UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation explores a series of nineteenth-century intra-sectarian polemical writings in the Tibetan Buddhist Geluk order between Buddhist scholars representing Khalkha’s Ih Hüree, the largest monastic institution of Outer Mongolia (today, the independent state of Mongolia), and Labrang Monastery in Amdo, eastern Tibet. China. In the nineteenth century, Labrang Monastery was a major Geluk monastery and a rising cosmopolitan center, located at the frontier of Tibetan, Mongolian, and Han Chinese cultural regions. This dissertation focuses not only on the doctrinal issues involved in the polemics over the interpretation of a particular text, but also on the sociopolitical motivations behind the dispute, its historical impact, and institutional ambitions underlying the exchange. The polemical disputes between leading scholars of these two important Geluk institutions in the Qing dominated Mongolian and Tibetan cultural regions highlight the historical development of Buddhist scholasticism and institutional competitions in the Qing border regions, isolated from the central government in Beijing and the religious center in Lhasa. Unlike many other polemical exchanges in Tibet, which mostly involved defeating or responding to the views of the “other” sects or schools, the polemic dispute examined in this dissertation occurred within a single school, the Geluk. Moreover, the most prominent polemicists of this exchange—Belmang Könchok Gyeltsen (1764–1853) from the Amdo-Tibetan region and his Mongolian counterpart Ngawang Khedrup (1779–1838)—were trained in the same monastic textbook (yig cha) tradition. I therefore call their exchange an “intra-sectarian” polemic. Plausible motivations behind this intra-sectarian dispute are explainable through a detailed study of the ambitions of Amdo-Tibetan and Mongolian monasteries to develop their respective institutions into influential cosmopolitan centers in the northern part of the Qing-Geluk world. Moreover, certain personal factors were also involved, since the polemicists also sought to defend the viewpoints of their respective teachers.