The seventh century reign of Songtsen Gampo, Tibet’s first Buddhist emperor, remains one of the most contentious issues in Tibetan historiography. As the royal founder of both the city of Lhasa and the earliest Buddhist temples on the Plateau, Songtsen Gampo is credited with overseeing the creation of Tibet’s first written script as well as its first written laws. In later hidden ‘treasure texts’ such as the Pillar Testament and the Compendium of Manis, he is described as invoking illusory monks, craftsmen, soldiers, and executioners to do his royal bidding, as well as ritually subduing the ‘she-demoness’ of Tibet in order to found the Jokhang temple at Lhasa. By contrast, near-contemporary dynastic records – not least the Old Tibetan Annals, as unearthed at Dunhuang – provide a more prosaic view of his rule. The overt clash between these two different kinds of account have led to strident dismissals of the later visionary narratives as demonstrating an inability to distinguish fact from myth (Vostrikov), as being revised in terms of later Buddhist doctrine (Huber), as the partisan glorification of an ancestral monarch (Sørensen), and as metaphors for patriarchal gender relations (Gyatso).

While each of these insights have some truth to them, their upshot is to set such accounts aside as any kind of reliable history and to relegate them to the domain of folklore. This talk will approach the issue from a slightly different perspective: Rather than concentrating on the truth or falsity of Songtsen Gampo’s life, it will delve into what such texts tell us about the historiographic intentions of the authors. How did the authors wish their readership to understand history and political agency as more general concepts? How did they think history should be written and understood? The answers, I would suggest, may give us some insight into an indigenous Tibetan understanding of history that transcends the European divide between religion and politics.