The emperor under whom the Tibetan plateau was unified and the empire became a power its neighbours had to negotiate with. He reigned in the first half of the seventh century and died in 649 or 650, moved his seat to Lhasa, took wives from Tang China and, by later account, from Nepal, and is credited by tradition with the introduction of Buddhism, the first Tibetan legal code and the commissioning of a writing system. Tibetan writing does appear in his reign. The Buddhist portrait of him, which makes him an emanation of Avalokiteshvara and the founder of the Jokhang, was built up centuries afterwards, and the earliest Tibetan records say strikingly little about religion in his time.
Facts
Life
Lifespan or Floruit Lifespan or FloruitReigned in the first half of the seventh century and died in 649 or 650. 1 The death is fixed by the Annals to within a year. No birth year is securely recorded, and the ages given for him in later histories are not independent evidence. Place of ActivityThe Yarlung valley and Lhasa, on the Tibetan plateau 1 Office HeldTsenpo, the title of the Tibetan emperors 1 Origins
Place of OriginGyama, in the Maldro region northeast of Lhasa 1 Disputed
Lifespan or FloruitTibetan and Chinese sources for the early Yarlung dynasty do not agree closely enough to fix Songtsen Gampo's birth precisely, and historians cite years across a range in the early seventh century. Around 605 is among the commonly cited estimates rather than a settled date. Identity
Also Known AsSrong btsan sgam po, in the Wylie transliteration of the Tibetan spelling 1 Attestation
HistoricityThe emperor is documented. The Buddhist portrait of him is a later development and is not evidence about his reign. Attested in the Old Tibetan Annals and Chronicle from Dunhuang and in the Chinese dynastic histories. Learn More
The Empire He Assembled
The Tibetan empire begins as a confederation of clans in the Yarlung valley. Songtsen Gampo came to power after his father was poisoned, put down the revolts that followed, and by the 630s was fielding armies far enough afield that the Tang court had to treat him as an equal. He moved the seat of power to Lhasa, imposed a system of administrative districts and military units on territories that had been clan holdings, and set up the taxation and record keeping that made the later expansion possible.
The best evidence for all of this is Tibetan and close to contemporary. The Old Tibetan Annals, recovered from the sealed library cave at Dunhuang, are year-by-year court records, and the Old Tibetan Chronicle preserves narrative and song from the same world. Beside them stand the Chinese dynastic histories, written by a state with every reason to pay attention to what was happening on its western frontier.
His marriages are part of that political record. The Tang princess Wencheng was sent to him in 641 and the alliance is documented on both sides. A Nepalese princess, called Bhrikuti in later Tibetan sources, is not attested outside them and her historicity is questioned. The two brides carry a great deal of weight in later legend, because each is said to have brought a Buddha image with her, and those images are what the Jokhang and Ramoche temples were later built to house.
The Buddhist King Made Later
By the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Tibetan histories are telling a different story about him. In it he is an emanation of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, ruling a Buddhist kingdom. He converts his people, founds the Jokhang, issues a code of law resting on Buddhist ethics, and sends a minister to India to bring back a script so that the scriptures can be translated. That is the Songtsen Gampo of the Tibetan religious imagination, and it is the version most later writing repeats.
The early record does not support most of it. The Annals and the Chronicle, contemporary or nearly so, say very little about Buddhism in his reign, and the religious material they do carry belongs to the older ritual world of the Tibetan court rather than to an imported Indian one. The state sponsorship of Buddhism that is well documented belongs to the reign of Trisong Detsen, more than a century later.
None of that makes the later account worthless, and reading it as a simple fabrication misses what it is for. It records what Tibet came to believe about its own beginnings, and the belief did real work: it gave the Buddhist order a founding emperor and tied the dharma to the state at the origin rather than partway through. The atlas keeps both accounts and distinguishes them, because collapsing the two is how a devotional history comes to be read as a chronicle.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Lhasa, Cities Songtsen Gampo unified Tibet and made Lhasa his capital, founding the Jokhang there in the seventh century.
Promulgated
Tibetan writing appears in his reign, and the tradition credits him with commissioning it. That the script was devised in the imperial period, during or close to his reign, is accepted. The circumstantial account of a royal commission and a mission to India comes from histories written some four hundred years later.
Related To
Why this is disputed. The traditional account makes him the emperor's minister, sent to India to bring back a writing system. Modern Tibetological scholarship increasingly reads the single inventor story as a later simplification of what was more likely a gradual adaptation of a North Indian script, and some scholars question whether Thonmi Sambhota is a securely historical figure rather than a name attached retrospectively to that process.
Sources
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