The Importance of
Tibet to Buddhism
The importance of Tibet to Buddhism as a whole has yet to be realised by the world
at large. The 20th century, Western stereotype of Buddhism developed mainly through
early contacts with Theravada and Zen Buddhism.
Few people realised that these two
schools were far from representative of the total wealth of diversity which was
Buddhism during its first 18 centuries in India. India was its birthplace, cradle
and home until Muslim invasions more or less eradicated it from that land in the
12th century.
Theravada Buddhism, which spread from Sri Lanka throughout South-East
Asia, grew from just one of the eighteen early Buddhist schools of India. Chinese
(and later Japanese) Buddhism developed from the seeds sown by their founders, who
brought home from their sojourn in India only the particular teachings they had
encountered or preferred.
Tibet however, couched like a sleeping snow-lion along the northern flank of the
Himalaya, was India's closest neighbour. Despite the hardship of crossing the mountain
passes, Tibet was directly influenced, over four important centuries, by masters
from all the great centres of Buddhism in India. Western Tibet was close to Kashmir
and the Punjab, Eastern Tibet was in contact with China, and Central Tibet was closest
to Nepal, the Gangetic plain (with its huge monasteries of Nalanda and Vikramasila),
and Bengal (ancient Vanga). To the north, Tibet controlled an important part of
the Silk Route, along which flowed ideas as well as rare goods. In the 400 years
from the 8th through to 12th centuries, the full spectrum of Indian Buddhism went
to Tibet.
For 1100 years, that wealth of Indian Buddhism has been carefully and reverently
preserved in Tibet. In the latter half of the twentieth century, it burst onto the
world stage and is now benefitting millions of people everywhere.
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Tibet's proximity to India led to a transplantation of all the strands of Buddhism's
tapestry:
- the universal teachings of hinayana,
- the bodhisattva teachings of mahayana and
- the vast panoply of tantric transmissions.
This occurred through the vision and diligence of Indian and Tibetan masters alike,
each putting up with extremely difficult climatic changes for their bodies in order
to establish dharma properly and fully on the roof of the world.
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The flight of HH the Dalai Lama, and other leading Tibetans, in 1959, put an unknown Tibet
on the world stage. Tibet's isolation and its people's profound respect for tradition
has maintained alive and unchanged, in Tibet, the Indian Buddhism of the eighth
through to twelfth centuries. It is almost as if Buddhism in its heyday had been
deep-frozen and preserved for the world at large to savour, a millennium later:
defrozen to coincide with the advent of the global village and mass communication.
Tibet had continued the Indian tradition of large monastic universities, some of
them having several thousand monks. Some 10,000 monasteries existed in the Tibetan
plateau and almost one in four males was a monk. Buddhist prayer and meditation
formed a central part of daily life and the whole social order was focussed on the
monasteries.
With time, Tibet became famous throughout central and northern Asia
as a great repository of spiritual and medical knowledge, at times providing spiritual
mentors for Chinese and Mongol emperors. Tibet also exercised considerable influence
on neighbouring Himalayan countries, such a Ladakh, Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim, which
lands used Tibetan script and scripture for their Buddhist practice. The fact that
Tibet could only be converted from its deeply-rooted animist Bön religion at such
a late date, more than a millennium after the Buddha, is indicative of the power
of Buddhism at the time.
Above all, Tibet is the only country in which the wealth
of mantrayana and vajrayana Buddhism has been fully preserved. Especially formulated
to overcome powerful emotions and deep-rooted preconceptions, the techniques of
vajrayana bought the Path of Peace to Tibet (which in ancient India was seen as
a sort of sinister Transylvania). Perhaps they constitute the extraordinary gift
that Tibet can offer the modern world, plunged as it is into the sensorial and the
phrenetic drive of commerce.
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