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Buddha was purely human to himself and his contemporaries. The ascription of divinity to the Tibetan Grand Lamas is a product of the transformation of Buddhism under the influence of a crude non-Aryan population that retained the old conception of the essential identity of nature of men and gods.
After the persecution of the tenth century Tibetan Buddhism was revived by the preaching of monks from Bengal. More celebrated is the mission of Atîsa, a monk of the Vikramaśila monastery, which took place about 1038. That these two missions should have been invited and despatched shows that in the eleventh century Bengal was a centre of Buddhist learning.
The Tibetan historian Târanâtha is not of much help, for his chronology is most confused, but still he definitely connects the appearance of Mahayanist texts with the reign of Kanishka and the period immediately following it and regards them as a new phenomenon. Greater assistance is furnished by the Chinese translators, whose dates are known with some exactitude.
The Tibetan Lama Târanâtha who completed his History of Indian Buddhism in 1608 is a less satisfactory authority. He merits attention but also scepticism and caution. His work is a compilation but is not to be despised on that ground, for the Tibetan translations of Sanskrit works offer a rich mine of information about the history of the Mahayana.
"But they are such cowards," declared one of the Tibetan officers, "they will run away." All this talk suddenly stopped when we heard the distant tinkling of our enemies' horse-bells. I encouraged my men as best I could, but a panic began to spread among them. The Jong Pen's men came in sight. I witnessed the strange spectacle of two armies face to face, each in mortal terror of the other.
Incidentally, Tibetans fundamentally were sheep-breeders and not horse-breeders and, therefore, they always showed inclination to incorporate infantry into their armies. Thus, Tibetan states differed strongly from the aristocratically organized "Turkish" states as well as from the tribal, non-aristocratic "Mongol" states of that period.
It is typical of the long continuance of old tribal traditions that a leader of the tribe in the tenth century married a woman belonging to the family to which the khans of the Hsiung-nu and all Turkish ruling houses had belonged since 200 B.C. With the rise of the Kitan in the north and of the Tibetan state in the south, the tribe decided to seek the friendship of China.
This they accomplished by basing the new script upon Mongol, which had been invented in 1269, by Baschpa, or 'Phagspa, a Tibetan lama, acting under the direction of Kublai Khan. Baschpa had based his script upon the written language of the Ouigours, who were descendants of the Hsiung-nu, or Huns.
I pitched my tent in a poplar grove for a fortnight, near the Moravian compounds and close to the travellers' bungalow, in which is a British Postal Agency, with a Tibetan postmaster who speaks English, a Christian, much trusted and respected, named Joldan, in whose intelligence, kindness, and friendship I found both interest and pleasure.
"This is indeed unexpected!" she declared, extending her hand. "How do you do, Captain Ratcliffe? You will understand our surprise when I tell you that some one was saying only the other day that you had entered a Tibetan monastery." "Some one must have been telling a lie, dear Lady Bassett," said Nick. "I am sorry if it caused you any uneasiness on my account.
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