Tribal Mobility and Religious Fixation: Remarks on Territorial Transformation and Identity in Imperial and Early Post-Imperial Tibet Guntram Hazod [Accepted manuscript of the chapter published in: Walter Pohl, Clemens Gantner and Richard Payne (eds.), Visions of Community in the Post-Roman World: The West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, 300-1100 (Farnham: Ashgate 2012) 43–57.] At the start of the seventh century CE, there was a political upheaval in the southern agrarian zone of the Tibetan Highlands that was to have a lasting impact. A union of rival clans under the leadership of a local dynasty, the Pugyel (‘Princes of Pu’ (spu rgyal)), 1 led to the formation of a united kingdom. The Pugyel and their allies represented the new political unit as a holy order whose maintenance was guaranteed by the sovereign, henceforth entitled the tsänpo (btsan po), ‘powerful one’ (i.e. emperor). An effective military organization permitted the kingdom, striving for outward expansion, rapidly to emerge as a leading power in Central Asia. In the eighth century the empire came to extend beyond the Himalayas in the south, as far as Yunnan and Sichuan in the south-east and east, and into present-day north Pakistan in the west, and controlled the city states on the Silk Road in the north. Tang China, the powerful neighbour in the east, was repeatedly put in its place by Tufan, as Tibet (T. Bö (Bod); below, n. 9) was known in the Chinese sources. In the mid-ninth century the empire disintegrated almost as fast as it had emerged. But its after-effects were enormous and in many respects formative for the following epochs. The post-imperial era is the history of the extension and establishment of Buddhism (Lamaism) in the Highlands, which in its discourses created the vision of a common Tibetan history and led to the flowering of Buddhist universalism, the seeds of which had been sown in the period of the tsänpo. The development of the religion took place within a tribal order, represented by the patrilineal clans, which survived the break-up of the empire and established a new polity in union with Buddhism. These two developments of the foundation of 1 Tibetan names and terms in brackets represent their transliterated form in accordance with the Wylie System. Abbreviations used in this article: T. = Tibetan, S. = Sanskrit, Ch. = Chinese. 1 the empire and the Lamaist expansion transformed the ethnic, religious and social identities within this area in favour of new concepts of integration and community-building. They found their expression not least in a specific political geography of the imperial (seventh–ninth century) and hegemonial (twelfth–seventeenth century) periods which I will outline in the following with regard to the decisive mechanisms of integration and the associated territorial transformations. The Building of the Empire The core zones of the Highlands were the agrarian areas of Central Tibet, on either side of the Tsangpo River (Brahmaputra) (Figure 2.1). From the third and fourth centuries, a number of local polities (in the sources described as ‘petty kingdoms’, gyetren (rgyal phran)) developed here. These were stratified, clan-based societies headed by ruling lineages (i.e. lineages of ‘lords’ and ‘ministers’, je, lön (rje, blon)). In the tradition, the bearers of the lineages were described as the ‘people of inner Tibet’ (bod nang gi mi’u) and as descendents of (four) proto- clans that were supposed to go back to a common ancestry – a fabrication of later, nationalistically coloured accounts of history, because the names of these ‘proto-clans’ are rather to be identified as ethnonyms referring to people of different origins (various Turkic groups and groups linguistically belonging to the Tibeto-Burmese family of languages).2 The 2 The ‘Tibetans’ do not appear in the classical (post-imperial) account of Tibetan anthropogenesis and socio-genesis: see Tsering Gyalbo, Guntram Hazod and Per Kjeld Sørensen, Civilization at the Foot of Mount Sham–po: The Royal House of lHa–Bug–pa–can and the History of g.Ya’–bzang. Historical Texts from the Monastery of g.Ya’–bzang in Yar–stod (Central Tibet), Beiträge zur Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte Asiens, 36, Denkschriften der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, 290 (Vienna, 2000), pp. 55f. The ‘four great clans’ (rüchen shi (rus chen bzhi)) were associated with Minyag (Tangut), the Sumpa (Ch. Supi) and Azha (Ch. Tuyuhun) (both of Turkic tongues) and with the population of Zhangzhung (Zhang–zhung). The last mentioned relates to the prehistoric Zhangzhung power in present-day west Tibet, which was conquered by the Tibetans in the seventh century. In this account the Zhangzhung people are linked with the rü (clan, lit. ‘bone’) called Ma (rma), a term for ‘man’ and an ethnonym that in this classification probably also includes the originally Tibeto-Burmese population of the Highlands usually associated with the name Mön (Mon). ‘Tibet’ derives from the Arabic ‘Tubbat’, which denoted postulation of a common origin is not entirely unjustified, however, because it indicates a reality under which the core areas of the Highlands had already developed a cultural homogeneity in the centuries before the foundation of the empire. The ‘petty kingdoms’ are here the result of this early Tibetan identity. 3 The patrilinear clan as the primary structural principle of this segmentary pre-state order was connected with a particular territory, and ancestrally linked to a territorial divinity, which each represented the celestial unity of the individual settlement areas. The territory of the Pugyel was Yarlung, with the snow mountain called Yarlha Shampo as the territorial god (lha). Like the other gyetren, it was affinally linked with several units, such as those described as ‘ancient relatives at the four borders’ (nanyen thashi rab (gna’ gnyen mtha’ bzhi)), four local dynasties that bordered Yarlung, each of which formed its own gyetren. Furthermore, the the Tuyuhun, one of the components of this ethnic construct of ‘Tibet’. Matthew T. Kapstein, The Tibetans, The Peoples of Asia (Oxford, 2006), p. 29, summarizes the question of Tibetan origin: ‘The peoples of the Tibetan plateau became Tibetan primarily owing to cultural developments during the past two millennia, rather than to common genetic origins.’ This cultural assimilation process, which was a process of ethnization, was forced and concretized by the development of the empire and led, among other things, to a Tibetan lingua franca. There are numerous Indo- Germanic elements in it, which go back to early contacts with Indo-Scythian groups in the north-east of the Highlands (ibid., pp. 18f.); see also Christopher I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (Princeton, 2009), p. 375. 3 Cf. Brandon Dotson, ‘Complementarity and opposition in early Tibetan ritual’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 128, 1 (2008): 41–67. One of the outstanding commonalities of pre-imperial Central Tibet is the tumulus tradition (and the associated ritual complexes; John Vincent Bellezza, ‘gShen–rab Myi–bo: his life and times according to Tibet’s earliest literary sources’, Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines, 19 (October 2010): 31–118), whose beginnings are to be dated to at least the fourth century (Guntram Hazod, ‘Imperial Central Tibet – an annotated cartographical survey of its territorial divisions and key political sites’, in Brandon Dotson and Guntram Hazod, The Old Tibetan Annals: An Annotated Translation of Tibet’s First History, Veröffentlichungen zur Sozialanthropologie, 12 (Vienna, 2009), p. 175). They point to the ‘gyetren culture’ as part of the Eurasian culture complex, with the tumulus tradition as a late inheritance of the Indo-Scythian contacts. See Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road, p. 127; see also above, n. 2. sources speak of the ‘six clans of paternal subjects’ (yabang rüdrug (yab ’bangs rus drug)), clans of the lön (‘minister’) category (see above), which were allied to the Pugyel.4 It appears they also formed something like a ritual unit, where in the course of a joint hunt (the hunt for the wild Yak) the Pugyel regularly had to prove his sacred power.5 The clans of these gyetren units were transregional, that is, apart from their own territory they had branch settlements in various areas. Thus a clan in one unit could represent the ruling lineage (je (rje)) and elsewhere serve as a lön lineage. The link to the home territory here remained an important identity criterion. It also explains the mutual demarcation of the gyetren, which not only faced one another as bride-giver and bride-taker but also waged wars against each other. The sources finally make it clear that the alliance formations were apparently relatively open and had no lasting foundation. The lön lineages could leave the alliance at any time, as is made clear in the description of the rival of Yarlung, the house of Ngäpo (Ngas–po). Several clans left the alliance of the Lord of Ngäpo, who is described as unloved, and joined the Yarlung lord, entitled ‘Son of the Gods’ (lha sä (lha sras)), and indeed linked to the suggestion to destroy the territory of their former chief. The successful crusade against the rival, with his territory in the area of the Lhasa valley, was the actual start of the foundation of the empire. 6 The alliance of the Pugyel and his heroic fellow combatants was of a new quality, as the records in the early chronicles, with their panegyrics to the Yarlung house, show. The mythical charter, which legitimized the figure of a god king, now addressed as lha tsänpo (‘divine mighty one’), was essentially the principle of higher descent, according to which the mythical progenitor of the Pugyel line was described as the distant progenitor of all lines.