At the turn of the nineteenth century the ruler of the powerful kingdom of Dergé in Eastern Tibet was the queen Tsewang Lhamo (d. 1812). This paper explores two epistles written for her by chaplains to the royal family. The conventions of advice for Buddhist kings written from the perspective of exoteric Buddhism are well known to scholars. These Tibetan epistles differ for being addressed to a woman and for operating out of a tantric ethical framework. The two works challenge the mainstream Buddhist views of the inferior spiritual and worldly capabilities of women in terms of esoteric doctrine and mythical precedents of the Buddha’s past lives as women. Several key passages from the epistles will be highlighted in this paper. The normative claims made in the letters will be augmented with a profile of the political career and posthumous reputation of this unusually well documented female monarch.
Jann Ronis studied religion, Tibetan studies, Sinology, and the Tibetan and Chinese languages at the University of Virginia. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 2009 for a dissertation about developments in the monasteries of eastern Tibet, along the border between Tibet and China, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At Berkeley, Dr. Ronis is researching the twelfth and thirteenth century formation of an important ritual tradition in Tibetan Buddhism — the Kagye (bka’ brgyad), or Eight Dispensations in an effort to better understand the domestication of Buddhism in Tibet.
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