Editing Tibet (section)

== Buddhism in Tibet ==

The Gelugpa school rose to political dominance in 1642, when the 5th Dalai Lama, backed militarily by his Mongol patron Gushri Khan, defeated the rival Karmapa sect and its patron, the king of Tsang.<ref>Goldstein, Melvyn C. (1989). ''A History of Modern Tibet, 1913–1951: The Demise of the Lamaist State''. University of California Press, pp. 1–2.</ref> The resulting government articulated its own ideology as ''chösi nyitrel'', "religion and political affairs joined together," and endowed the major Gelugpa monasteries, above all his own seat at Drepung, with manorial estates worked by serfs, while smaller monasteries and major ritual observances received direct government subsidy.<ref>Goldstein (1989), ''Demise of the Lamaist State'', p. 2.</ref> This union of religious and political authority rested on a broader economic structure: manorial estates held by lay aristocrats, monasteries, and incarnate lamas, together with land held directly by the government, made up the great majority of arable land, with religious estates alone accounting for roughly thirty-seven percent of the total and lay aristocratic estates for roughly twenty-five percent.<ref>Goldstein (1989), ''Demise of the Lamaist State'', p. 3.</ref> Serfs owed extensive labor obligations to their lords and could not freely leave the land, though a numerically small "middle stratum" (''badzalaga'') of literate monks and ex-monks worked as administrators for monastic and aristocratic estates, occupying a position between the tiny governing elite and the mass of hereditarily bound peasants.<ref>Goldstein, Melvyn C. (2007). ''A History of Modern Tibet, Volume 2: The Calm before the Storm, 1951–1955''. University of California Press, pp. 319–320.</ref>

Between 1913 and 1950, successive attempts to modernize this system were repeatedly defeated by the monastic establishment. The 13th Dalai Lama's post-1913 military modernization program, and the Western-oriented officer corps it produced, was dismantled by conservative pressure in 1924–1925, along with an English-language school opened at Gyantse the previous year.<ref>Goldstein (1989), ''Demise of the Lamaist State'', pp. 816–819.</ref> A 1934 attempt by the lay official Lungshar to introduce an elected Kashag was crushed through a fabricated charge of plotting a "Bolshevik" coup, resulting in his mutilation and life imprisonment; a second English-language school, opened in Lhasa in the 1940s, was likewise forced closed by monastic opposition.<ref>Goldstein (1989), ''Demise of the Lamaist State'', pp. 202–212, 819–822.</ref> By 1950, Goldstein argues, the cumulative effect of these defeated reforms left Tibet without trained diplomatic personnel or a modern army, unable to offer more than token resistance to the Chinese People's Liberation Army.<ref>Goldstein (1989), ''Demise of the Lamaist State'', p. 822.</ref>

Following the 1951 Seventeen-Point Agreement and the 1959 Lhasa Uprising, the traditional monastic system inside Tibet was dismantled by direct Chinese state action (see below), and the Cultural Revolution brought a near-total assault on surviving religious institutions, such that practice of Buddhism "survived only in memory" through the 1970s.<ref>Schwartz, Ronald D. (1999). "Renewal and Resistance: Tibetan Buddhism in the Modern Era". In: Harris, Ian (Ed.), ''Buddhism and Politics in Twentieth-Century Asia'': 229–253. Cassell, p. 232.</ref> Religious revival began only after 1979, but the traditional self-governing monastic administration was not restored: monasteries have instead been governed since then by Democratic Management Committees answerable to the Communist Party and Religious Affairs apparatus.<ref>Schwartz (1999), "Renewal and Resistance", pp. 232–234.</ref> In exile, the government led by the 14th Dalai Lama re-established the three great Gelugpa monastic "seats" (Ganden, Sera, and Drepung) in south India and formally extended its patronage to all five Tibetan Buddhist traditions, rather than the Gelugpa establishment alone.<ref>Schwartz (1999), "Renewal and Resistance", p. 235.</ref>