Soft power from the rooftop of the world
How Tibetans rescued a neglected Indian faith and bought 1000 years of relevance
Note: part 1 of 2. Read part 2.
In 1915, nine lamas arrived in St. Petersburg, Russia, to inaugurate the Datsan Gunzechoinei Buddhist temple there. Russia’s last Tsar, Nicholas II, had approved its construction in the empire’s then capital. Erecting a temple on Europe’s northeastern fringe as the 20th century dawned may sound odd, but Buddhism had actually been one of the Russian Empire’s official religions since 1741. Hundreds of thousands of the Tsar’s subjects were devotees of the Vajrayana tradition; from Kalmyk Mongols tending their herds on the Volga to Tuvan Turks ascending Siberian peaks every summer to reach upland pastures.
Vajrayana derives from the Sanskrit vajra, a diamond-strong thunderbolt the storm god Indra yields, thus its alternate labels: the “Diamond Vehicle” or “Thunderbolt Vehicle.” Vajrayana is Buddhism’s third and youngest tradition, after Theravada or the “Way of Elders,” which is both the most ancient and traditional variant dominant in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, and the Mahayana tradition of China and Japan, which translates as the “Great Vehicle.” Theravada puts the onus on individual action to attain salvation, while Mahayana sects count on the power of supernatural intercessory beings, or bodhisattvas, to aid believers in attaining enlightenment. Vajrayana, meanwhile, though originally an extension of the Mahayana tradition, contends that enlightenment can be accelerated into a single lifetime through initiatory rites supervised by a teacher of confirmed spiritual lineage, often himself a reincarnated bodhisattva in the flesh (rather than an unseen spirit). These teachers are called lamas, the Tibetan word for guru, and Vajrayana is often termed “Lamaist” for their essential role. Turkic and Mongolian Vajrayana adherents also use the term lama for their religious leaders, illustrating Tibetans’ influence after incubating and nourishing this form of Buddhism for over a millennium.
Vajrayana Buddhism is India’s last great religious gift to the world, and the tradition’s lamas eventually became trusted confidants of everyone from Mongol Khans to Chinese Emperors. The religion’s subcontinental origins date to the late first millennium, crystallizing tantric traditions that peaked between 600 and 1000 AD, in a land then teeming with charismatic teachers and devotional sects. India was undergoing a religious transformation. Hindu kings were turning away from the Buddha. Chinese pilgrims to India during these centuries noted the decline of the monastic orders and the neglect of Buddhist religious sites in the religion’s homeland. The year 1000 AD marked the end of a civilizational cycle; Buddhism was gradually sliding towards senescence in the subcontinent, seemingly poised to fade into history. But ultimately, the religion collapsed with cataclysmic finality upon Islam’s arrival at the beginning of the second millennium. In 1192 AD, the Afghan warlord Muhammad of Ghor administered Indian Buddhism’s coup de grâce, defeating Indian forces at the Second Battle of Tarain, ushering in over five centuries of Turco-Muslim rule in the Gangetic plain. The Turks immediately plundered the last Buddhist universities and monasteries, overnight scattering dispossessed monks to the four corners of Asia, and almost as promptly saw to Buddhism’s elimination in its ancient North Indian core.
But as the Buddha’s teachings withered in his homeland, their practice continued to spread in the mountains and plateaus beyond the Himalayas, maturing into a new empire of faith on Asia’s very rooftop. Tibetans had first put their stamp on history after 600 AD, exploding into surrounding civilizations’ consciousness, racking up one military victory after another, crashing the gates of venerable imperial capitals. This was when the ruler Songtsen Gampo unified all the petty highland kingdoms south to north between the Himalayas and the Tarim Basin into one powerful state, fatefully laying the foundations for Tibet’s future cultural preeminence by sponsoring Buddhist monks to preach and build temples in his domains.
Over the next two centuries, Tibetan armies would occupy the Tang capital of Chang'an, defeat Chinese armies in Central Asia (aiding their Arab Muslim allies), and invade the Indian subcontinent. Tibet, at Eurasia’s geographical center, was the continent’s geopolitical fulcrum between 600 and 850 AD. But more lasting than the outcomes of the Imperial Tibetans’ political machinations and military victories was the fateful choice to pluck South Asian Buddhism from the edge of extinction, transplanting it wholesale. At the height of Tibet’s temporal power in the 8th century, Tantric Buddhism found political patronage in the north, just as the number of adherents began declining in India when South Asia’s rulers were switching their allegiance to new, assertive sects of Hinduism. Drawn by the offer of patronage, two Indian monks, Padmasambhava and Śāntarakṣita, journeyed north of the Himalayas, sowing the seeds for the oldest school of Tibetan Buddhism, the Nyingma. In Tibet, they imparted their tantric knowledge to the rising empire’s enthusiastic acolytes. So by the time a unified Tibet began shattering into dozens of petty principalities in the 900’s, Vajrayana Buddhism was firmly enough ensconced that it continued to spread among the people, unifying Tibetans culturally against the backdrop of an increasingly fractured political landscape.
During the Tibetan Empire in the 7th to 9th centuries AD, Buddhist practice had become widespread in China, Korea, Japan and Southeast Asia, with genuine popular appeal (as opposed to being just a faddish elite affectation, like in Tibet). Many sects, like Chinese Chan (which we tend to know better for the Zen form it later assumed in Japan), drew on indigenous philosophical traditions and by then Buddhism was no longer viewed as a foreign religion in many of the societies that had adopted it centuries prior. When Mahayana Buddhism came to Tibet from the east in the 7th century, it was as a Chinese religion and an unwelcome tool of Chinese soft power.
Not unlike Christianity in its own birthplace, and in contrast to its expansive legacy across much of Asia, Buddhism is today nearly extinct in its founder’s homeland. But this reality only dates to the second millennium AD. Buddhism was a force in northern India for over 1,500 years, from 500 BC to 1000 AD, a span that in the West encompasses everything from the rise of the Classical Greeks to the foundation of medieval European kingdoms. Those intrepid monks who braved the Himalayas in the centuries around 1000 AD preserved a distinct Indian aspect to a confession that had continued to evolve and change in its homeland, centuries after Mahayana and Theravada spread to East and Southeast Asia, decoupling themselves from subcontinental developments.
The youngest Indian innovation in Buddhism, the Vajrayana tradition, which leaned on concomitant changes within Hinduism, came to maturity in an India populated by magicians of all religions bent on manipulating the forces of the universe via esoteric mental gymnastics. Tantric-influenced Buddhist monks and priests offered not just philosophical wisdom to their flocks, but magical powers. Medieval Tibet’s lamas, proud philosopher-kings who reigned as autocrats from fortified monasteries, were also wizards whose incantations and spells struck fear in their enemies and psychologically fortified their allies. Today, the Tibetan lamas’ Buddhism offers a glimpse of what might have been in India had it not been for Islam’s rise and Buddhism’s attendant expungement there. The Vajrayana adepts who fled north, just as their faith winked out of existence in their homeland, did more than transmit a fossil religion; in Tibet, Vajrayana Buddhism got a new lease on life, and would eventually vie with Mahayana sects, as well as Islam and Christianity all across northern Asia’s breadth.