ABSTRACT

The primary purpose of this work has been to examine the nature of religious authority in Tibetan Buddhism in general, and within Gelukpa monasticism in particular. Whilst such a discussion may certainly have its abstract sides, we should be careful not to assume that it is an issue without contemporary political importance. This is all the more so in the case of Tibetan Buddhism, where the role of religion as a source of social authority has been the touchstone of core ideological disputes following the ‘peaceful liberation’ of Tibet in 1950 by the People's Republic of China, an act regularly justified over the last fifty years by the accusation that Tibet under Buddhism was an oppressive feudal theocracy, one in which religious authority played a key role in the exploitation of the peasantry. In this concluding chapter, therefore, we shall discuss the implications of the arguments explored so far for Marxist (and, to a certain extent, Western) criticisms of Tibetan Buddhism as a mode of social hierarchy.