Power, Politics, and the Reinvention of Tradition

This volume focuses upon the relationships between the past and the present evoked in Tibetan historiography, ritual literature, and Buddhist esoteric writings. It offers diverse perspectives on a critical period in Tibet's history when Tibetans found themselves caught up in the tides of political turmoil and forced into the center of a much larger Central Eurasian struggle for power and territorial control between the Manchu rulers of the Qing empire and the Mongols of the north. The volume highlights the various ways Tibetan historians, biographers, and Buddhist scholars during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries succeeded in the task of reinventing and reinforcing their respective traditions.