The Narrative Foundations of Tibetan Buddhist Culture

Between the 11th and 14th centuries, Buddhist communities on the Tibetan Plateau crafted a national charter myth that was to have immense cultural staying power. The narrative literature that successfully promoted this myth would inflect the cultural, religious, and political landscape of Tibet even into the 21st century, and greatly impact Mongolia, the Himalayas, and other Asian Buddhist communities as well. Yet the genesis and even original content of this literature has now turned out, thanks to the PI’s efforts, to be poorly understood, which greatly hinders progress in a number of fields. Using newly identified and until now unstudied manuscripts, we will:1) establish a sound text-historical basis for using these hugely influential sources;2) illuminate the rise of major elements of Tibetan Buddhist culture, including a national culture hero and the mythology of the land’s patron deity;3) produce case studies on a variety of topics central to Tibetan cultural, religious, and political history.Because this Buddhist literature promoted the existence of an intimate relationship between the country’s patron deity (the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara), a divine king (the 7th-century Emperor Songtsen), and the Tibetans themselves, it throws important light on premodern relations between religion, politics, and collective identity. As such, it has world-historical implications. Yet the lack of text-historical groundwork ensures that scholars who wish to consult these materials, which were subject to centuries-long copying, adaptation, and mutual borrowing, immediately find themselves on unfirm ground. We will set the entire field on sounder footing by mapping the history of these early compositions and plotting their evolution. Using this new foundation, we will then study the genesis of Tibet’s far-reaching cultural complex.