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Two Boys Went to the Mongol Court With Sakya Pandita, and One Became an Emperor's Teacher

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Two Boys Went to the Mongol Court With Sakya Pandita, and One Became an Emperor's Teacher

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

When Sakya Pandita departed Sakya Monastery in 1244 for the Mongol prince Godan's court, he did not travel alone. He brought two young nephews, the ten year old Phagpa and the six year old Chagna-dorje, on the same three year journey that ended at Godan's camp near Lanzhou in 1247, a documented detail of the same negotiation his first article recounts but never names. Scholars read the choice as deliberate rather than incidental: sending the family's own heirs alongside its senior lama was a way of binding the Sakya house itself, not only its teaching authority, to whatever arrangement emerged from the meeting.

Phagpa, the elder nephew, remained at the Mongol court after his uncle's death in 1251 and went on to a career the first article's account of the priest patron relationship never reaches: he became the close religious advisor of Godan's eventual successor, Kublai Khan, was named the Yuan dynasty's first Imperial Preceptor, and in 1269 completed a new script, commissioned by Kublai to write the many languages of the Mongol empire in one alphabet, that still carries his name, the Phags-pa script, a documented later career distinct from anything the priest patron negotiation itself covers.

That the arrangement Sakya Pandita is credited with founding at Godan's court did not end with his own death but continued directly through the nephew he had brought there as a child, who rose from hostage age companion to the most senior religious office in the Mongol empire, marks Phagpa and Chagna-dorje's presence at Lanzhou as a documented case where the priest patron relationship's durability rested on people the first article's account of the negotiation leaves offstage entirely.

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Sources
Indo-Tibetan Buddhism: Indian Buddhists and Their Tibetan Successors
David L. Snellgrove, Serindia Publications, 1987
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