Emperor - Khri Srong lde brtsan

The reconstruction, as a historian, of actual events surrounding the introduction of Buddhism is not at issue here. We are concerned solely with discovering the ideas that have arisen concerning this introduction, that which one believed or wanted to have others believe at the end of the eighth century and at the beginning of the ninth century, and then in the later tradition.

“Emperor” Khri Srong lde brtsan

Khri Srong lde brtsan was a Tibetan “emperor” (btsan po) who lived from 742-c.800 CE. He greatly expanded the Tibetan empire and oversaw the construction of one of the most famous early Buddhist monasteries in Tibet, bSam yas. When he was born, he was given the name Srong lde brtsan. At his enthronement, in 755-756 CE, he had the royal title Khri bestowed upon him. Our oldest Tibetan records call him a btsan po, rather than, say, a

king (rgyal po), when they report these events. The term btsan po is difficult to translate, but may be akin to the term “emperor” used of the previous rulers of China or Japan. In other words, it is an indigenous term for the sole ruler of the Tibetan state. The term btsan po is therefore inapplicable either to anyone in the same country who has not held this position, or to the head of another nation.4 Khri Srong lde brtsan is also an “emperor” in the more literal sense of the term, “one who rules over an empire.” The Tibetan empire reached its greatest extent during his reign.

In the northwest, it threatened the Caliph Harun Al-Rashid on the banks of the Oxus; in the east, Tibetan armies even briefly sacked the Chinese capital Chang'an (present day Xi'an) in 763 CE. The btsan po also presided over the growing institutionalisation of Buddhism in Tibet, epitomised by his patronage of bSam yas Monastery. As Walter says, bSam yas is ‘not the oldest, but the most famous early Tibetan monastery.' The inscription at

bSam yas itself mentions another monastery, Ra sa (sprul snang), in Lhasa, which perhaps dates from the seventh-century reign of Srong btsan sgam po (c.614-649 ). Finally, Dotson has recently argued that Khri Srong lde brtsan may have lived into the ninth century, and tentatively dates his death to c. 800 CE. For all this, we can, in fact, say very little with certainty about the “historical” Khri Srong lde brtsan.

However, Khri Srong lde brtsan plays a very important part in most traditional Buddhist histories. These histories usually devote a great deal of space to Khri Srong lde brtsan's endeavours to spread Buddhism in Tibet. They less often emphasise the “mundane” aspect of his reign, the conquests and international diplomacy that made Tibet at this time one of the largest and most feared empires in Central Asia. Even the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, despite receiving a good monastic education in religious history, was not taught about the imperial achievements of Khri Srong lde brtsan when young. Then, in 1954, he visited what was once the ancient western Chinese capital, Chang'an:

“The mayor of Xi'an and the deputy minister of Gansu province suggested that we go outside the city. Outside there are walls from the Tang Dynasty more than one thousand years old. We were on the walls, which are quite high and thick, and the sun was about to set. Sitting there, the mayor told me that the Tibetan army reached up to these walls and the emperor of China, living then in Xi'an, had to run away. I thought that in an airplane I could have flown from there to Lhasa in a one-hour flight. And I thought ‘Oh the Tibetan army, in order to create such a panic in the capital of the Tang.. .at least tens of thousands of soldiers must have been there, must have come to China on foot.'”

The Chinese historians had passed on records of Tibet's military campaign for the intervening twelve hundred years. Tibetan histories, in contrast, omitted this victory and all other conquests from their accounts of Khri Srong lde brtsan's reign. In general terms, Tibetan Buddhist tradition had favoured religious history over royal history.

This focus on the Dharma influenced the reports of early European travelers to Tibet, as I shall show below. Early western scholars writing on Tibet mistook the imperial Tibetan Khri Srong lde brtsan of the Chinese sources and the Buddhist king Khri Srong lde brtsan of indigenous histories for two separate people. When the Christian monk Desideri recounted the reign of the Buddhist king, he focused much more on the Indian master Padmasambhava than on Khri Srong lde brtsan. His contemporary, Du Halde, focused exclusively on the btsan po's military campaigns. Later scholars have not fully combined these two sides of his character.