by Robert Thurman PhD: Buddhism was only accepted in Tibet because they perceived it as being brought there by some sort of superior being,
whom they learned to call a “Buddha.” It came into Tibet full-blown, with its monastic education, universalistic social ethic, and apocalyptic vision of reality. It had to confront and overcome an already developed priestcraft capable of addressing every aspect of life and death, transitions of birth, marriage, economic ethics, magic, protection against demons and so forth.
In the mid seventh century, an emperor named Songzen Gambo ( a near contemporary of the Japanese culture-transformer, Prince Shotoku Taishi) began the attempt to transform the civilization from feudal militarism to peaceful monasticism. In a systematic process of culture-building, he sent a team of scholars to India to learn Sanskrit, create a written language for Tibetan, and begin to translate the vast Buddhist literature. He married nine queens from neighboring countries, requesting each to bring Buddhist artifacts and texts with her to Tibet. He built a system of imperial temples laid out in a geomantic grid, centering on the Jokhang and Ramoche cathedrals in his new capital at Lhasa, creating a geometry of sacredness to contain the nation.
For the next two and a half centuries, his successors continued his work of cultural transformation, sponsoring translations, holding research conferences, building institutions, and educating their subjects. This process reached a high point during the 790s, in the reign of Emperor Trisong Detsen, who, with the help of the Indian adept Padma Sambhava and the Indian Buddhist abbot Shantarakshita, built the first monastery at Samye. Here the Indian Buddhist university structure and curriculum were transplanted, and a sixty-year process of collecting all the useful knowledge then available in Asia was begun.
Mathematics, poetry, medicine, the art of government, art and architecture—all these branches of learning were cultivated, not only Buddhist philosophy and psychology. Scholars were invited from Persia, India, Uighuria, Mongolia, the silk route states, and T’ang China, and Tibetans became skilled at comparison and combination, in their quest for the best understanding of man and nature. For example, during the 830s, hundreds of scholars from all over the known world spent a decade comparing the medical systems of India, China, Persia, Mongolia, and Uighuria, creating a Tibetan medical system that integrated the best available psychology, anatomy, neurology, surgery, botany, chemistry, and nutrition with Buddhist spiritual technology.
Excerpt from Robert AF Thurman’s Tibetan Book of the Dead.
