The Council of Lhasa

In the eighth century Tibet was importing Buddhism from two directions at once. Indian teachers were arriving from the south with a systematic path of study, ethical training and staged meditation, in which awakening is approached over a long course of cultivation. Chinese teachers were arriving from the east with Chan, in which awakening is not built up in stages at all but recognised, suddenly, in the mind as it already is.

Both were plausible readings of the same tradition and both had powerful patrons in Tibet. The accounts say that the emperor Trisong Detsen, having built the monastery at Samye and having to decide which model his new state religion would follow, convened a confrontation between them. Kamalasila argued the Indian gradualist position. The Chinese master known in Tibetan sources as Moheyan argued the other.

The question was not academic and it is still not. If awakening is sudden and available in the mind as it stands, then the whole apparatus of graded study, monastic discipline and accumulated merit is at best a support and at worst a distraction. If it is gradual, then the apparatus is the path. Every Buddhist tradition since has had to place itself somewhere on that line, and Zen and the Tibetan schools ended up in visibly different places.

What Tibet did afterwards is not in question. It built an Indian-facing Buddhism, translated the Indian curriculum wholesale, and told the story of Samye as the moment that direction was chosen.

The Tibetan histories say Kamalasila won and the emperor ruled for the Indian gradual path. A Chinese document recovered from the sealed cave library at Dunhuang says Moheyan won and the emperor ruled for him. Both are partisan, both are the only substantial account their side left, and they cannot both be describing the same outcome.

Paul Demieville edited the Chinese material in 1952 and made the problem impossible to ignore. Before that the Tibetan version stood more or less alone in Western scholarship, as it had stood alone in Tibet, and the debate was told as a clean victory. Afterwards it became a case study in what happens when a tradition's founding story is checked against a source the tradition did not control.

Later work has pushed further and questioned the frame rather than the verdict. There may have been no single staged debate at all. What the evidence supports more easily is an exchange of written positions over a period, submitted to a court that eventually made a policy decision, which the tradition later shaped into a contest between two champions in a hall because that is a story that can be told.

The atlas records both accounts and does not choose. What is not uncertain is the use the story was put to. Whatever happened at Samye, the narrative of an Indian master defeating a Chinese one became the charter for Tibetan Buddhism's orientation, and it was still being told for that purpose a thousand years later.