The Fifth Dalai Lama

Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso was born in 1617 in the Yarlung valley to a family claiming descent from Tibet's old imperial line, and he came of age during a period when Tibet was fractured among competing regional rulers and rival Buddhist schools, most sharply the Gelug school his own Dalai Lama lineage belonged to against the Karma Kagyu school backed by the ruling king of Tsang.

The conflict was resolved not by the Dalai Lama's own forces, which were negligible, but by Gushri Khan, chief of the Qoshot Mongols, who invaded Tibet on the Gelug school's behalf, defeated the King of Tsang and the school's other rivals by 1642, and then formally handed political authority over the whole of Tibet to the twenty-five year old Dalai Lama rather than ruling directly himself, installing him as head of state at Shigatse's Samdrubtse Palace. This arrangement, spiritual authority now backed and enforced by Mongol military power, created the Ganden Phodrang, Tibet's first unified centralized government since the collapse of the old imperial dynasty many centuries earlier, and set the pattern, spiritual head of state legitimated and protected by an outside patron power, that would recur across Tibetan history down to the twentieth century, including in different form under Chinese Qing dynasty oversight.

In 1645 the newly installed Dalai Lama commissioned a palace on Lhasa's Red Hill, the site of a ruined seventh century fortress associated with the ancient Tibetan emperor Songtsen Gampo, and construction of what became the Potala Palace, part fortress, part monastery, part seat of government, continued in stages for decades, with much of the iconic Red Palace section completed only after his death and its completion concealed from the public for years by his regent, Desi Sangye Gyatso, to avoid destabilizing the new state during a politically fragile transition.

Beyond statecraft, the Fifth Dalai Lama was also a serious tantric practitioner and prolific author in his own right, notably drawn to Nyingma, the oldest of the Tibetan Buddhist schools, in tension with his own Gelug institutional position, and he worked deliberately to reconcile and patronize multiple Tibetan Buddhist schools rather than favoring the Gelug alone, a policy that helped stabilize a state built on the ashes of recent sectarian war. His unusually long and eventful reign, and the scale of the Ganden Phodrang state he built, is why Tibetan tradition remembers him simply as the Great Fifth, a title carried by none of the other thirteen Dalai Lamas before or since, and why his life supplies the clearest case of full temporal rulership actually exercised by a Dalai Lama in Tibetan history.