Buddhism Reaches Tibet

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Buddhism first reaches the Tibetan court in the seventh century, under King Songtsen Gampo, an introduction tradition associates with his own Buddhist queens from Nepal and Tang China and with his building of the Jokhang and Ramoche temples at Lhasa. It met sustained resistance there from the indigenous Bon religion and its aristocratic supporters, and did not become securely institutionalized for another century.

That institutionalization came in the eighth century, when King Trisong Detsen invited the Indian masters Padmasambhava and Shantarakshita to Tibet. Their debate victory over Bon opponents and their founding of Samye, Tibet's first fully monastic institution, gave Buddhism a durable footing at court, one a royal edict in 791 formally recognized, the point at which this atlas records the tradition as established rather than merely arrived.

What changed for Buddhism's spread is the creation of a distinct Tibetan tradition built directly on Indian teachers and Indian textual authority rather than transmitted secondhand through China, a lineage that would in time develop its own monastic schools and carry its own forms of the teaching back out across the Himalayas and into Mongolia.