Origin and Development of Tibetan Buddhism

Tibetan Buddhism was originally introduced in the middle 7th century. At that time, the king of Tibet-Songtsen Gampo converted to Buddhism under the influence of his two wives-Princess Wencheng of Tang Dynasty and Princess Chizun of Nepal. Songtsen Gampo dispatched 16 people to India to study Sanskrit and Buddhist scriptures. Later, he created Tibetan words and began to translate some Buddhist scriptures.

In the middle 8th century, the then Tibetan King-Trisong Detsen invited Master Padmasambhava from India to Tibet. The former popular Tibetan Bonism was convinced by Buddhism and thus Buddhism was widely spread.

After Master Padmasambhava arrived in Tibet, he at first built Samye Monastery and invited some translators to translate a large amount of Buddhism scriptures from Sanskirt into Tibetan. Meanwhile, some scriptures in Han language are also translated into Tibetan. According to the record, there were about 738 kinds of Exotoric Buddhism scriptures and Esoteric Buddhism scriptures being translated at that time. So Buddhism was quite prosperous at that time.

In the middle 9th century, however, Tibetan Buddhism was once destroyed, that is the so-called Gldarma destroying Buddhism (In Tibet, the time before Gldarma destroying Buddhism was called Pre-Hong Period and the time after Gldarma destroying Buddhism was called Post-Hong Period). So there was a period, from 842 to 978, Buddhism went downhill. Later, Buddhism was again introduced to Tibet from Xikang area and Tibetan Buddhism was revived.

In the 11th century, the great Buddhist master Attisha came to Tibet from India. In the year of 1042, Tibetan Buddhism was promoted once more and many Buddhist scriptures were again translated into Tibetan.

After that, especially when the Indian Buddhist monasteries were destroyed by the invaders in 1203, more Indian Buddhist scholars came to Tibet and spread Buddhism. And the translating work was more thriving. The majority of the Tibetan Tripitaka are directly translated from Sanskirt and only a few are firstly translated into Chinese and then translated into Tibetan. As a result, the post-period Buddhist works of India were actually kept in Tibetan scriptures. These works are rich in content and great in amount.