Songtsen Gampo (“Songtsen the Profound”) was a fifth-generation descendant of Lhathothori, ascending the throne of the Yarlung kingdom around 630. As a youth hunting wild game in the Lhasa Valley, Songtsen became intimately familiar with the region. He rebuilt Lhathothori’s palace on Marpo Ri and turned it into his main residence, from which he oversaw the transformation of his kingdom into an empire stretching across Central Asia.
At the time of Songtsen’s ascension, seventh-century Asia was in the midst of an extraordinary phase of development. He was conscious his kingdom was at the vortex of a region undergoing an upward and accelerating whirlwind of material progress and cultural change.
To the south, a classical age of Indian culture was in full bloom despite the collapse of its sponsor, the Gupta dynasty, in 543. The kingdom of Harsha on Tibet’s southern frontier had replaced the Guptas and continued to nurture a high culture of religion, art, and literature. This, the home of the dharma, was widely famous for historic sites associated with the life of Siddhartha Gautama and its network of monastic universities devoted to Buddhist learning.
To the east, Li Yuan, a Sino-Turkic clan leader, unified China, a civilization hoary with age and rich in accomplishments, and established the Tang dynasty in 619. Despite frequent outbreaks of squabbling among elite factions in the Tang capital Chang’an, China reasserted its role as the dominant political, commercial, and cultural superpower of East Asia. Buddhism had already been embraced during the prior five centuries through patronage by the nobility and the sustained effort of foreign and Chinese monks to proselytize the new faith among ordinary people. The Awakened One’s sayings and religious treatises were translated into Chinese by legions of Indian and Chinese monks, who labored to locate Chinese words to capture accurately the underlying Sanskrit meaning of Buddhist terminology rather than simply relying on phonetic transliterations. Tibetans soon picked up this extraordinary cross-linguistic challenge and surpassed the achievements of the Chinese.
To the north, Turkic and Uighur steppe confederations came and went, while the oasis cities in what is now Xinjiang, such as Khotan, became centers of trade and Buddhist learning. The steppe peoples, who were feared for their strength and military prowess, carried on a robust tradition of pastoral nomadism and aggressive horse-borne warfare while rejecting the dubious advantages of sedentary civilization as a threat to their independence. Although few in number, the equestrian people of the steppe made a disproportionately profound impact on the psychology of sedentary civilizations as unstoppable marauders.
To the west, Persia had reached a pre-Islamic high-water mark in the Sassanian Empire, which was envied for its sophisticated civilization and wealth but was soon to be toppled by the Umayyad Caliphate. Rising as a power on Songtsen’s western flank, Arab Muslim armies under the Umayyad clashed with Tibetans and their allies. These contacts were memorialized in the Arabic language; to this day the Bay of Bengal is known in Arabic as the Sea of Tibet. Incidentally, the English word for Tibet appears to be derived from Arabic too.
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Ancient Tibetan theoreticians interpreted these four border civilizations as supplicants who were presenting sacred offerings to Tibet and analogized them to the ancient Kings of the Four Directions guarding the entrances to Mount Meru, the center of the Buddhist universe. As India was the home of the dharma, it was viewed as the King of Religion. China was the King of Divination because of the profound mysteries contained in its Book of Changes and other works of prophecy and astrology. To the west, Persia was the King of Wealth, where merchants made fortunes from its strategic location as a signal nexus among trading nations. To the north, the people of the steppes were the King of Warfare by virtue of their military prowess. At the center and rising majestically above them on the Himalayas stood Tibet, with Songtsen Gampo at his palace on Marpo Ri graciously accepting the offerings of expertise from these four supplicants.
Amid this intense churning of global transformation, Songtsen threw himself into the red dust of empire-building using the standard set of ruthless geopolitical tools such as warfare, espionage, and deceit. In short order, he conquered nearby kingdoms that were part of the early Tibetan cultural sphere and established the Yarlung Empire. Through guile, he took over Zhang Zhung, a massive kingdom to the west stretching from the upper Yarlung Tsangpo River to the Persian border with its capital near Mount Kailas. Songtsen’s sister had married the king of Zhang Zhung, but then she conspired to murder her husband and annex his kingdom to her brother’s domain. A forerunner of the Tangut Kingdom, Minyak to the northeast near present-day Qinghai Province, fell to Songtsen’s troops as did the Tolung Mong region along what is now the Indian-Himalayan borderland. Songtsen took royal consorts from these regions; his wife from Tolung Mong, Pogong Mongza Tricham (Mongza, the “Mong wife”) was his empress and first consort. His other wives were Litigmik from Zhang Zhung and Minyakza from Minyak.
Tibet, as we understand it today, coalesced during Songtsen’s reign and evolved into three expansive regions. Central Tibet (sometimes called Ü-Tsang) stretched from the Yarlung River valley toward the southern foothills of the Himalayas and to the deserts surrounding Mount Kailas in the west. Its two main provinces are Ü (where Lhasa is located) and Tsang to its west. Kham is the region to the east of Central Tibet, bordering Yunnan, Sichuan, and Gansu provinces. Amdo is the third great Tibetan region; it is next to Greater Mongolia and inner China in today’s Qinghai, Xinjiang, and Gansu regions.
With the growth of his empire, Songtsen contemplated the adoption of a new faith for an effective consolidation of administration. Scholars say the dharma offered him “an impressive array of cultural apparatus (writing, literature, history, law, art, ritual complexity, etc.) that gave an already sophisticated Tibetan elite access to the latest cultural trends in their part of the world.” As Tibetans point out, this interpretation is fine as far as it goes, but it fundamentally ignores the spiritual attraction of Buddhism and its impact on the king, notwithstanding his human shortcomings as a monarch.
Tibetans see Songtsen as the first of the three great dharmarajas (religious kings) of the Yarlung Empire who were responsible for the propagation of Buddhism in their country. The Clear Mirror on Royal Genealogy, a fourteenth-century work, relates that Avalokitesvara saw Tibetans ripening for conversion at that time. Through his avatar Lokesvara, Avalokitesvara cast an impregnating light into the womb of Songtsen’s mother. At Songtsen’s birth, the Amitabha Buddha consecrated him by resting a hand on his head leaving an imprint perceptible only by those who had attained a high level of spiritual consciousness. In artwork Songtsen is often depicted with the head of the Amitabha Buddha rising from his crown to symbolize that imprint.
This excerpt from MA Aldrich’s ‘Old Lhasa: A Biography’ has been published with permission from Speaking Tiger Books.