ABSTRACT
A n ongoing concern of Tibetan scholars from at least the 12th-13th fi centuries has been the writing of biographies of spiritual masters, either as individual works or as collections of texts dealing with successive reincarnations. It has often been a preoccupation of Tibetans to trace spiritual lineage back to an Indian antecedent, and due to the extremely close relationship between the two countries in the formative stages of Buddhism in Tibet between the 11 th and the 13th centuries, this has mostly been a relatively easy and felicitous task. The purpose of tracing this relationship between the current holder of the incarnatory lineage and his Indian antecedents is not for the aggrandisement of either the incumbent or the lineage, although there are obvious examples where this patently did occur. It is rather to firmly establish the genuine nature of the teachings which the master's lineage is in possession of and which is in itself regarded as a guarantee of the impeccability of the teachings, to be able to maintain that they have an unimpeachable antecedent and to demonstrate that they have manifestly been passed from master to student in an unbroken chain to the present time.
