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Something similar could be said about the Chinese communists. The Red Army and cadres entering Tibet acted like missionaries. They brought the secular gospels of Mao and Marx to the “pre-modern heathen” whose original sin was being mired in “feudalism”. The goal of the Communist party was and remains delivering Tibetans to a worker’s utopia, a Marxist version of heaven. And like any group of missionaries, the engagement of Maoist cadres with Tibetans likely deepened their sense of purpose as evangelists of a secular socialism. Thus, the famous photos of Mao walking with the young Dalai lama and Panchen lama, the gurus of imperial China, in the young People’s Republic, are rife with significance.

Interestingly, tibetan missionizing has a different flavour and once again, it seems to revolve around the dichotomy of monastics and laypeople. The people doing the missionizing are almost always monastic. Consequently, Tibetan missionizing seems to be less about building identity. I suspect much of the forming of identities for Tibetan Buddhist monks, nuns, and lamas occurs within monasteries and the debates between the different schools of Tibetan Buddhism. There are four schools of Buddhism in Tibet, as well as the school of indigenous tradition, the Bon. Each has its own established traditions and within each, debate and philosophical studies are a key component.

As part of their education, monks, nuns, and lamas debate a range of Buddhist and Hindu philosophocal positions. This allows them to deepen both their knowledge of teachings and their sense of being Buddhist or Bon. This training is formidable and it’s notable that the Maoist cadres were often unprepared for the rhetorical sophistication of the monks in the monasteries.