ABSTRACT
The great Tibetan Empire which created Buddhism as a national religion, began to disintegrate in the mid-ninth century when the Emperor Langdarma instituted a persecution of institutional Buddhism, traditionally said to culminate in his assassination by a Buddhist monk. Buddhism was first imported into Tibet on a massive, government-sponsored scale during the period of the Tibetan Empire, a time when Tibet controlled much of the Asian continent with successful military incursions even into the heart of China. As the new Buddhist groups importing teachings and authority from India put older Tibetan Buddhist lineages on the defensive, the latter, the Nyingma, developed the Ter movement as a response. The Great Perfection's rhetorical negation thus functioned to create and sustain a bounded Tibetan discourse that resisted the pressure of domination from the new Indic materials flowing into Tibet and yet performed the alchemy of cultural assimilation.
