Sovereignty through Subjugation: Dülwa as Statecraft in the 13th Dalai Lama’s Monastic Guidelines

The 13th Dalai Lama wrote forty-two guiding documents (bca’ yig) for monasteries throughout Tibet and Mongolia—more than double any known author before him. Scholars have speculated that this prolific output was an attempt to bring distant powers in Amdo and Kham under the control of the Ganden Phodrang. Through an analysis of the Dalai Lama’s guidelines for Kumbum Monastery’s Kalachakra college, I demonstrate how he sought to employ Buddhist practices of subjugation (‘dul ba) as bureaucratic tools of statecraft. By granting the college trainings and ritual dances aimed at subduing local spirits, the Dalai Lama gave the monks techniques to efficiently run their institution and defend themselves from threats, while simultaneously subsuming them into a larger state-sanctioned cosmology. This complicates the narrative of the 13th Dalai Lama as a modernist reformer, demonstrating his desire to use monastic technologies to forge a polity outside the mold of the nation-state.