Travel and transcendence: Lamaist expansion in the Himalayan kingdoms.

Buddhist institutions often form vast networks overlaying the ethnic and political divisions of South and Central Asia. This dissertation considers how such a transnational network expands historically--how it feeds on centers of more intensive power such as chiefdoms and states even as it transcends their boundaries and lives on after they are gone. The shock troops of this process, it is argued, are certain strategically situated travelers--especially religious teachers and missionaries--who develop wide personal networks yet remain detached from local political and kinship institutions. When such networks are infused with the patronage of a king or other central authority, new religious institutions linking local communities are often founded. This may be an important mechanism promoting social and economic integration of large geographic areas in pre-modern settings. Much of the history of modern Bhutan, Sikkim, and Nepal may be understood as a series of structured conjunctures between Hindu kings and Buddhist lamas. Between 1600 and 1900, two distinct expansionist systems--one Hindu, the other Buddhist--met on the southern flank of the Himalayas. Hindu expansion in the Himalayas is argued to depend on military conquest, with the Brahman often acting as an intelligence agent. Buddhist expansion, on the other hands, depends more on the conversion of foreign rulers. The present work explores the founding of religious kingdoms in light of the foregoing model, with special reference to the Tibetan Buddhist enclaves of the Kathmandu Valley. Beginning in the early seventeenth century, Hindu kings attempted to expand into Tibet, without success. About the same time, however, Buddhist lamas were able to found Lamaist kingdoms in Bhutan and Sikkim by converting the local tribal leaders and warlords. Later, Hindu kings would bestow patronage upon Buddhist lamas in an effort to gain influence over frontier regions that could not be conquered militarily. Ethnographic research in the Kathmandu Valley suggests that the key religious and political institutions of Tibetan Buddhist ethnic communities were created through patronage from Hindu kings.Ph.D.Asian historyCultural anthropologyPhilosophy, Religion and TheologyReligionSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129087/2/9319623.pd