhas
must really have existed, and they still do today.^21Despite the fact that Tibetan Buddhism was practiced by many inside
and outside the Ming court, Han Chinese literati made every attempt
to discriminate against Tibetan monks and Tibetan Buddhism. They
often interpreted the court’s favoritism toward Tibetan monks and
its endorsement of Tibetan Buddhism as political utilitarianism. They
either described Tibetan Buddhism as the secret teaching that “con-
fused the heart of the emperor” or directly labeled it as heresy or
demon religion. Their purpose was to deny the religious and cultural
significance of Tibetan Buddhism and firmly to position Tibetans as
“remote barbarians beyond civilization.”
It was also in the writing of Ming literati that Tibetan Buddhism’s
most famous/notorious nick name, lama jiao , i.e. Lamaism,
appeared for the very first time. The first appearance of the term we
have seen so far is in “Tablet for the Tibetan Sūtra Printing Work-
shop” (Fanjing chang bei ), a document composed by the
(^21) Shen 1959, juan 30, 782.