Between cosmos and karma: metaphysics and sociopolitical theory in a Tibetan regime

This paper asks how Tibetan Buddhist political agents understood the place and purpose of human political activity within and upon a larger Buddhist cosmos, and what we can learn about this self-understanding from the religious traditions of thought with which they engaged.

The early modern central Tibetan regime, ruled by the fifth Dalai Lama and his successor the Desi Sangyé Gyatso, was by its own account an agent of world-transformation. These rulers oversaw a period of remarkable cultural and intellectual productivity, one which they understood as potentially inaugurating a new spatiotemporal center and hence a new cosmic epoch of peace and prosperity. Even as they emphasized their own intellectual, material, and social creativity, they also justified these endeavors, and their ruling power, by situating themselves within a universe whose space and time, agentive forces, and ultimate ideals anticipated and exceeded the scope of human experience and action. In sum, the self-understanding and political actions of this regime made recourse to Buddhist traditions for ideological justification, but also self-consciously set themselves apart from and even asserted their control over the world so defined.

In particular, this paper represents my tentative efforts to examine the metaphysical foundations of this humanist political project. In this respect, it extends earlier work on the discourse of kingship, which employed innovative conceptions of karma to explain how the kingship could be both divine in its origins and socially constituted in practice. My hypothesis is that sovereign and state observe the same general structure and express the same ambivalent orientation to divine and human agency.

The Desi wrote extensively on the cosmological situatedness of the state, drawing on dozens of sources including especially Kālacakra literature. He was also embedded in a network of Nyingma practitioners, taking the fifth Dalai Lama as his guru and receiving teachings and transmissions from him and Jangter masters including the Dorjé Drak tulku and Terdak Lingpa. What is noteworthy about his cosmological writings is that they presuppose a tantric metaphysical worldview, basic to which is the idea of the aboriginally perfected nature of world and self and the supervenience of karmically conditioned activity on that pristine, primordially established ground. As such, the basic ontological principles and soteriological dynamics at stake in this case differ substantially from classical conceptions that have informed much foundational social scientific scholarship on Buddhist polity. My point is not to criticize the findings of such scholarship but rather to emphasize the benefits of pursuing a similar line of inquiry—namely, exploring the relationship of religion to patterns of sociopolitical life—with respect to this Tibetan evidence.

The Tibetan case thus poses questions that implicate the study of karma and sociopolitical theory: What is the world like, such that humans can (or must) take it upon themselves to transform it into the image of its own ideal? How is it that a state can set itself cosmic stakes and posit divine rule, while also being explicit about, indeed valuing for its own sake, the fact of its karmically conditioned, humanistic, “made” quality? Is a “Buddhist state” properly speaking possible, or do the terms of transcendence dictate an irreconcilable gap between religious ends and worldly political pursuits?

I want to suggest that this ontology of primordial perfection, and its corresponding engaged ethic of world-transformation, align with the prospect of a humanist political project that values its own productive and transformative capacities. In other words, in this world, a humanist politics and transcendental vision are reconcilable in theory as well as in practice. This Tibetan example thus speaks to a broader line of theoretical inquiry in the field that would see human creative action and the more-than-human powers that exceed it as being co-constitutive of one another.