Trisong Detsen

Buddhism had reached the Tibetan court before Trisong Detsen, but as a foreign practice patronized by particular queens and ministers rather than as the religion of the realm, and it had powerful opponents among the nobility and among the priests of the older Tibetan cult. Trisong Detsen made it official. He invited Santaraksita, an abbot and philosopher from the Indian monastic university tradition, whose first stay ran into resistance and a run of disasters that were blamed on offended local spirits. On Santaraksita's advice the emperor then invited Padmasambhava, a tantric master whose reputation was for subduing exactly such powers, and Tibetan tradition holds that he bound the local deities by oath to protect the new religion rather than destroying them.

Samye was built with that settlement behind it, on a plan representing the Buddhist cosmos with Mount Meru at the centre and the continents around it, and consecrated in about 779. It was the first monastery in Tibet, and its purpose was to make Buddhism reproducible without further imports: seven Tibetan men were ordained there as monks, known in the histories as the seven men to be tested, and once ordination existed inside Tibet the tradition could continue on its own.

The other institution founded in the same reign was the translation office. Trisong Detsen funded teams of Indian scholars working with Tibetan translators, and the standardization of Buddhist vocabulary in Tibetan begins here, producing eventually one of the most complete surviving records of Indian Buddhist literature, much of it preserved in Tibetan after the Sanskrit originals were lost.

Eighth century Tibet sat between two living Buddhist worlds. From India came the monastic and scholastic tradition of the great universities, with its long graded path of ethics, study, meditation and analytical insight. From Tang China came Chan, whose teachers held that discursive effort is itself an obstacle and that awakening is immediate when conceptual activity stops. Both had followings at the Tibetan court, and the difference was not academic, since it decided what monks should actually do with their days.

Tibetan histories record that Trisong Detsen summoned both sides to Samye, at a date usually given as somewhere between 792 and 794. The Indian position was argued by Kamalasila, a pupil of Santaraksita, and the Chinese by a Chan master the Tibetan sources call Hwashang Mahayana, generally identified with the monk Moheyan. The Tibetan account has Kamalasila win, the emperor rule for the gradual path, and the Chinese party withdraw from Tibet.

The account is contested. Chinese documents recovered from the sealed cave at Dunhuang give the opposite result, with Moheyan vindicated, and modern historians treat the event less as a single formal disputation than as a protracted argument at court that the tradition later compressed into one scene. What is not contested is the outcome for Tibetan Buddhism. The Indian scholastic model became the norm, Kamalasila wrote his Stages of Meditation in its defence, and the figure of the Hwashang survived in Tibetan literature for a thousand years as the standing example of a wrong view, invoked against any teacher accused of telling students that nothing needs to be done.