During the first two decades following India’s independence, the CIA had a complex, and often conflicted relationship with the ruling Congress party and the Indian media. Despite public and private criticisms levelled at the Agency by Jawaharlal Nehru, a number of CIA covert operations in the subcontinent were undertaken with the full knowledge and support of India’s intelligence service and senior figures within the Congress Party: In Kerala, in the late 1950s, the CIA worked with the Congress Party to destabilise a democratically elected communist administration; following an abortive Tibetan uprising in 1959, India’s Intelligence Bureau chose to ‘look the other way’ as CIA aircraft transited through Indian airspace in support of Agency sponsored resistance operations in Chinese-controlled Tibet; and CIA operatives spirited the Dalai Lama out of Lhasa and into northern India. This chapter probes the genesis and evolution of the CIA’s relationship with India during the Agency’s so-called ‘golden age’ in the long 1950s, when a series of major US covert operations were conducted across the globe, in places such as the Congo, Guatemala, Iran, Indonesia, and Tibet.

In Chapter 5, the final case study examines the spate of Tibetans burning themselves alive in opposition to rule by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 2009. First delineating significant events in the relationship between the nation of Tibet and the PRC, prior to and through the Cultural Revolution, I describe the social, political, and cultural situation of Tibetans during their loss of their sovereign nation. Interrogating the most attested claims and desires of these self-immolators—called pawo or martyrs in Tibetan circles—I highlight the role Tibetan Buddhism plays in the conflict as target of the PRC, core of Tibetan identity, and solution to the crisis on the plateau. I connect that discussion to an analysis of the historical and religious bases for the practice of auto-cremation as a means of resistance and meritorious action. Drawing these arguments together, I conclude by describing the state of emergency within Tibet, most notable in lands which now exist within the internationally recognized borders of China. I conclude by showing how suffering is constructed as an affirmation of the truth of the Tibetan imaginary made plain in the burned bodies of pawo.

This chapter provides an overview of Buddhist sexualities ranging from monastic celibacy in India, China and Japan, to Buddhist lay sexualities, to altruistic sexuality in Indian Mahayana Buddhism. It then examines religious sexuality in tantra in India and Tibet, including transgressive discourses in Indian Buddhist liturgies and sexual yoga techniques in Tibetan Buddhist literature. The chapter argues that these diverse and contradictory discourses all represent a shared concern with regulating sexuality and harnessing it for soteriological purposes. Both the renunciation of sensual experience in Indian monastic literature and the embrace of sensual experience in Tibetan sexual yoga have been framed as means for relieving suffering and attaining soteriological success. With examples from Vinaya literature, yogini tantras, premodern and contemporary literature, this chapter highlights the rich diversity of Buddhist sexualities and gender constructs.

Chapter 6 turns to Chinese coercion regarding foreign leaders’ reception of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader. China did not use coercion against European states over the Dalai Lama visits in the pre-2002 period, despite a high need to establish a reputation for resolve in the 1996–2002 period. The cost-balancing theory would have predicted China would use coercion in this period because Tibet is a core-interest issue. This slight deviance from the theory suggests that China’s economic costs with respect to the United States and Europe, in general, trumped other factors in China’s coercion calculus prior to 2002. Except for during the 1996–2002 period, the patterns of Chinese coercion are in line with the theory’s predictions. Furthermore, China did not coerce all the states that receive the Dalai Lama in the post-2006 period. Instead, it focused on major European countries because the need to establish a reputation for resolve was high in major European countries, whereas the economic cost had lowered. This chapter indicates that the cost-balancing theory does not apply only to security issues but can also generalize to political issues, such as visits with the Dalai Lama.

This chapter provides a bibliographical overview of the most important Tibetan-language sources from the time of the Mongol overlordship in Tibet. They range from official documents such as imperial decrees to historical and biographical works and letters that Tibetan clergy, among others, wrote to Mongol rulers. The Tibetan sources constitute a valuable resource for the study of imperial diplomacy and political relations of the period. Furthermore, they provide important information about religious and administrative matters in the Tibetan areas of the Mongol empire, including details like corvée duties, rights to pasture lands, and the issue of abuse of power by local authorities. Highlighting the importance of the Tibetan sources, particular emphasis is placed on the concrete contributions that the individual sources make to the study of the Mongol Empire.

Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of Bengal (1772-85), patronized learning on a larger scale than any previous East India Company official. This chapter argues that he did so in an attempt to square the Company’s growing political footprint with its hybrid constitution. The Company’s conquest of Bengal from midcentury had stirred up arguments in Britain and India that a body of merchants could not, or should not, rule vast and populous territories. Hastings sympathized with such arguments, but he was bound by duty and circumstances to oppose them. “Conciliation” offered him a means to do so. This idea, derived from both European and Mughal sources, denoted a commercial style of politics based on accommodation and negotiation. In the context of scholarly patronage, it tapped into widespread positive associations between commerce and knowledge. Hastings maintained that patronizing European scholar-officials and Indian learned elites would conciliate opinion toward the Company state. If this hybrid entity was to last, he suggested, it must traffic not only in material goods but also in intellectual ones.

The 1962 Sino-Indian War was not just a border war over disputed territory (or the outcome of the Sino-Indian spatial rivalry alone) as is generally argued because issues related to their positional rivalry were also at stake. Sino-Indian positional rivalry in the Himalayan states and in Burma was linked with the Tibetan issue, and Tibet itself was at the nexus of Sino-Indian spatial and positional rivalries. Furthermore, the 1962 Sino-Indian War proceeded as wars between positional rivals tend to: with the near multilateralization of the war as India sought help from the United States (and that it was favorably considered). While China’s unilateral ceasefire that was accepted by India precluded overt American participation, India’s massive defeat also had positional consequences as it removed India as a contender for Asian leadership. Although this did not result in Chinese leadership in Asia, China continued to remain more important than India to the wider Asian strategic dynamic in the decades after 1962.

Given China and India’s claims to Asian leadership, the positional dimension of the Sino-Indian rivalry was central to their relationship in the 1940s and the 1950s. This positional contest played out in three venues: (i) in various Asian multilateral fora (such as the 1947 Asian Relations Conference and the 1955 Bandung Conference) and in India’s attempts to mediate in conflicts involving China and other players; (ii) in the Himalayan states (Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim) and in Southeast Asia; and (iii) in Tibet. The Tibet issue was particularly fraught with strategic consequences. As China sought India’s help to consolidate its own rule in Tibet, it gave India an exalted but much-resented position in China’s internal affairs (pertaining to Tibet). Matters related to Tibet also entangled the positional and spatial dimensions of the Sino-Indian rivalry because the territories in dispute between China and India had complex historical links with Tibet.

There are disagreements about when the Sino-Indian rivalry began, what it is about, what its potential for escalation might be, and how significant the rivalry might be for the course of world politics. It is argued that this rivalry began with the advent of Indian independence, given that the earliest time point at which a rivalry between two states can commence is when both states are independent. There is not surprisingly a great deal of emphasis on disputes along the Tibetan border. They are not insignificant, but they may prove to be the least important part of the Sino-Indian rivalry. The positional contest between the two Asian giants seems more central to the rivalry overall. We think the rivalry has considerable potential for escalation – perhaps even more than the Sino-American rivalry does. If that is indeed the case, the rivalry may hold one of the most critical keys to world peace and stability. It is not something that can be dismissed as a minor tempest in a frozen region.

Do government laws have a trickle-down effect into monastic laws? Or is it the other way around? The adjudication of monastic law and the presence or absence of governmental intervention in such matters can indicate the status of the relationship between monasteries and state. Previous research has shown that many Tibetan Buddhist monasteries were distinct legal entities, with the power to try and punish not just the monks but also the lay-people who interacted with the clergy. This chapter is concerned with the ways in which these two types of constitutional laws were related to each other. While in the case of Bhutan certain state regulations were based on existing monastic guidelines, which suggests that monastic law directly inspired secular governmental policy, the picture for historical Tibet is less clear. The language of some “secular” legal texts reveals that their authors were very much aware of internal monastic laws and accommodated them. Similarly, the monastic rulebooks pointed out when monks were subject to state law. This chapter examines where and how government law and monastic law intersected in early modern Tibet and attempts to demonstrate the potential mutual influences and legal concerns.

The charismatic Tibetan religious hierarch, the Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyal unified Bhutan in the second quarter of the seventeenth century. The Zhabdrung introduced a “dual system” of secular and religious government that remained in place until the establishment of the current monarchy in 1907. Major institutional reforms implemented by the third king saw the state-sponsored Central Monk Body gain roles in the National Assembly and the Royal Advisory Council that lasted until 2008. In its transition to a democracy in 2008 Buddhism was declared to be separate from politics with monks, nuns, and lay practitioners (gomchen) prohibited from taking part in elections or voting. The chapter outlines the transformation from a theocratic “dual system” to a constitutional monarchy and the unforeseen consequences of the separation of religion and politics now emerging in Bhutan.

Tibetan ethnohistories of Buddhist law have traditionally revolved around the figure of the seventh-century emperor Songtsen Gampo, codifier of first written Tibetan law code. This code was putatively “based” on the ten Buddhist virtues, enshrined in early Mahāyāna works such as the Daśabhūmika (“The Ten Grounds”). This claim is often debunked by modern constitutional historians, who argue that there is little evidence of any lineage of Buddhist textual sources from India to Tibet at the time to support such a claim. However, a closer reading of Indian Mahayana texts and subsequent Tibetan writings suggests a different interpretation of this claim: that the emperor’s dependence on the ten virtues was seen to be noetic rather than literary. Specifically, that its formulation was a product of his personal qualities as a second ground bodhisattva, which naturally generated virtuous law in a Buddhist sense; and that it was based on ethical objectives rather than a lineage of codified injunctions. In this sense, the Buddhist core of royal law was understood to depend on the personal virtue and wisdom of the lawmaker, rather than the integrity of the codified textual lineage.