The Transmission of Buddhism to Tibet and the Bon Tradition

Traditional Tibetan historiography credits the emperor Songtsen Gampo (r. c. 618–649), the first great ruler of the unified Tibetan Yarlung empire, with introducing Buddhism to Tibet, partly through his marriages to the Nepalese princess Bhrikuti and the Chinese Tang princess Wencheng, both later venerated as embodiments of the female buddha Tara. Songtsen Gampo is also credited with commissioning his minister Thonmi Sambhota to travel to India and devise a Tibetan script modeled on a northern Indian Brahmi-derived alphabet, the writing system that would make possible, over the following century, the vast project of translating Buddhist scripture from Sanskrit into Tibetan. Modern historians, drawing on the Old Tibetan Annals and other Dunhuang manuscripts, note that the empire's early religious life remained dominated by indigenous ritual specialists and ancestor cults, and that later hagiographic accounts, composed centuries afterward, likely retrofit Songtsen Gampo as a fully formed Buddhist dharma-king (chos rgyal) rather than accurately depicting a still largely pre-Buddhist seventh-century court. Matthew Kapstein, in The Tibetan Assimilation of Buddhism (2000), stresses that Buddhism's real institutional foothold in Tibet dates not from Songtsen Gampo's reign but from the reign of Trisong Detsen a century later. This gap between legendary founding narrative and documentable institutional history runs through much of early Tibetan Buddhist historiography, complicating any simple chronology of the religion's arrival.