The Tibetan Nun Mingyur Peldrön

Front matter

sk A R 7

mot Powera 478 a A

and Privilege

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been in process so many years, with the help of so many people, that it might be impossible to thank all those who have helped it come into being in one way or another. Initial research for the project was funded by a Fulbright grant, and gratitude goes to Paromita Datta, Neeraj Goswami, and Vinita Tripathi for their support of the Fulbright grantees in India. My translation of Mingyur Peldrén’s gur was supported by a Tsadra Foundation grant to participate in the 2018 Lotsawa Translation Workshop in Boulder, Colorado. Thanks to Marcus Perman and Tracy Joosten for supporting the Tsadra workshop and to Sean Price for his tireless efforts compiling Mingyur Peldron’s collected works. Later stages of research were conducted with funds from Bates College.

Itis hard to convey the impact that great mentors can have ona scholar’s trajectory and process. I am infinitely grateful to three people whose scholarly support has most significantly benefited me in the creation of this book. Thanks to Kurtis Schaeffer, Andy Quintman, and Holly Gayley, whose good humor, profound kindness, brilliant guidance, and unwavering advice have been the fulcrum for this project.

Vii

Chawla, Viji Melnick, Wangyal Bhutia, and Yap Tshering Bhutia. Much of the initial work for this project was conducted at Songtsen Library, Dehradun, and later at Pemayangtsé Monastery, Pelling, Sikkim—two communities whose warmth and interest in this project helped it fly.

Editorial support takes many forms. Thanks to Lorri Hagman for her enthusiasm and insight and to the editorial team at the University of Washington Press, including Elizabeth Gratch and Joeth Zucco, for all that they have done to bring the project along. Great thanks to Meredith Carroll for helping me navigate the early stages of the publication process. For her thoughtful comments and suggestions, thanks to Madeline Korbey. Infinite gratitude to the anonymous readers whose critique and feedback were vital to improving this work.

To complete a book in the midst of a pandemic is no easy thing, and in this case it was bolstered by a loving community. Thanks especially to Amy Bunker, Andy Harrington, Andy Hegle, Angelique Pilon, Ciaran Fullerton, Jessica Eschman, John Bowker, Karla Harrington, Khenmo Drolma, Laura Trumbull, Megan Goodwin, Michelle Greene, Rick Fullerton, Sarah Shotwell Wallace, Sita, and my family, who all helped me stay grounded and connected with the living world when it was needed most.

This book would not have come into being without the unwavering love, compassion, and support of Eric Dyer, whose confidence was the bedrock of viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS the project and whose contributions, if fully recounted here, would occupya whole other volume. Thank you for believing it was possible, for working through ideas together, and for helping make it happen in a million different ways. This book is dedicated to Eric.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

NOTE TO THE READER

Most Tibetan names and terms in the main text are rendered phonetically in the roman alphabet, as they are pronounced in a Lhasa dialect. Corresponding transliteration of written Tibetan forms according to the Wylie system is provided in notes and in the “Tibetan Glossary.”

Likewise, in the main text, titles of Tibetan literary works are given in English translation, with a note linking to the corresponding romanized Tibetan title.

Throughout this book the many translated passages from A Dispeller of Distress for the Faithful, the biography of Mingyur Peldron authored by her disciple Khyungpo Repa Gyurmé Ösel, are in a different font to distinguish them from quotations from other sources.

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CHRONOLOGY

Birth

Commencement of studies with Terdak Lingpa

Terdak Lingpa dies

Commencement of studies with Lochen Dharmasri Retreat

Civil war

Flight to Sikkim

First public teaching

Return to Mindréling and monastery reconstruction Illness and recovery

First meeting with Polhané and the Seventh Dalai Lama First meeting with Gyurmé Osel

First meeting with the Fifth Lelung, Jedrung Rinpoche Khangchenné assassinated, war in Gyantsé begins Cease-fire of the war in Gyantsé

Seventh Dalai Lama exiled in Kham

Teaching tour in central Tibet

Second meetings with Polhané and the Fifth Lelung Mass teachings at various locations in central Tibet Retreat

Mass teachings in central Tibet

Gyurmé Osel begins writing A Dispeller of Distress for the Faithful

Mass teachings in central Tibet Beginning of three-year retreat

Polhané dies

Pilgrimage and teachings at Shauk Taggo Mass teachings at Mindréling

Death xiii

THE

TIBETAN

NUN

MINGYUR

PELDRON

Introduction

HE driveway to Pemayangtsé Monastery rises at a steep grade, as do

most of the roads in this part of Sikkim. Off to the right, level with the bottom of the hill and just inside the driveway’s entrance, there is a stand where prayer flags flutter like leaves in the wind. Nearby sits what at first appears to be a white pile of rocks. Upon closer inspection, I notice that the dilapidated stone structure has been carefully whitewashed year after year, so that although the rocks have shifted over time, they remain fused together, encased in layers of white paint. The surrounding ground is covered with wild strawberries. There are no signs to mark this structure, which I am told is in fact a throne originally erected for the nun Mingyur Peldrén (1699-1769).! It is said that when the young woman arrived here in 1718—a refugee from the U region of central Tibet—she was exhorted to give teachings at Pemayangtsé. Although she consented, she refused to enter the monastery itself, citing impropriety that a woman would enter the realm of celibate men.’ Thinking of this invitation, I look up the hill and wonder wryly if perhaps she had insisted on remaining at the bottom of the mountain to avoid the climb.

Like the stone throne, Mingyur Peldron’s work for the Nyingma community had an influence that has persisted over centuries, even if it is not always immediately identified. Although Sikkim is where this story starts, Mingyur Peldrén only spent a few years there. She was born, educated, and later taught at Mindréling Monastery, located in modern-day Dranang, in U, central Tibet, some seventy miles south of Lhasa. Born to Phuntsok Peldzom (17th-18th CE) and Terdak Lingpa Gyurmé Dorjé (1646-1714), she was one of seven children. As a daughter of Mindroling’s founding family, she received an unprecedented religious education, which began early on in her childhood. Terdak Lingpa and his brother, Lochen DharmasSri (1654-1717/18), oversaw her education until their respective deaths. Empowered with an encyclopedic collection of teachings, she was raised with the expectation that alongside her brothers she would inhabit the role of religious teacher and carry on the new populist reframing of the Nyingma tradition that her father and uncle had established. She lived her entire adult life as a celibate nun, never marrying or having children. Inher role as a religious teacher, she worked for the edification of the Mindréling community, teaching throughout her adult life and authoring works focusing on the Great Perfection (Dzogchen) praxis of the Nyingma school. As a prolific author, she wrote texts throughout her adulthood that spanned a range of genres, including Great Perfection ritual manuals and other instructive texts for her disciples that have been preserved down to the present day.

Alongside the work of her brother Rinchen Namgyel (1694-1768), her role as a teacher and an author was centrally important to Mindrdling’s survival in the eighteenth century. Of the relatively small extant collection of literary works about the lives of Tibetan Buddhist women, Mingyur Peldrén’s hagiography suggests a woman who was unusual for her time and place. Unlike most other Tibetan women whose lives have filtered down to the present day, Mingyur Peldrén was born and raised in the heart of a prominent religious family at the center of the religious elite. Like Khandro Tare Lhamo, Sera Khandro, and Chokyi Drénma, she was born into the aristocracy. Her family took the unusual step of supporting her religious pursuits and did not pressure her to marry. Her education was directed by the well-known and erudite members of her family (all men), which meant she received an education that would support her rise as a respected religious teacher in U. Her story defies some of our received notions of how gender has been treated as a topic in the life stories of Tibetan Buddhist women and complicates how we approach religious women’s recorded biographies—their Lives. Most significantly, the treatment of her status as a woman—and the implications of her womanhood for her own religious authority—is inconsistent throughout her hagiography. Rather than a uniform narrative about the challenges of living as a woman, her gender is at turns held up as a benefit, and in other moments it is said to hold her back. Likewise, privilege plays a dynamic role throughout her story. She was simultaneously the recipient of multiple forms of high privilege and also experienced great hardship. Different aspects of her lived experience are combined in unexpected ways in her hagiography, and learning about her life story can help us understand more about how the intersectional nature of her identity strengthened and challenged her religious path and her public persona. Her privilege and the support of her family allowed her access to a host of social contexts that would have been otherwise inaccessible and were not even extended to all the women of her family’s generation. Meanwhile, their sectarian affiliations would lead to her persecution and exile during the 1717-18 civil war. The effects of these difficulties, and her later relationship to powerful Nyingma and Geluk Buddhist institutions, tell of awoman who was resourceful and determined to achieve soteriological and institutional progress for herself and her community.

Mingyur Peldrén is one of few women of her time and place for whom we have a long and detailed life story. Querying the factors that influenced the decision to memorialize her in a hagiography shows how her life story exemplifies the interrelated nature of privilege and authority, the multifaceted aspects of privilege, and the ways these were negotiated within a gendered context in eighteenth-century Tibet. Mingyur Peldron’s life offers an example of how these themes of gender and privilege function in the creation of the public persona of a saint who happens to be a woman, an eldest daughter, and a celibate nun.’

HAGIOGRAPHY AND NAMTAR

This study takes as its central source the life story of Mingyur Peldron, which was written by her disciple Khyungpo Repa Gyurmé Ösel (b. 1715) and completed in 1782. Titled The Life of Mingyur Peldrén: A Dispeller of Distress for the Faithful (hereafter referred to as Dispeller),* it is one of the extant life stories of Tibetan Buddhist women, which all told comprise about 1 percent of the approximately two thousand extant hagiographies of Tibetan Buddhist saints.° The scholarship for this study is based upon three different editions of Dispeller. The version referred to in the notes as “Dispeller ms. 1” is a 237- folio edition reproduced by the National Library of Bhutan in 1984. “Dispeller ms. 2” was published in 2015 by the Sichuan Minzu Language Press as part of a multivolume series of Tibetan women’s lives.‘ Finally, “Dispeller ms. 3” consists of Mingyur Peldrén’s life story as well as a collection of works (sungbum) written by her. It was compiled by Sean Price, from texts housed at Mindrolling Monastery in Clement Town, India,’ with support from Eric Columbel and the Tsadra Foundation. Apart from some spelling and grammatical differences, these three versions of her story are much the same in content and organization. There are also other, shorter life narratives of her, which are referenced throughout the book and identified based on the collections in which they are found.

Understanding the life story of Mingyur Peldr6n means understanding its author. We know very little about Gyurmé Osel beyond what is found in Dispeller, but the text does offer some clues as to his own trajectory. In addition to composing the text, we know that he hailed from Shang, in the Tö region of Tibet. We also know that he first met Mingyur Peldrén when he was about eight years old. He became her disciple and joined her community as a child, leaving the home of his grandmother for Mindréling. He became amonk at some point, although the details of his ordination are unclear. We also know he did not finish writing Dispeller until some thirteen years after Mingyur Peldrén’s passing.*® In addition to Dispeller, Gyurmé Ösel is not known to have authored any other works, although he did act as scribe for at least one piece that Mingyur Peldrén wrote. This work was the result of a request he made, asking that she explain one of Terdak Lingpa’s treasures focusing on the Highest Yoga (Atiyoga) teachings of the Great Perfection.’ The result was her text Elaborations on the Awareness-Empowerment Methods for the Ati Zabdön, Profound Unsurpassable Meaning of the Great Perfection.

Dispeller falls into the Tibetan literary genre of namtar, a ubiquitous form of Tibetan life writing that includes a variety of narrative styles. These life stories of religious practitioners vary widely in focus, tone, and style, although they do constitute a loosely associated genre." Broadly speaking, namtar, which literally translates as “complete liberation,”” portray the lives of historical and semihistorical figures and have been received as examples of successful paths to enlightenment. The ostensible purpose of these texts is to provide soteriological guidance by recounting the exemplary lives of saintly figures. The central subject of the text is often depicted in miraculous terms, and the texts include accounts of spiritual realization, visions, and thaumaturgy woven together with worldly activities and the historical accounts of mundane life. Miracles occur, deities and demons appear and interact with humans, and prophecy and revelation are par for the course. Namtars often include devotional language, references to dreams and visions, and prophecy. Engaging the Buddhist concepts of samsara and reincarnation, namtars also include accounts of the subject’s previous lives. In some cases the texts are composed by the disciples of the main subject, as is the case for Dispeller.

Significant work has been done to highlight the ways that the genre of namtar intersects with and diverges from the various North American and Western European genre groupings of saintly Lives and semihistorical narratives.” While the relationship between the namtar and its potential non- Tibetan equivalents is not necessarily a one-to-one correlation, Tibetan life narratives often reflect a similar approach to life writing, crossing the boundaries between the broadly defined genres of biography and hagiography, according to the intentions of the author. In the case of Mingyur Peldr6n’s namtar, the most relevant Eurocentric genre is that of hagiography. While similar to namtar in diversity and range, generally speaking, the term hagiography refers to texts that are focused on the life of a saint. In particular, these life narratives tend to provide accounts supporting the subject’s identity as a saint that include miracles, trials overcome, and other signs of virtuous activity. In addition to proving an individual's saintliness, they depict exemplary behavior for readers and hearers to emulate, ostensibly for the goal of soteriological benefit. Hagiography will here be loosely defined as narratives of the life of the saint, written for devotional and/or historical purposes, which include a combination of miraculous and historically traceable events.

As several European medievalist scholars have shown, hagiography is a term that encompasses a range of literary styles and approaches.“ It is a modern word that developed out of studies of medieval European saints and the diverse corpus of writing by and about them. As such, it has been applied to a variety of texts that contemporary medievalists argue would be more accurately differentiated into separate genres. The concept of hagiography can be approached not as a bounded category but, rather, as what scholar Anna Taylor describes as a “horizon of expectations” about style, form, and content." This corrective offers flexibility in understanding the role of narratives of saintly lives in the contexts of both European and Tibetan life writing. In the same way that hagiography can be applied to a multifaceted set of texts, namtar can apply to a broad range of Tibetan saintly Lives. Both genres can be taken as polythetic in their scope.

Much has been written on the namtar genre and its relationship to European medieval hagiography and spiritual instruction manuals, and methods for approaching this have been well established. Scholars have variously translated namtar as “biography,” “hagiography,” and the more neutral “Life” or have chosen to retain the Tibetan term rather than hazard a translation, all depending on the specific context of a given Life and the circumstances of its authorship. Hagiography is not a direct translation of namtar, so we must tread lightly and acknowledge that the overlap of the two terms will not necessarily be comprehensive. Nevertheless, using a modern English term to make sense of a long-standing Tibetan genre can be useful insofar as it helps situate namtar in a comparative intercultural context of soteriologically minded life writing about eminent religious figures. In cases like Mingyur

Peldrön’s A Dispeller of Distress for the Faithful, namtar is best translated as “hagiography,” rather than “biography.” This is because it better describes the Life of the saint that is soteriologically grounded, imbued with the miraculous, and diverges from European post-Enlightenment concepts of a narrative bounded by the subject’s birth and death. Applying the term hagiography to Tibetan sources also helps to draw connections between the devotional textual traditions of disparate parts of the world, allowing for equivalencies to be drawn between Buddhist and Christian religious literature in ways that are useful for understanding the works of both traditions.

Hagiography is useful for differentiating Mingyur Peldron’s life story from what we might think of as biography. While namtar is sometimes translated as “biography,” this term conjures up notions of European post- Enlightenment accounts of historical figures presented in an etic and allegedly objective manner, to act as a window into the lives of individual people. Whether or not such objectivity is actually possible, biography indicates a factual representation that neither claims to excessively elevate nor to apotheosize the subject. Because it suggests some modicum of objectivity and the assumption that all accounts reflect world-bound historically verifiable events, biography is ill suited as a term to use for some namtars, including Mingyur Peldron’s. Referring to namtar as biography indicates that the post-Enlightenment goals of objective reporting were in place for the authors of these texts and that miraculous events, stories of previous incarnations, and so forth would be excluded. For her Life, and with so many other Lives of Tibetan heroes and saints, this is simply not the case. The term hagiography is a more appropriate reference than biography with these works because it indicates that the person will be depicted as a saint, their life serving as an example of enlightened activity with the story a lesson for soteriological benefit.

Given the similarities between Mingyur Peldrén’s namtar and the genre of hagiography (broadly defined), the two terms are used interchangeably here. Throughout this study the terms namtar, hagiography, and Life are all used to refer to the genre of miraculously imbued Tibetan life writing, specifically Dispeller. This is not meant to simplify the genres but, rather, to emphasize the author’s visible effort to assert the sanctity of the subject, especially as it relates to the context of her spiritual authority.” In the case of Dispeller, the text sits squarely in the hagiographic realm, much closer to the European Lives of Christian saints than it is to the post-Enlightenment biographies of the Euro-West. In contradistinction, while Dispeller contains biographical attributes, and some sections reflect the conventions of biography, in general it is not written in the European post-Enlightenment biographical tenor.

Mingyur Peldrén’s life story weaves miracle with historical occurrence and represents her life as the exemplary model of a highly realized religious practitioner. It includes miraculous accounts, stories of spiritual realization, and narrations of the extreme hardships endured by the saint along her path. Like other namtars, Dispeller also includes accounts of her previous lives. And perhaps most important, it was written by her devotee Gyurmé Osel, whose goal appears to be elevating her in the eyes of their community. Dispeller also follows a format that is common in namtar. It begins with an opening homage to buddhas and bodhisattvas, followed by a description of the subject’s previous lives. After this discussion of her pre-lives, the text goes on to discuss her life as Mingyur Peldron. It ends with a description of her death and closes with a colophon that gives the details of the text’s composition.

Tibetanists and European medievalists alike have explored the ways that the abundant hagiographies of these respective religious communities can be used in conjunction with other sources to better understand significant moments in religious history and, to a lesser extent, the lived experience of those who are memorialized in these works. While the historical and religious contexts are different, continued dialogue between the two fields of scholarship could help advance both. Hagiographic texts are best understood within a broader literary and historical context. Tibetan literature differentiates between these saintly Lives and actual histories (Jogyii), and looking at them together can be a fruitful exercise. In contrast with namtar, logyü recount specific moments in political and religious institutions, naming the actors involved, the dates of occurrence, and the outcome of these engagements.

In comparison, it is clear that namtar are not meant to be read solely as histories, but if read thoughtfully and alongside other sources, they can be beneficial in terms of how we understand the mores and historical events of a specific moment. These works are often best read alongside related texts, including histories, liturgies, songs, rituals, letters, and even other hagiographies, to get a better sense of the context of the hagiography’s creation and the world in which the author was situated.” Taken alone, one text cannot offer a coherent religio-historical context but, read in conjunction with other works, can indicate the significant religious and social implications of the material found within a given hagiography. Thus, hagiography can give some insight into the cultural and religious indicators functioning in the time and place where a text was produced. While they are not “windows” into a historical moment, when contextualized they can give clues about what was important to both author and readers in the time of the text’s creation. Taken contextually, hagiography provides a complicated source of information for meeting historical and imagined figures through literary means." Hagiography can be mined to understand society and the saint by understanding the literary and historical context in which the text was written.

Avoiding the presumption of objectivity, such an undertaking should be carefully navigated. The scholarship of European medieval scholars Patrick Geary and Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg offer helpful guidance for engaging these works. In reading hagiography, it is important to acknowledge the “propagandistic nature” of the genre and to take into account that hagiographic works have political implications beyond the literary realm.” It is particularly useful to keep in mind that hagiographers’ “works were panegyrics, conscious programs of persuasion or propaganda, meant to prove the particular sanctity of their protagonists.”° While these works offer unique insight into their subjects and the historical moment in which they were written, first and foremost they give the reader a sense of the author’s goals for elevating a particular historical figure, a set of approaches to religious praxis and doctrine, and the social mores of the moment in which they were writing. In thinking about the creation of the saint, hagiography also gives the reader a sense of what the author considered most important for achieving the goal of elevation to sainthood.

This is all relevant in the Tibetan literary context of the eighteenth century as well. Insofar as Gyurmé Osel sought to present his female teacher in asaintly light, Dispellertells us a great deal about his particular soteriological and social concerns. These works also need to be read contextually to understand how they do and do not represent the values of a given historical context. Taken together with other contemporary works, hagiography can offer insight into historically embedded ideals and proscriptions as well as some reference to historical events (even if these events are construed ahistorically in some moments in the text).” As such, it is also important to note that Dispeller was completed more than a decade after Mingyur Peldrén’s death. In the colophon of the work, Gyurmé Osel explains that he had completed it in order to support the newest generation, the future of Mindr6ling leadership.

As such, it is instructive to read Dispelleras reflective of the late-eighteenth-century concerns of the institution, sometimes diverging completely from the concerns on which Mingyur Peldrén focused during her lifetime.

The very aspects that make namtar challenging historical sources also mean that they are compelling literary works and can tell us something of the religious attitudes and conventions of the time, at least in terms of how the author and the author’s interlocutors were engaging with their social and historical context. Hagiographers can be seen following certain socially embedded stylistic themes in their literary creations, which often exemplified the social mores and soteriological anxieties of their religious and historical contexts or at the very least represented their own concerns.” Especially in this context and when treated in conjunction with other works, hagiography can be helpful for learning about the socioreligious environment of both author and subject. It communicates themes and aspects of sainthood and religious praxis that were considered important to the hagiographer and may have been significant for their community as well. By looking at these works, we can learn what authors thought was ideal behavior, how they viewed the missteps and foibles of the intended audience, and their process of grappling with contemporary issues. By understanding the symbolic, doctrinal, and culturally bound significance of these literary productions, the reader can learn about the intellectual and religious environment of the period.

Incorporating both historical and literary analyses of Mingyur Peldron and her Life is useful for understanding both the life she actually lived and how it was presented in literary form. Engaging both histories and hagiographies helps make sense of her position as a religious leader and practitioner who was also a woman. We can consider the ways in which she is represented in texts and work to glean from this what her lived experience might have been. The themes of gender and privilege are particularly useful for building this understanding, especially when we consider their positioning in her Life narrative. Taking an analogy from the fiber arts, in this book the themes of privilege and gender act as the weft. We can ask whether and how they can impact each other when laid side by side in Mingyur Peldrén’s life story. Meanwhile, the hagiography Dispeller acts as the warp on which these concepts hang. Privilege and gender appear in the text at different moments, impacting the narrative accounts of her experiences and her significance as a religious figure. Considered together, the warp and weft make sense of the whole.

Mingyur Peldr6n’s namtar includes several accounts of historical events, the result of which is a confluence of history and hagiography wherein history is presented to further the ends of the author’s goal of soteriological storytelling. While Gyurmé Osel’s work is useful as an example of hagiography of the period and contributes to our knowledge about hagiographies of women, it also represents a specific historical depiction of her life and legacy. Political, social, and doctrinal clashes are woven into the work to meet the goals of the author. As a source, there is a great deal of generative potential, ifthe text is read responsibly. To do this, I read Dispeller in conjunction with histories, hagiographies, and other accounts from contemporary sources and related institutions, all of which give context to Gyurmé Osel’s presentation of her and eighteenth-century central Tibetan political and religious life. These include histories of Sikkim and Mindrdéling and hagiographies of her brother and grandmother. Dispeller offers an example of the hagiographic text as a rhetorical product. That is, it is a location in which soteriological narrative is used as a literary device to legitimate her and reinforce her goals for the Nyingma community. Gyurmé Osel drew on and elided gendered norms at turns in his process of elevating his teacher to the level of a saint. His engagement with gender, especially in relation to other aspects of Mingyur Peldrén’s identity, is considered in relation to other literary sources in order to show how we can make sense of one woman’s rise to an authoritative role in the world of eighteenth-century central Tibet.

RELIGION AND POLITICS IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Historical context can tell us a great deal about the social dynamics that color individual experience. For Mingyur Peldrén the most significant influences were the regional religious and political communities associated with two religious denominations, both the Nyingma (such as her birthplace of Mindréling) and the Geluk. In particular, the religiopolitical machinations of central Tibetan organizations set the stage for the causes and conditions that altered her lived experience, literary representations of her, and her own writing. At the turn of the eighteenth century, Lhasa had become well established as a center of cultural, political, and religious power in Tibet, and there were rumblings of inter-sectarian strife that would ultimately erupt into outright war. Much scholarship has been dedicated to the mid-seventeenth-century contexts, such as the establishment and rise of the

Ganden Podrang government in Lhasa. Likewise, a great deal of work has been done to study the rise of nonsectarian (rimé) developments that later centered in nineteenth-century Kham, in eastern Tibet. I categorize the interim between these periods as the “long eighteenth century.” Less scholarship has focused on this interim period so that it remains vague in our current understanding. Mingyur Peldrén’s hagiography helps to fill this lacuna by linking the rise of the seventeenth-century Ganden Podrang with the nonsectarian developments of the nineteenth century. The long eighteenth century was a time of fluctuating sectarian factionalism, with significant tensions between the Nyingma and Geluk denominations.