The Canon, the Curriculum, and the Recognition of Tulkus

The Tibetan canon comes in two parts and the distinction between them matters. The Kangyur is the translated word, the discourses and tantras attributed to the Buddha. The Tengyur is the translated treatises, the Indian commentarial literature. Together they preserve a very large body of Indian Buddhist material whose Sanskrit originals are lost, which is why Tibetan translations are a working tool of Indology and not only of Buddhist studies.

Monastic education is built on debate. A student in the scholastic curriculum works through logic and epistemology, the perfection of wisdom literature, Madhyamaka, monastic discipline and the treasury of higher doctrine, arguing each stage out loud in the courtyard against another student, and the geshe degree at the end of it can take twenty years. That curriculum runs alongside a quite different track of tantric practice and long retreat, and the same person may do both.

The recognition of tulkus, reincarnate teachers, is the institutional feature most often noticed from outside. It began with the Karmapa line in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and was adopted widely afterwards, because it solved a real problem: how a celibate monastic institution passes on property and authority without a family to inherit them. It is also why the succession is now a matter of state. The Chinese government issued regulations in 2007 requiring official approval for any recognition of a reincarnate lama, and the resulting disputes are political as much as religious.