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An ironic consequence of the Chinese invasion of Tibet is the wave of missionary activity it produced. Up until the 20th century, Tibet remained stubbornly closed to outsiders. As late as the 1940’s, intrepid aventurers like Heinrich Herrer and Alexandra David-Neel found it difficult to enter. This is not to say Tibetan teachers didn’t missionize. Important masters ministered to the imperial dynasties of China. As I mentioned, a prominent white stupa stands in the heart of Beijing close to the Forbidden City, the palace of the Qing emperors. On the outskirts of Beijing, at the Qing summer palace, there is a prominent shrine with large statues of the Dalai lama, Panchen lama, and Je Tsong Khapa, the founder of the Dalai Lama’s school of Buddhism, the Gelugpa. Both the Dalai Lamas and Panchen Lamas instructed the Qing rulers in Tibetan Buddhism. Likewise, the Dalai lamas and the Karmapa lamas taught China’s Mongol rulers. What is different post-invasion is the beginning of Tibetan missionizing beyond East Asia. It’s as if Tibet was being forced to share its teachings with the rest of the world. In exile, a series of high masters such as the 14th Dalai Lama and the 16th Karmapa, began addressing large audiences in Europe, the Americas, and the Indian subcontinent.

Funnily enough, this missionizing continues to follow the dichotomy of monks, nuns, and lamas versus laypeople as well as the theme of a “closed Tibet”. In most of the North American dharma centres I have visited, the people who attend are almost always westerners or East Asian (often from mainland China, Taiwan, Malaysia, or Vietnam). The only Tibetans are the monks, nuns, and lamas, and even then, they may not be Tibetan depending on the monasteries they come from. If they come from monasteries in Northern India or Nepal, they are often Sherpa, Tamang, or sundry other Himalayan ethnicities related to the Tibetans.

The legacy of the Rimé plays an important role in this missionizing. Tibetan teachers have sometimes had an uncanny ability to anticipate things and the Rimé collection of Buddhist texts in the 19th century and their practice of ecumenism was, well, timely. The Chinese invasion in the 1950’s and the ensuing destruction wrought by the Cultural Revolution in the 1960’s and 70’s threatened to destroy a huge part of Tibetan religious heritage.