Inspired by the 2025 AAR theme of “Freedom,” this panel examines shifting conceptions of political power and novel techniques for its enactment across the Tibetan and Himalayan regions from the period of Tibetan scholastic institutionalization (14th–16th centuries) to the mid-20th century geopolitical entanglements of the region. This politically fraught period, marked by conflict, nevertheless produced novel conceptions of religious authority and governance. The panel explores how the region’s religious elite articulated these shifting conceptions of the political sphere through philosophical treatises, biographies, artistic representations, monastic curricula and codes of conduct, and ritual technologies. Papers examine: How have Buddhist thinkers informed Tibetan and Himalayan attitudes toward authority and freedom across social, religious and political landscapes? How were artistic and literary media deployed in the articulation of power across the region? And how have communities across the region negotiated shifting and competing models of political power?
The second revival of Buddhism in Mongol regions, particularly the Geluk tradition, established a monastic network tied to central Tibet. However, religious authority in these regions was not solely dictated by Lhasa. The Qing court, as the dominant power in late imperial China, actively regulated Mongol Buddhism, overseeing reincarnation confirmations, restricting monastic mobility, and imposing administrative policies.
This dual-layered governance placed Mongol monasteries at the intersection of Tibetan religious leadership and Qing imperial control. While Tibetan hierarchs dictated doctrinal matters, Qing officials shaped monastic administration. Mongol monks and monasteries navigated these overlapping authorities, balancing religious tradition with political constraints.
This paper examines how Mongol religious institutions operated under—and at times negotiated—the competing influences of Lhasa and Beijing, highlighting specific cases to explore the impact of Qing policies and Tibetan authority on monastic governance in Mongol regions.
This paper explores the concept of Thakhob (mtha' 'khob) as a rhetorical tool that legitimized religio-political expansion in early modern Tibet. It examines how both Tibetan Buddhists and Bonpos invoked Thakhob—a designation for borderlands inhabited by “uncivilized” peoples and untouched by the rays of Dharma—to justify their civilizing missions. Through various methods, including the interpretation of dreams and prophecies or “discovery” of hidden lands and texts, they sought to propagate their respective religious traditions. Specifically, this paper traces how, beginning in the 15th century, early Geluk monks and scholars initiated efforts to proselytize the eastern Tibetan borderlands, particularly the Bon strongholds of Gyalrong. These missionary activities intensified in the 18th and 19th centuries under the Qing-Geluk alliance, with prominent Tibetan and Mongour Geluk lamas playing key roles. By examining Thakhob as a conceptual and discursive device, this paper highlights its role in framing expansionist projects as a civilizing endeavor.
In this paper, I consider the opposing Madhyamaka ('Middle Way') Buddhist philosophical positions of Tsongkhapa Losang Drakpa (1357-1419) and Karmapa VIII Mikyö Dorje (1507-1554) as contrasting visions for theoretically grounding political authority. By comparing Tsongkhapa's and Mikyö Dorje's divergent attitudes toward epistemology and gnoseology, I argue that we see differences emerge that helped or hindered their orders in consolidating extensive political control by a central authority. Specifically, while Mikyö Dorje takes pains to profess a Madhyamaka philosophical view reflecting the apophatic bent of the Madhyamaka progenitor, Nāgārjuna (2nd c. CE), as well as his preeminent commentator, Candrakīrti (7th c.), the interpretive liberties that Tsongkhapa takes with those Indian thinkers' texts help establish justification for the kind of intensified bureaucratic control over the Buddhist monastic clergy that marked the Gelukpa order and aid its rise to power.
By 1920, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama (1876-1933), had survived an assassination plot, two foreign invasions, and prolonged exile. Following his final return to Tibet in 1913, he sought to modernize and secure his territory through various reforms, both political and religious. Drawing on models of Buddhist kingship and Tibetan traditions of state protection, he employed the standard technologies of governance—temple renovation and monastic reform—but did so, remarkably, in a single project. Central to his undertaking was his illustrated commentary on the monastic code transformed into murals at two geomantically important sites: Ramoche and the Potala. In this paper, I consider the pictorial text and its murals within the circumstances of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama’s reign and the content of the historical record, contextualize them within his program of renovation and reform, and consider how the murals might have functioned more so as power objects than didactic diagrams.
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.
Influenced by European Christian conceptions of divine power, the 20th century German legal theorist and Nazi apologist Carl Schmitt famously wrote that “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (Schmitt, 5). This paper approaches the problem of authoritarianism that Schmitt raises by focusing on a paradigmatic figure of power and exceptionality in Tibetan Buddhist political and religious thought, that of the bodhisattva. Examining how Tibetan Buddhist thinkers in three different time periods and political environments theorize bodhisattva power, intentionality, and action, this paper asks how these framings illuminate Tibetan debates regarding the moral dimensions of charisma and leadership, and the possibilities for freedom with respect to the state.
Tibet is often referenced in brief and passing notes in the literature on theocracy as the lone and somewhat anomalous Asian example of a premodern theocratic state. Focusing on the founding of the Drukpa theocracy of Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyel (1594-1651) known today as the Kingdom of Bhutan, my paper investigates what theocracy, as a descriptive and analytical category, might help elucidate about notions of governance in the Tibetan region during the seventeenth century, and vice versa, what the Tibetan experiment with the union of religious and temporal domains (chos srid zung ’brel) might contribute to our understanding of theocracy as an organizing principle for social and political life.