Imperial and Religious Dependency in a Twelfth-Century Tibetan (Auto)Biography

This article examines the Tibetan biography of a legendary eighth-century Indic tantric master, Padmasambhava (‘the lotus-born’). He is said to have converted the Tibetan emperor Tri Songdétsen ( khri srong lde brtsan , 742–c. 800 CE) and thus helped spread Buddhism there; and reverence for him now spans all traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. The primary focus will be a twelfth-century Copper Island biography compiled by a Tibetan adept who claimed to have pre-incarnated as the Tibetan emperor himself. Further, he claimed that the life-story of Padmasambahava was in some sense the autobiography of the master, who prophesied that the emperor would ‘discover’ such textual ‘treasure’ as this biography in his twelfth-century reincarnation. The (auto)biography narrates Padmasambhava’s overthrow of the old Tibetan order and creates new Buddhist norms of kingship, revelation and devotion. This text thus highlights the importance of non-European types of life writing that play with being both autobiography and biography, remembered and revealed writing and idealized Buddhist scripture. This example forms part of the valorisation and re-envisioning of empire according to very different values, and uncovers how largely asymmetric dependency on the empire is turned into strong dependency on Buddhist masters and deities, real or imagined, in post-imperial Tibet.