Tibetan Buddhism

Cham is performed by monks of the Tibetan Buddhist schools and of the Bon tradition alongside them.

The office is the Gelug school's and became a political authority over Tibet under the Fifth Dalai Lama in the seventeenth century. The Nyingma, Kagyu and Sakya schools have their own heads, and the Dalai Lama has never been head of Tibetan Buddhism as a whole.

The Dalai Lama is the best known of the reincarnate offices the tradition recognises, and heads no school in his own right.

Certain Tibetan Buddhist tantric deity cycles use a damaru, historically sometimes made from paired human skull caps, alongside a hand bell.

The dungchen is sounded from monastery rooftops to open major ceremonies in Tibetan Buddhist practice.

The Endless Knot is one of the eight symbols of the Ashtamangala in Tibetan Buddhism.

The khadag is used across Tibetan Buddhism as the khata, usually white.

Padmasambhava is the figure the earlier transmission is told through.

The Tibetan ethnic culture.

Tingsha mark transitions in Tibetan Buddhist ritual and personal meditation practice.

Tsongkhapa is the reformer the Gelug school descends from.

Patronised the fifth Karmapa, a Tibetan-lineage figure.

Tibetan Buddhism is the Tibetan form of the tantric vehicle. Vajrayana is wider: Japanese Shingon is Vajrayana with no Tibetan lineage.

The set is the standard decorative and ritual vocabulary of a Tibetan temple, appearing on thangka borders, on furniture and on the printed page.

The Tibetan tradition holds the site as the place of awakening and maintains monasteries there, and its great prayer gathering is held at the site each winter.

Rows of lamps burning clarified butter are offered before an image, and the offering is one of the commonest lay acts in the tradition.

Held at the year's great festivals in the courtyards of the great monasteries, and the occasion on which a lay population sees the protectors.

The long telescopic horn is sounded in pairs from a monastery roof and in the assembly, and the sound of it is the tradition's signature.

The knot is worked into metalwork, textile and jewellery in Tibetan use far beyond the ritual context, and it keeps its reading as endless dependence wherever it goes.

The Epic of King Gesar, a sacred oral epic, is part of this tradition's wider literary and ritual culture.

The bell held in the left hand stands for wisdom, and the two are held together to say that the pair cannot be separated.

The temple at the centre of Lhasa holds the image brought to Tibet in the seventh century and is the most venerated in the tradition, with pilgrims prostrating the circuit around it.

Juniper is burned as the smoke offering made on a hilltop or at a shrine, addressed to the local powers of a place as much as to the buddhas.

The lama is qualified to teach and, decisively, to confer tantric empowerment, which no ordinary monk may do.

The Lamrim Chenmo, Tsongkhapa's graded-path treatise, is foundational literature within this tradition.

Beads of one hundred and eight for counting recitation, with the counters attached for keeping longer totals.

Tibetan tradition identifies the mountain with the mandala palace of Chakrasamvara, and the circuit is made clockwise by Buddhist pilgrims.

Carved on roadside stones, turned in prayer wheels and printed on flags, and the most recited formula in the Tibetan world.

The palace was the seat of the Tibetan government as well as a monastic residence, and is the best known building of the tradition.

Recited by lay households as well as in the assembly, and among the first Tibetan texts a child learns.

The drum of rolled mantras turned by hand or by water, which counts the recitation without the reciting.

Rinpoche, precious one, is the form of address to a teacher of high standing, and is used of tulkus and of eminent teachers alike.

The painted scroll is mounted in brocade so that it can be rolled and carried, which is why a mobile tradition painted rather than carved.

Tibetan accounts present the debate at Samye as the moment the Tibetan empire chose the gradual Indian path of the bodhisattva over the sudden approach taught by the Chinese master, and the choice shaped everything that followed.

Associated above all with the Gyuto and Gyume tantric colleges, whose recordings carried the sound far outside Buddhism.

Small paired cymbals struck to mark the divisions of a rite and to gather attention at its opening.

The tulku is recognised as the rebirth of a previous teacher, and the institution gave Tibet a way of transmitting authority and property that neither inheritance nor election could provide.

The sceptre held in the right hand stands for method and for the indestructible, and it names the vehicle itself.

Cold country practice changed the garment. The Tibetan monastic wears a sleeved upper garment and a thick shawl over the panelled robe, in maroon rather than the ochre of the southern traditions.

Tibetan Buddhism carries a tantric stream in which the afflictions are transformed rather than only renounced, alongside the sutra path on which they are abandoned.

Tibetan astrology joins an Indian stream descended from the Kalachakra literature to a Chinese elemental stream, so its reckoning is neither the Indian system nor the Chinese one but a compound of both.

The perfections are held across the Tibetan schools as the common path, taught in the lamrim before the tantric path is entered.

The order makes state approval a condition of recognising a reincarnate teacher, which the Tibetan tradition holds to be a religious determination no government can make.

Ache Lhamo's repertoire draws on Buddhist folk narrative and Tibetan history rather than on tantric ritual practice.

Anatta, that there is no permanent unchanging self, is affirmed across Buddhist schools, including this tradition.

The bardo, the transitional state most famously between death and rebirth, is a distinctive feature of this tradition's teaching on the process of rebirth.

A Tibetan Buddhist pilgrimage stupa.

Buddhahood attainable within a single lifetime through tantric method is affirmed across this tradition's schools.

Buddha-nature as the basis tantric method works with is affirmed across this tradition's schools.

Chod, a Tibetan practice cutting attachment to self.

Dependent origination, that phenomena arise in dependence on conditions, is the central explanatory principle shared across Buddhist schools, including this tradition.

Milam, the dream-yoga practice of the Six Yogas of Naropa.

Dukkha, the unsatisfactoriness of conditioned existence and the first Noble Truth, is affirmed across Buddhist schools, including this tradition.

The Epic of King Gesar, a sacred oral epic, is part of this tradition's wider literary and ritual culture.

The forty-nine days are read as the bardo in Tibetan practice.

Geshe is a Tibetan monastic academic degree.

Tibet's most sacred temple, in Lhasa.

Karma, action and its consequence, is affirmed as the mechanism of rebirth across Buddhist schools, including this tradition.

Khenpo is a Tibetan/Himalayan teaching title.

Lama, a title of recognized teaching authority, is a central office of Tibetan Buddhism specifically, distinct from the wider pan-Vajrayana tradition, following the Tibetan Buddhism/Vajrayana split used throughout this collection.

The Lamrim Chenmo, Tsongkhapa's graded-path treatise, is foundational literature within this tradition.

Losar, the Tibetan New Year.

In Tibetan Buddhism it is the ground of milam, dream yoga, one of the six yogas of Naropa.

Tibetan preliminary practices before tantric training.

Nirvana, the cessation of craving and the end of rebirth, is the shared goal named across Buddhist schools, including this tradition.

Phowa, the Tibetan practice of consciousness transference at death.

The Dalai Lamas' seat in Lhasa.

The tulku succession is a Tibetan institution.

Clergy or specialist role within Tibetan Buddhism.

A Tibetan Buddhist monastery rebuilt as the exile seat of the Karma Kagyu school's head after 1959.

Samsara, the beginningless round of rebirth from which the Buddhist path seeks release, is affirmed across Buddhist schools, including this tradition.

The elaborate coloured-sand mandala technique, distinctively Tibetan.

Its own record names it specifically Tibetan Buddhism.

The Six Yogas of Naropa, a Tibetan yogic system.

Sky burial is a distinctively Tibetan funerary practice.

The traditional seat of the Panchen Lama lineage since its fourth holder, and one of the great Gelug monastic seats.

The canon was translated into Classical Tibetan, and the translation vocabulary was fixed by imperial decree.

Non-injury is held across the Tibetan schools on the Mahayana ground of compassion.

The three poisons are held across the Tibetan schools and are drawn at the hub of the wheel of becoming as the animals that drive it.

Impermanence is held across the Tibetan schools and stands among the four thoughts that turn the mind, the preliminaries every path begins from.

The intermediate state is real, lasts up to forty-nine days, and can be navigated by one prepared for it.

The bodhisattva motivation is held across the Tibetan schools and is the stated ground of the tantric path.

Giving is held across the Tibetan schools as the first of the perfections.

Dharma is held across the Tibetan schools in the Mahayana sense, with the tantras counted among the Buddha's word.

Dzogchen is taught chiefly in the Nyingma school and in Bon, rather than being a teaching of Tibetan Buddhism as such.

The graduated stages of the path are the organising form of Tibetan teaching. The genre grew from the Kadam tradition and was given its most influential form by Tsongkhapa, and it is used well beyond the Gelug school most identified with it.

Mahamudra is taught in the Kagyu schools, and in a transmission of its own by the Gelug, rather than being a teaching of Tibetan Buddhism as such.

This is the question the Tibetan schools sort themselves by, and Tibetan Buddhism as a whole holds no answer to it: the Gelug position is rangtong, the Jonang position shentong, and currents within Kagyu and Nyingma stand on the shentong side. It is recorded here as the tradition's own dividing question rather than as a doctrine the tradition holds.

Rigpa is a term of the Dzogchen literature, so it belongs to Tibetan Buddhism through the Nyingma school rather than across the tradition.

Collected absorption is held across the Tibetan schools, taught as calm abiding paired with insight.

The question was argued in Tibet at the Samye debate and the gradual side is the position the tradition recorded as having prevailed. Dzogchen and Mahamudra then reintroduce a direct approach inside a graded frame, so the settlement is less clean than the debate's recorded outcome suggests.

Rangtong, emptiness of self-nature: phenomena are empty of any inherent existence of their own, and nothing further is asserted.

The treasure tradition is chiefly a Nyingma and Bon institution, taken up in a minor way by other schools, rather than a practice of Tibetan Buddhism as such.

The five aggregates are held across the Tibetan schools as the analysis of a person.

The four immeasurables are held across the Tibetan schools and are recited at the opening of practice.

The six realms are held across the Tibetan schools, and the wheel of becoming that draws them is one of the tradition's most reproduced images.

The six sense bases are held across the Tibetan schools.

The Prasangika reading, which declines to advance a positive thesis of its own and works by drawing out the consequences of the opponent's.

The three realms of desire, form and the formless are held across the Tibetan schools.

It carries the Mahayana philosophy and the bodhisattva vow alongside its tantric methods, and its scholastic curriculum is largely Indian Mahayana material.

Lhasa is the historic capital of Tibet.