The Dalai and Panchen Lamas

From the seventeenth century the Gelug order became the dominant religious and political force in Tibet, and it is the school of the Dalai Lamas and the Panchen Lamas, its two most famous reincarnation lineages. The turning point came when the Fifth Dalai Lama, the "Great Fifth," with Mongol military backing consolidated religious and temporal authority over central Tibet in the mid-1600s, establishing the Ganden Phodrang government that the Dalai Lamas headed until 1959.

The institution of the tulku, the recognised reincarnate lama, is central to how the order transmits its highest authority, and it has become a point of sharp modern contention: the Chinese state now asserts a right to approve reincarnations, including the next Dalai Lama, which the exiled Tibetan leadership rejects. The Gelug is thus at once a school of monastic scholasticism and the tradition whose leadership carried, for three centuries, the government of Tibet.