The Great Fifth: The Fifth Dalai Lama and His Times

Samten Karmay's The Great Fifth is a scholarly study of the Fifth Dalai Lama, the seventeenth century figure who unified Tibet politically and religiously and established the Ganden Phodrang government, written by a Tibetologist working from Tibetan-language primary sources including the Fifth Dalai Lama's own extensive autobiographical writing. Its authority rests on that direct access to Tibetan historical and religious texts most Western scholarship of the period could not draw on as fully. As a specialist academic study it treats the political and religious complexity of the Fifth Dalai Lama's rule with more nuance than popular accounts, including tensions within Tibetan Buddhist sectarian politics of the time, and it is respected within Tibetan studies as an authoritative, source-grounded treatment of a genuinely complicated historical figure.