Shared Threads Across East Asian Religion

East Asian Buddhism is closely connected to, yet historically distinct from, the Vajrayana Buddhism practiced in Mongolia and Tibet, which entered a significant political relationship with China during the Yuan dynasty, when Kublai Khan formed an alliance with the Tibetan Sakya lama Phagpa in the thirteenth century, granting Tibetan Buddhist clergy religious authority in exchange for political legitimation. The Gelug school, founded by the reformer Tsongkhapa in the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries, later developed the institution of the Dalai Lama, whose spiritual authority extended into Mongolia and, at various points, into Qing-dynasty China’s multiethnic religious policy. While Tibetan and Mongolian Buddhism share with Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese Buddhism a common Mahayana root and many textual and philosophical lineages, its distinct tantric ritual practices, monastic institutions, and its historical development largely independent of Chinese Chan and Pure Land traditions mark it as a related but separate strand within the wider Buddhist world of East and Inner Asia.