Khri Srong lde brtsan and Padmasambhava's Travels through His Land

Abstract

This talk will compare three perspectives on the travels of Padmasambhava, beginning in Uḍḍiyāna but focusing on his invitation to Tibet by Emperor Khri Srong lde brtsan: the early Tibetan Buddhist perspective; an early first-millennium view from the autochthonous religion, Bon; and that of a European missionary in the eighteenth century. In the former, the emperor rightfully enters into a dependent relationship with Padmasambhava due to the evident spiritual and magical power that the master has acquired through his travels. In contrast, the early histories of the Bon religion and the missionary account of Ippolito Desideri (1684–1733) cast this dependent relationship on Padmasambhava as a negative state that entailed destructive consequences in Tibetan history. However, they did not question the dependency of Khri Srong lde brtsan on Padmasambhava. Beyond their differences, this talk will show how these three perspectives on the master's travels around northern South Asia and to Tibet and his relations with political power there are comparable in following certain legitimisation logics of different dependencies, as well as world-building techniques consistent with supporting the religious lineages that have created these narratives.

About the Speaker

Lewis Doney is Professor of Tibetan Studies at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. He received his PhD (Study of Religions) from SOAS, University of London, in 2011. He was then engaged in postdoctoral research on early Tibetan life writing, empire and religion, Tibetan relations with South Asia and their impact on social and labour dependencies within Sino-Tibetan communities around Dunhuang. Doney also studies later southern Tibetan Buddhist historiography and ritual and their relations to cultural identities and ecologies in the Himalayas. His publications include a solo-authored monograph titled The Zangs gling ma: The First Padmasambhava Biography (International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, 2014), an edited volume, Bringing Buddhism to Tibet: History and Narrative in the dBa’ bzhed Manuscript (De Gruyter, 2021) and a monograph co-authored with Brandon Dotson: Producing Buddhist Sutras in Ninth-Century Tibet: The Sutra of Limitless Life and its Dunhuang Copies Kept at the British Library (De Gruyter, 2025).