Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie
Buddhism, Both the Means and the End of the Ganden
Phodrang Army: An Introduction to Buddhism vis-à-vis the
Military in Tibet (1642–1959)
Alice Travers, Federica Venturi
Citer ce document / Cite this document :
Travers Alice, Venturi Federica. Buddhism, Both the Means and the End of the Ganden Phodrang Army: An Introduction
to Buddhism vis-à-vis the Military in Tibet (1642–1959). In: Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie, vol. 27, 2018. Le bouddhisme et
l'armée au Tibet pendant la période du Ganden Phodrang (1642-1959) / Buddhism and the Millitary in Tibet during the
Ganden Phodrang Period (1642-1959) pp. 13-22;
doi : https://doi.org/10.3406/asie.2018.1505
https://www.persee.fr/doc/asie_0766-1177_2018_num_27_1_1505
Fichier pdf généré le 07/01/2020
BUDDHISM, BOTH THE MEANS AND THE END OF THE GANDEN PHODRANG ARMY
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BUDDHISM, BOTH THE MEANS AND THE END
OF THE GANDEN PHODRANG ARMY:
AN INTRODUCTION TO BUDDHISM
VIS-À-VIS THE MILITARY IN TIBET (1642–1959)
Alice Travers & Federica Venturi*
The history of Tibet, like that of any other country, is characterised by many
instances of warfare, and the period of the Buddhist government of the Dalai
Lamas, the Ganden Phodrang (Dga’ ldan pho brang, 1642–1959),1 is no exception.
However, while other civilisations’ recourse to war does not surprise, the thought
that a Buddhist government—ideologically committed to avoid harming sentient
beings—would include warfare among its tools may seem at first counterintuitive. In
fact, still today, the general public regards Buddhism as a religion of non-violence,2
and would hardly associate the Dalai Lamas and their government structure with
involvement in any form of armed conflict. This volume does not aim at dispelling
this idea—which does not stand even a quick observation of Tibetan history—but
rather seeks to gain a deeper understanding of the interweaving relations between
the military and religious spheres in Tibet. Thus we have gathered here a variety
of studies which explore the multiple and complex aspects of this subject.
As an explicitly Buddhist government, the protection of Buddhism—and particularly of the Buddhist school to which the Dalai Lama belonged, the Gélukpa
(Dge lugs pa)—was the ultimate goal of the Tibetan state, and of all military action
undertaken on its behalf—whether by its own army, ad hoc militias or imperial
(Mongol or Sino-Manchu) forces. Thus, in order to achieve this end, Buddhist
monks oen played prominent roles in Tibetan military affairs during the Ganden
Phodrang period. Moreover, Buddhist doctrine, and especially rites of protection
and destruction, were used to support military action, and in Tibetan sources such
* This introduction is a revised and expanded version of an article on the state of the art of
research on the relationship between Buddhism and the military in Tibet, published as a post on
the TibArmy project’s website: Alice Travers and Federica Venturi, “Buddhism, Both the Means
and the End of the Ganden Phodrang Army: A State-of-the-Field Review on Buddhism vis-àvis the Military in Tibet,” 2017, https://tibarmy.hypotheses.org/691 (accessed 25 October 2017).
1. The period of the Ganden Phodrang government, between 1642 and 1959, broadly corresponds to the reigns of the Fih to the Fourteenth Dalai Lamas or monastic regents during
their minority or the periods of seeking their reincarnation aer their death. These three centuries included two brief periods during which ultimate power was in the hands of a lay leader:
the reigns of Pholané (Pho lha nas) and his son (1728–50), and the regency of Shatra Wangchuk
Gyelpo (Bshad sgra Dbang phyug rgyal po, r. 1862–64).
2. This hard to dismantle opinion seems to survive even in the face of the recent (2017
and 2018) persecution of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in Myanmar (Burma), a prevalently
Buddhist country.
Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 27 (2018) : ⁇-⁇
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Alice Travers & Federica Venturi
methods were oen portrayed as determining factors in the outcomes of armed
conflict. This attitude towards war and violence was not an exception within Buddhist
tradition, nor a peculiarity of Tibet, far om the origins of Buddhist tradition. On
the contrary, the integration of violence in general, and military force in particular,
into the Buddhist amework has been a feature of this religion om the start, as
illustrated by the following overview of scholarship on this theme.
Though Buddhism is not a religion normally associated with violence, Buddhist
societies are of course no strangers to violence, nor indeed to state violence and
warfare, and Tibet is no exception. The first scholarly piece dedicated to an analysis
of the apparent oxymoron of “Buddhist warfare” appeared sixty years ago, in the
article “Le Bouddhisme et la guerre” by the eminent sinologist Paul Demiéville,
which was published in 1957 as a postscript to General Gaston Renondeau’s Histoire
des moines guerriers du Japon. The issue addressed by this pioneering article was
whether the phenomenon of monk-soldiers was restricted to Japanese Buddhism,
or whether Buddhist militarisation in various forms was also found in other Buddhist traditions. Demiéville explored the ideological bases used to justi warfare in
Buddhist contexts, and assessed the possible reasons for the occurrence of Buddhist
militarism as a historical phenomenon.
In particular, he elucidated aspects of Buddhist ethical theory and ritual practice
in light of their relationships to warfare. In this regard, he observed that throughout
East Asia tantric Buddhist rites were regularly employed in support of military goals.
He further pointed out that the propagation of Buddhism rendered neither China
nor Japan more pacifist. Nevertheless, he did concede that the Buddhist doctrine
of nonviolence appears to have contributed to the historical weakening, militarily
speaking, of the “lamaist” Tibeto-Mongol world. In this, Demiéville was echoing
an idea that remains pervasive in the fields of Tibetan, Chinese and Mongolian
studies, as well as in general public opinion.3 It is easy to see, however, that such
a presentation, in light of the many examples of Buddhist militarism furnished by
Tibetan and Mongolian history, might merit further analysis.
In looking for Buddhist ethical justifications for the recourse to violence,
Demiéville particularly highlighted what he called the “statistical justification,”
namely that murder may be justified if killing one person can save the lives of
many—a utilitarian ethic that is illustrated, for example, in the story of the
bodhisattva ship’s captain in the Upāyakauśalya Sūtra. Interestingly, the main historical example that Demiéville draws upon to illustrate this principle pertains to
Tibetan history, with the story of the murder of King Langdarma (Glang dar ma)
by the monk Lhalung Pelgyi Dorjé (Lha lung Dpal gyi rdo rje) in 842. According
to Tibetan tradition, this murder was provoked by the king’s oppression of Buddhism, and his monk assassin is celebrated in Tibet as a saint. It is said that when
3. For example, in 1928, the British diplomat Charles Bell wrote apropos of Tibet that
“. . . Buddhism, with its soening influence forbidding the taking of life, had weakened the martial power of the nation,” see Charles Bell, The People of Tibet (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass,
1992), 15. Cf. also the idea of Tibet as a “disarmed society” as described by George Bataille in
1949 and quoted in Bernard Faure, Bouddhisme et Violence (Paris: Le Cavalier Bleu, 2008), 44.
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BUDDHISM, BOTH THE MEANS AND THE END OF THE GANDEN PHODRANG ARMY
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embarking on his enterprise, Lhalung Pelgyi Dorjé had only “thoughts of commiseration” toward his intended victim.
For unspecified reasons—perhaps due to a decline in interest in military history
in general, or to an increased focus within Buddhist studies on other aspects of
doctrine and practice—for almost fi years aer the appearance of Demiéville’s
article, the topic of Buddhism and violence was almost entirely neglected by scholars. The sole exception to this was Lambert Schmithausen’s “Buddhismus und
Glaubenskriege,” which appeared in 1996 in the proceedings of a seminar dedicated
to the theme of religious wars. This article systematically tackled four distinct but
related questions concerning war and violence in Buddhism, namely: 1) the “explicitness of the sources” on the ethical norm of not engaging in war; 2) examples
of violations of this norm; 3) “attempts to harmonize politics and ethics”; and
4) “attempts to relativize the norm.”4
With the beginning of the twenty-first century, we find a sudden profusion
of publications devoted to the subject of the relationship between Buddhism and
violence, which appeared in quick succession.5 The first is a collection of articles
entitled Buddhism and Violence, edited by Michael Zimmermann.6 Comprising the
results of a conference panel dedicated to this theme, Zimmermann’s volume aims
to illustrate that, like other religious systems, “the traditions of Buddhism have
actively or passively promoted violent modes of behaviour.”7 The volume includes
eight articles ranging geographically om India to Japan, and passing through Tibet.
Chronologically, they range om treatments of classical Pali and Mahāyāna sources
to the twentieth century. Thematically, the range is also very wide, including, for
example, an analysis of suicide and the practice of self-immolation by fire (a feature
of Tibetan protests for independence in recent years); a discussion of soldier monks
in Japan; and an analysis of the ethical tension experienced by a model Buddhist
sovereign or “ideal universal ruler” (Skt. cakravartin; lit. “the one who turns the
wheel”) when punishing evildoers.
Significantly for our purposes, this collection also includes two articles on Tibet,
both of which focus on the above-mentioned story of the assassination of King
4. See Lambert Schmithausen, “Aspects of the Buddhist Attitude towards War,” in Violence
Denied: Violence, Non-Violence and the Rationalization of Violence in South Asian Cultural History,
ed. Jan E. M. Houben and Karel R. van Kooij (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 45–67.
5. Here we only discuss those works that have sections specifically on Tibet. Other volumes
on this theme appeared in the same period focusing on Southeast-Asian contexts. Among these,
the following should be mentioned: Stanley J. Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics and
Violence in Sri Lanka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Tessa J. Bartholomeusz, In
Defense of Dharma: Just-war Ideology in Buddhist Sri Lanka (London: Routledge, 2002); John R.
Hinnels and Richard King, eds., Religion and Violence in South Asia: Theory and Practice (London:
Routledge, 2007); Michael K. Jerryson, Buddhist Fury: Religion and Violence in Southern Thailand
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Vladimir Tikhonov and Torkel Brekke,
Buddhism and Violence: Militarism and Buddhism in Modern Asia (New York: Routledge, 2013).
6. See Michael Zimmermann, ed., Buddhism and Violence (Lumbini: Lumbini International
Research Institute, 2006).
7. Ibid., 6.
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Alice Travers & Federica Venturi
Langdarma. The first, by Carmen Meinert, looks at how the celebrated episode
has been assimilated in Tibetan literary sources with the tantric rite of “liberation
through killing,” and illustrates how an act of murder such as that of Langdarma,
when religiously amed, can be transformed through ritual into a sacred act.8
Dissenting om this reading, Jens Schlieter argues that rather than illustrating
a “liberation killing,” the story provides a justification for tyrannicide under the
right circumstances,9 and thus becomes “a model for political conflict resolution.”10
Two years aer the appearance of the Zimmermann collection, Bernard Faure,
a specialist in Japanese Chan Buddhism, published his seminal opus Buddhisme et
violence. This book carefully scrutinises the contradictions and ambiguities inherent
to the relationship between Buddhism and violence. Faure starts om the observation that there is a certain disjunction between the normative ethical ideals of
Buddhism on the one hand, and its pragmatic approach to conflict and violence on
the other. Drawing examples om the histories of Sri Lanka, China, Vietnam, Tibet
and Japan, his analyses encompass not only warfare but also examples of symbolic
violence as expressed through mythology, iconography,11 ritual and the language
of sermons. Within the various Buddhist cultures under scrutiny, he reviews the
ways in which the recourse to violence has been legitimated on both doctrinal and
practical levels, and the reasons that were so readily available to Buddhist leaders
for compromising on the principle of non-violence. Particularly stimulating for our
own research on warfare under the Ganden Phodrang are those sections of his work
that synthesize the various sociological debates on the proper relationship between
Buddhism and the state. Indeed, Faure underlines the fact that any state, whether
Buddhist or not, since it by definition holds the monopoly on the legitimate use of
violence, cannot relinquish this monopoly without at the same time losing its right
to govern and its capacity to maintain order.12 In this context, he highlights the
humanism of Buddhist religion, which like all religions is constructed by humans
in order to serve humans, who do not always manage to live up to the ideals they
create for themselves. Therefore, he argues, given that Buddhist societies have in
practice been constrained by the force of circumstance to tolerate state violence, the
very fact that the idea of non-violence has been sustained at the level of an ideal
remains a significant achievement and a point to its credit.13
8. Carmen Meinert, “Between the Profane and the Sacred? On the Context of the Rite of
‘Liberation’ (sgrol ba),” in Buddhism and Violence, ed. Zimmermann, 99–130.
9. Jens Schlieter, “Compassionate Killing or Conflict Resolution? The Murder of King
Langdarma according to Tibetan Buddhist Sources,” in Buddhism and Violence, ed. Zimmermann,
131–58.
10. Zimmermann, ed., Buddhism and Violence, “Introduction,” 8.
11. One thinks here, for Tibet, of Amy Heller, “Armor and Weapons in the Iconography
of Tibetan Buddhist Deities,” in Warriors of the Himalayas: Rediscovering the Arms and Armor
of Tibet, ed. Donald J. LaRocca (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2006), 35–42.
12. See Faure, Bouddhisme et Violence, 48.
13. Ibid., 16.
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Jacob Dalton’s The Taming of the Demons specifically addresses the discourse of
violence in Tibetan Buddhism and in particular the tantric ritual of “liberation” or
killing.14 By analysing textual evidence om various literary genres and historical
periods, Dalton reconstructs what he calls a “history of violence” in Tibetan Buddhism. In a parallel way, Nicolas Sihlé’s book Rituels bouddhiques de pouvoir et de
violence15 examines the figure of the Tibetan tantrist, which is associated with rituals
aiming at killing, through exorcism practices and sorcery. The work focusses on
the violence of exorcism rituals and the tension it creates in the activity of specific
Buddhist religious specialists in Baragaon (Mustang, Nepal). The focus of these
works, however, is firmly on ritual violence and sorcery, rather than actual violence
or warfare, but, as underlined by Bernard Faure, there is no discontinuity in premodern societies between symbolic violence as found in rituals and physical violence.16
Symbolic violence is certainly part of Tibetan military history, since very oen
ritual means were employed in support of military campaigns and political goals,
and the reputation for efficacy in such rituals was an important asset for religious
leaders. The examples are too numerous to be quoted here, and the topic of “war
magic” is at the centre of one of this volume’s chapters (see the contribution by
George FitzHerbert). To date, however, most scholarly attention has pertained to
such practices during the pre-Ganden Phodrang periods of Tibetan history, for
instance with the twelh-century religious figure, Lama Zhang (Bla ma Zhang,
1122–93),17 or the ritual specialist Sokdokpa Lodrö Gyeltsen (Sog bzlog pa Blo gros
rgyal mtshan, 1552–1624).18 Otherwise, scholars have looked at such practices in
Tibetan territories not directly controlled by the Ganden Phodrang government
or its army, such as the well-known use of “war magic” during the Qing second
campaigns in the Tibetan borderlands of Gyelrong (Tib. Rgyal rong; Ch. Jinchuan)
in 1771–76.19
14. See Jacob Dalton, The Taming of the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).
15. Nicolas Sihlé, Rituels bouddhiques de pouvoir et de violence (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013).
16. Bernard Faure, Unmasking Buddhism (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 95, quoted by
Sihlé, Rituels bouddhiques, 11.
17. See Carl Yamamoto, Vision and Violence: Lama Zhang and the Politics of Charisma in
Twelfth-Century Tibet (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
18. See James Gentry, “Representations of Efficacy: The Ritual Expulsion of Mongol Armies
in the Consolidation and Expansion of the Tsang (gTsang) Dynasty,” in Tibetan Ritual, ed.
José Cabezón (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), and, by the same author,
Power Objects in Tibetan Buddhism: The Life, Writings, and Legacy of Sokdokpa Lodrö Gyeltsen
(Leiden: Brill, 2017).
19. See Dan Martin, “Bonpo Canons and Jesuit Cannons: On Sectarian Factors Involved
in the Ch’ien Lung Emperor’s Second Gold Stream Expedition of 1771 to 1776 Based Primarily on Some Tibetan Sources,” Tibet Journal 15, no. 2 (1990), 3–28; Joanna Waley-Cohen, The
Culture of War in China: Empire and the Military under the Qing Dynasty (London, New York:
IB Tauris, 2007).
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In Jerryson and Juergensmeyer’s anthology of articles entitled Buddhist Warfare,20
the focus was not on violence in general but war in particular. The avowed aim of
this volume, which includes an English translation of the Demiéville article discussed
above, was “disrupting the social imaginary that holds Buddhist traditions to be
exclusively pacifistic.”21 In keeping with this provocative goal, the cover of the book
shows a young Buddhist novice holding what looks like a pistol (an image that was
not well received among certain Buddhist circles in the West).22 Like the collection
edited by Zimmermann, this publication also has a wide range—both geographically
and temporally—illustrating that warfare in a Buddhist context was not confined
to any specific period or place. One emphasis of the volume is on illustrating how
Buddhist scriptures can be interpreted to justi warfare.23 For example, Stephen
Jenkins’s exploration of the Ārya-Satyakaparivarta Sūtra ultimately concludes that
certain canonical discourses of the Buddha suggest not only that warfare can be
justified, but that in some circumstances it is actually possible to accumulate merit
through warfare. In the scriptures, he argues, dharma not only gives a cakravartin
the right to rule, it also allows him to enforce his rule through violence.
The Zimmermann collection includes an article on Tibet that is especially relevant
to the theme of this volume, since it deals with the period of the formation of the
Ganden Phodrang state during the time of the Fih Dalai Lama Lozang Gyatso
(Blo bzang rgya mtsho, 1617–82). In this piece, Derek Maher looks at the ways in
which the wars of the 1630s and 1640s—which led to the formal establishment of
the Ganden Phodrang state in 1642—were justified in different ways by the Fih
Dalai Lama himself in his various writings.24 Maher looks at both the Fih Dalai
Lama’s history of Tibet, the Song of the Queen of Spring, composed very soon aer
the events described (1643), and at the first three volumes of his autobiography,
the Good Silk Cloth, authored some twenty-five years later.25 In particular, Maher
observes that in his history, the violence of the warfare that brought him to power
was neither concealed nor obscured, and he was clearly concerned with justiing it.
20. See Michael K. Jerryson and Mark Juergensmeyer, eds., Buddhist Warfare (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
21. Ibid., 3.
22. Several filo-Buddhist blogs on the internet have criticised the theme addressed by the
book and even its title, accusing the editors and authors of an anti-Buddhist stance. In addition,
it was questioned if the photo was staged. See, for example, http://mybuddhaispink.blogspot.
com/2011/03/buddhist-warfare-introduction.html#comment-form (accessed 9 July 2017).
23. See Jerryson and Juergensmeyer, Buddhist Warfare, 5.
24. See Derek Maher, “Sacralized Warfare: The Fih Dalai Lama and the Discourse of
Religious Violence,” in Buddhist Warfare, ed. Jerryson and Juergensmeyer, 77–90.
25. See Samten Karmay, The Illusive Play: The Autobiography of the Fifth Dalai Lama
(Chicago: Serindia Publications, 2014), 2–3, where it is explained that the Fih Dalai Lama,
although encouraged to write an autobiography since 1644, began to undertake this task only
in 1667. The third volume of his autobiography, concerning the years between 1675 and 1681,
was composed during the latter years of his life, almost contemporaneously to the events, since
it could not have been started before 1675 and was completed before the Dalai Lama’s death in
the second month of 1682.
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BUDDHISM, BOTH THE MEANS AND THE END OF THE GANDEN PHODRANG ARMY
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The enemy is portrayed as being under the sway of demonic influences, while Gushri
Khan (1582–1655)—the Mongol chief who conducted these wars on behalf of the Dalai
Lama and his school of Buddhism—is praised for his bodhisattva-like selflessness
in protecting and promoting the Buddhist cause. Gushri Khan is identified as an
emanation of Vajrapāṇi (the bodhisattva believed to be the manifestation of the power
of all the Buddhas) and is described as a “second Songtsen Gampo” (Srong btsan
sgam po, ca. 605–49), the celebrated seventh-century Tibetan emperor. He is also
honoured with the title dharmarāja, or religious king. In this way, the Dalai Lama
unequivocally and bombastically celebrates the violence done in the name of Buddhism by identiing Gushri Khan as a bodhisattva and his opponents as demons.26
By contrast, in the autobiography, which was composed much later, when the
Great Fih’s position of power was considerably more secure, these same conflicts
are depicted somewhat differently. Here he suggests his own reluctance or even
opposition to these wars, and depicts them as the outcome of a series of reactions
to unwelcome circumstances: namely, the repeated obstructions, intimidations
and harassments that the Bönpo (Bon po) and the Kagyüpa (Bka’ brgyud pa), two
religious schools of Tibet, had inflicted on the Gélukpa, the school of the Dalai
Lamas, in the previous decades. In this way, the Fih Dalai Lama is validating the
use of military force in a subtler way, as an unfortunate but necessary response to
his opponents’ immoral behaviour.27
If Demiéville may be considered the father of academic enquiry into the relationship between Buddhism and violence in general, Donald LaRocca may be regarded as
the father of research into Buddhism and the material culture of warfare in Tibet in
particular. In 2006, he published a landmark study of Tibetan weapons and armour
om the seventh to the twentieth centuries, as the catalogue of an exhibition held
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.28 This volume documents the
significant presence of arms and armour in Tibet and their development over the
26. See Maher, “Sacralized Warfare,” 81.
27. Maher asserts that in his autobiography, the Fih Dalai Lama “was prosecuting the
last battle of the war by placing the recently concluded conflict within a amework that made it
meaningful and that exonerated him and justified his rule” (ibid.). He later adds that the Fih
Dalai Lama in the first three volumes and Dési Sanggyé Gyatso (Sde srid Sangs rgyas rgya mtsho,
1653–1705) in the latter three had in fact attempted to sugarcoat the Dalai Lama’s role in the
spilling of blood that established his power: “From the comfortable vantage point of [this] fully
articulated—and by then successful—mythology, they seem to have decided to distance the Dalai
Lama om responsibility for the warfare of the 1630s and 1640s, denying that he had approved
of the most consequential bloodshed. It may also be that, by that time, the elderly Dalai Lama
had come to have second thoughts about the violence that had been unleashed in his name. It is
evident, for example, that the Dalai Lama remained troubled by the human impact of the battles.
A wide variety of the dreams and visions reported in the Fih Dalai Lama’s Sealed and Secret
Biography demonstrate that he was oen disturbed by specters of violence and war.”
28. See LaRocca, Warriors of the Himalayas.
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Alice Travers & Federica Venturi
centuries, particularly during the Ganden Phodrang period, and it includes the first
lexicon in this field.29
The most comprehensive study to date on the military history of Tibet itself
is the work by Gyaltse Namgyal Wangdue (1976),30 later reprinted and expanded
under the aegis of the Veterans’ Association of the Tibetan Army (Bod dmag rnying
pa’i skyid sdug) in 2003.31 It is a mine of information on the Tibetan army of the
Ganden Phodrang, as it contains a good deal of first-hand testimony by the author
himself, who served as a soldier, and by several former officials and officers of the
Tibetan army, such as Taring (’Phreng ring) and Nornang (Nor nang). Still, the
work overall has a kind of hybrid status between a primary and a secondary source,
as sometimes entire passages are reproduced om the history written by Shakabpa,
a former member of the Ganden Phodrang government and a historian,32 or om
Tibetan-language sources, and other times the author furnishes new information
without citing the original source, thus limiting the work’s usefulness.
Further significant contributions to the study of military affairs during the
Ganden Phodrang period include an investigation by Heather Stoddard into the use
of enemy-repelling (dmag bzlog) rituals during the 1888 Anglo-Tibetan skirmishes;33
an article by Elliot Sperling addressing the constructed notion of Tibet as a land of
peace untouched by warfare or violence;34 and, finally, a few studies authored by ourselves—the editors of this volume. Alice Travers has published articles on aristocratic
laymen who served as military officers at the beginning of the twentieth century;35
29. Later, he further developed this theme. See his “Tibetan Warriors: The Challenges
of Presenting the Warlike Side of a Peaceful Culture,” in Challenges and Choices in a Changing
World: Proceedings of the ICOMAM Conference, Vienna 2007 (Vienna, Heeresgeschichtliches
Museum, 2008), 39–52.
30. Dwang slob ’go ’dzin rgyal rtse rnam rgyal dbang ’dud [sic], Bod ljongs rgyal khab chen
po’i srid lugs dang ’brel ba’i drag po’i dmag gi lo rgyus rags bsdus (Dharamsala: Tibetan Cultural
Printing Press, 1976).
31. Dwang slob mda’ zur spyi ’thus rgyal rtse rnam rgyal dbang ’dus, Bod rgyal khab kyi
chab srid dang ’brel ba’i dmag don lo rgyus, 2 vols. (Dharamsala: Bod dmag rnying pa’i skyid sdug,
2003). It was finally translated into English as Gyaltse Namgyal Wangdue, Political and Military
History of Tibet, 2 vols., trans. Yeshi Dondup (Dharamsala: LTWA, 2010–12).
32. See Tsepon Wangchuk Deden Shakabpa, Bod kyi srid don rgyal rabs, 2 vols. (Kalimpong:
Shakabpa House, 1976).
33. See Heather Stoddard, “The Great ‘Phi gling dmag zlog’ of 1888: The First Hands-On
Conontation between Tibet and the British Raj with the Participation of Leading Lineage
Holders of the ‘1900 Sngag mang Phur thog gos dkar lcang lo can,’ Lay mantrins of Reb kong,
Amdo, in the Dga’ ldan Pho brang State Military Ritual to ‘Turn Back the Philing’ Foreigners”
(unpublished paper presented at the 11th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan
Studies, 27 August–2 September 2006, Bonn).
34. See Elliot Sperling, “ ‘Orientalism’ and Aspects of Violence in the Tibetan Tradition,”
in Imagining Tibet: Perceptions, Projections, and Fantasies, ed. Thierry Dodin and Heinz Räther
(Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2001), 317–29.
35. “The Horse-Riding and Target-Shooting Contest for Lay Officials (drung ’khor rtsal
rgyugs): Reflections on the Military Identity of the Tibetan Aristocracy at the Beginning of the
20th Century,” Études mongoles et sibériennes, centrasiatiques et tibétaines 42, 2011 (https://emscat.
revues.org/1850).
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BUDDHISM, BOTH THE MEANS AND THE END OF THE GANDEN PHODRANG ARMY
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military law;36 and the development of the military institution as it appears in legal
documents om the seventeenth to the twentieth century.37 This last article is an
attempt to analyse the lacunae in our understanding of the institutional development of the Ganden Phodrang’s army and to help delineate the scope and potential
of her current research on the institutional and social history of the Tibetan army.
In her 2014 article, Federica Venturi brought to light the personal involvement
of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama (Thub bstan rgya mtsho, 1876–1933) with Tibetan
military affairs and also his own views on the usefulness of the army, by translating
four documents that unequivocally confirm the direct involvement of the highest echelons of the monastic establishment with Tibetan military affairs.38 These
documents show that the Thirteenth Dalai Lama was personally fully involved in
the temporal government of the Ganden Phodrang, and that he was acutely aware
of the external pressures and realpolitik challenges facing Tibet at the time. These
challenges necessitated, in his view, pragmatic solutions such as modernising the
army, which he believed must prevail over Buddhist ethical reservations.
The six articles in this volume constitute a first attempt to examine the general
question of the relations between Buddhism and violence in the context of the
military history of the Ganden Phodrang om multiple points of view. The issues
discussed above, i.e. the different discursive and ethical elaborations to legitimise the
use of violence, the justification of war as necessary to protect a Buddhist government, the involvement of monks in conflicts, and of soldiers in religious affairs, all
of these themes variously appear in the researches presented here, which we have
arranged chronologically in order to provide a diachronic picture of the development
of the relations between the Buddhist and military spheres.
The first two articles look at the founding period of the Ganden Phodrang,
namely the reign of the Fih Dalai Lama (1642–82), supplementing Maher’s
abovementioned seminal study on this period. George FitzHerbert shows the pivotal role played by rituals in political and military ideology, studying a set of rites
designed to promote a combat-iendly outcome, and showing the crucial place
that this “war magic” held in the tradition of Tibetan Buddhism and in the literary
production of the Fih Dalai Lama in particular. Focusing on the same period,
Federica Venturi analyses writings of the Fih Dalai Lama, this time in order to
evaluate the involvement of this Buddhist hierarch in the various military activities
of his reign. She concludes that military interventions sanctioned by the Ganden
36. “The Lcags stag dmag khrims (1950): A New Development in Tibetan Legal and Military
History?” in Social Regulation: Case Studies from Tibetan History, ed. Jeannine Bischoff and Saul
Mullard (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 99–125.
37. “The Tibetan Army of the Ganden Phodrang in Various Legal Documents (17th–20th Centuries),” in Secular Law and Order in the Tibetan Highland: Contributions to a Workshop Organized
by the Tibet Institute in Andiast (Switzerland) on the Occasion of the 65th birthday of Christoph Cüppers
from the 8th of June to the 12th of June 2014, ed. Dieter Schuh, Monumenta Tibetica Historica,
Abteilung 3, Band 13 (Andiast: IITBS), 249–66.
38. “The Thirteenth Dalai Lama on Warfare, Weapons and the Right to Self-Defense,” in
Trails of the Tibetan Tradition: Papers for Elliot Sperling, ed. Roberto Vitali (Dharamsala: Amnye
Machen Institute, 2014), 483–509.
© École ançaise d’Extrême-Orient, Paris, 2011
Do not circulate without permission of the editor / Ne pas diffuser sans autorisation de l’éditeur
22
Alice Travers & Federica Venturi
Phodrang occurred rather equently in this period, and that the Fih Dalai Lama
was aware of the situations that led to conflict and well acquainted with the details
of military preparations.
The third article is devoted to the eighteenth century and to the role Buddhist
hierarchs could play in Tibetan historiography as witnesses of military conflicts.
Here, Marlene Erschbamer illustrates the effect of the war against the Gurkha
(1788–91) on a master of the Barawa (’Ba’ ra ba; a Kagyü sub-school) tradition, who
happened to be on the battlefield shortly aer an armed conflict in the Kyirong
(Skyid grong) area, and recorded his impressions in his autobiography. As a large
part of the historiographical sources available in Tibet include religious biographies
(rnam thar), this analysis opens the doors to further research on similar occurrences
in other hagiographies.
The three final articles are devoted to the last period of the Ganden Phodrang,
the first half of the twentieth century. Alice Travers examines the concrete involvement of a particular type of monk as actor, and not just spectator, in the military
activities carried out by the Ganden Phodrang government; she analyses the role
of monk officials (rtse drung), commonly employed in the military administration
as secretaries and payroll masters, as well as General-in-Chief of the Tibetan army,
but also as active officers at the head of troops on the battlefield, and she reflects
on the ideological implications of this organisation. Ryōsuke Kobayashi’s article
studies the involvement of several monasteries located in Kham (Khams) in military
conflicts implicating the Tibetan and Chinese governments in the first quarter of the
twentieth century, and presents the interesting case of the militarisation of Dargyé
(Dar rgyas) Monastery. His article provides a clear illustration of the fact that the
plurilingualism (Chinese and Tibetan) of bilateral treaties allowed, through the
actual difference of the texts themselves, a divergence in the interpretation of these
treaties by the various parties. Finally, Stacey Van Vleet explores a new development
of that period, namely the birth of a Tibetan form of “military medicine.” She
explains that the Institute of Medicine and Astrology (Mentsikhang; Sman rtsis
khang), created by the Thirteenth Dalai Lama in 1916, trained astrologer-doctors
who could be sent to the ont to provide their services to Tibetan military leaders.
In addition, under the regency of Réting Thupten Jampel Yéshé Gyeltsen (Rwa
sgreng Thub bstan ’jam dpal ye shes rgyal mtshan, r. 1934–41), a new stage was
crossed when thirty to forty soldiers of the Tibetan permanent army were admitted
to Mentsikhang to study the traditional course of medicine and astrology, likely
with the intention to train them as field surgeons.
This volume thus demonstrates that the religious and military projects constantly
supported each other during the Ganden Phodrang period. Buddhism supplied
the army with both the means—human means through monastic manpower and
the performance of rituals, and discursive and philosophical means when it came
to justi the resort to violence—and the end, i.e. the protection of the Buddhist
government.
© École ançaise d’Extrême-Orient, Paris, 2011
Do not circulate without permission of the editor / Ne pas diffuser sans autorisation de l’éditeur
Alice Travers