The Great Perfection of Kham: Dzokchen Monastery and the Assembling of Buddhist Tradition in Seventeenth-Century Tibet

Abstract

This dissertation explores the dynamics animating the production of religious tradition in Tibet during the seventeenth century. It describes the founding of Dzokchen Monastery, the most influential Nyingma monastery in the eastern Tibetan region of Kham, and the social, religious, and political agendas that surrounded it. Since the earliest European encounters, Buddhism in Tibet has been analyzed by four distinct sects: Nyingma, Geluk, Kagyu, and Sakya. But precisely what is meant by a Buddhist sect, or whether “sect” is an appropriate category, has gone largely unexamined. I investigate a diverse archive of religious histories, biographies, epistles, exegetical commentaries, and poetry to document how religious tradition was invented in early modern Tibet, and describe the Tibetan categories used to name that tradition. Considering the geographic and political motives that shaped the making of Dzokchen, I demonstrate that these multiple and contending agendas were integral components of the novel institutionalization of the Nyingma tradition.

In the first two chapters, I examine how a cartography of lineage was produced in the biographies of Pema Rikzin. Situating his life and career within the broader context of the rapidly changing political and religious fields of mid-seventeenth-century Tibet, I describe the strategies his biographers used to legitimate Pema Rikzin, the son of a Nepali immigrant from a humble background. Pema Rikzin’s teachers, who included the Fifth Dalai Lama and Karma Chakmé, a widely renowned Kagyu figure, were at odds. From the Dalai Lama’s perspective at the center of the burgeoning Buddhist empire he was building, Pema Rikzin was from a provincial backwater, one in need of taming. The Dalai Lama saw his influence over Pema Rikzin as an extension of his work in central Tibet. The reverse is true for Pema Rikzin’s other mentors. Karma Chakmé and Pema Rikzin’s patrons as the court of the eastern Tibetan kingdom of Degé saw their land as a verdant center of Buddhist activity. Such disputes would shape Pema Rikzin’s lineage at Dzokchen Monastery.

The third and fourth chapters analyze epistles and poetic songs in an effort to uncover the analytical categories that Pema Rikzin himself used to describe his institution-building. He wrote letters to esteemed senior lamas, asking to receive their blessings and instruction. Situating these texts in the broader history of Buddhist epistolary culture, I demonstrate how such exchanges were couched in a rhetoric of institution. This rhetoric was emblematic of the rapid establishment of Nyingma monasteries during this period. I also highlight the ways in which Buddhist tradition is inextricably linked to the practice of translation. Reviewing two pieces written by Pema Rikzin—one a song that ponders the nature of a monastery, the other his own autobiography, sung as a poem—I describe how his reflections on the heterogeneity of religious belonging can inform our own understanding of what it means to create a religious tradition.

This dissertation reveals the many elements of Tibetan social and religious life—the Fifth Dalai Lama’s desires to expand his rule through Pema Rikzin as his protégé, the rapid growth of the Degé kingdom where Dzokchen was established, debates about eclectic ritual and contemplative practices, and networks of charismatic lamas from across the Tibetan world—that coalesce in the assembling of Buddhist tradition.