And, if you read the article, you would see that one of the major points is that the Dalai Lama has dissolved that connection (head of religion - head of state) only relatively recently.

Calling Tibet a 'tribe' is also a little bit strange, and smacks of the way Chinese propaganda reduces the legitimacy of Tibet's claim to nationhood (and even legitimate personhood), despite Tibet's governmental and territorial sovereignty from at least 1200 AD onward. Your claim that the "[Dalai Lama] is succeeding...at conflating religion and politics" is the direct Communist Party line, even though that is being directly contradicted by the source article.

My personal reading of the article is that the Dalai Lama gave up on statehood in the 80s, and is primarily focused on preserving Tibetan culture, despite the persistent claim that he is a "wolf in sheep's clothing", and that "every word he speaks is a lie".

The Dalai Lama is considered by religious Tibetans to be the incarnation of Avalokiteshvara, the Tibetan Buddhist deity that personifies compassion. So your question makes about as much sense as asking what Jesus has to do with Christianity.

The Dalai Lama has abdicated political leadership to the Tibetan Parliament in Exile and only retains a leadership role as head of the Gelugpa sect. He still speaks to the human rights abuses and political oppression of Tibetans but his proposal is a "Middle Way" which would preserve Chinese rule but give Tibetans some autonomy and representation in governing Tibet.

Which seeks to be combined theological and political state in the vein of Russian czars, Japanese emperors, North Korea, and countless other ruling parties. You can even argue Great Britain still abides by this.

> we would not confound Iranian political independence with Shia Islam

Why would we not? They are 2 sides of the same coin. Religion is quite often the basis of political power such as in Iran.

Distance in terms of belief and time. The most 'orthodox' and also the oldest extant sect is Theravada Buddhism (mainly centred around Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, but also with historic temples in India and elsewhere), although there is also the argument that some of the older Mahayana sects may have some succession to the Mahasamghika, but strictly speaking the oldest references to the 'Mahayana' are from the 1st century BCE, and the Theravada can be traced to the 3rd century BCE.

Anyhow, Tibetan Buddhism came as a result of various influences, including Indian Tantric Buddhist missionaries (Tantric beliefs, which originate in Saivism, a cult within Hinduism, appeared in Buddhist texts from the 3rd century CE onward, and of course don't appear in early Buddhist texts), the native Bon religion (animistic and shamanistic), and then-current Mahayana Buddhism. The origins of Tibetan Buddhism are fairly well documented, with Buddhism reaching Tibet in the 7th century CE, and it being adopted as the state religion in the 8th century CE.

> Who in Buddhism would you count as a peer, or someone more important than the Dalai Lama, in the present day?

Buddhism isn't supposed to have a central leader. It's supposed to be centred on the teachings of the Buddha, although there are prominent monks with fairly wide influence in all the major schools.

It's kind of like in Christianity. Prior to the great schism, you had the unified Orthodox/Catholic church which had 5 Patriarchs (Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria). Rome split and became huge and monolithic, the Orthodox were less centralised so when they spread, they established more 'Patriarchates' with more or less equal importance to the historic ones; in addition to the Patriarchs of Constantinople (New Rome), Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, you also have Patriarchs of Moscow (3rd Rome), Georgia, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria, in addition to Archbishops and so on. So even though Orthodox Christianity is nearly as widespread as Catholicism (arguably more widespread in the 'old world'), they don't have a visible 'leader' because of the flat power structure.

Tibetan Buddhism adopted a more vertical power structure because the Dalai Lama's sect eventually achieved political power over Tibet, whereas other schools of Buddhism maintained the flat power structure that existed in early Buddhism.

> Whatever the reason he became famous for, he's probably done probably the single most influential figure to influence the West's familiarity and understanding of Buddhism.

Familiarity yes, but not understanding. There have been many other Buddhist teachers who have actually brought the religion to the west (not only from Theravada, Mahayana, Ch'an, Zen and Vajrayana schools, but also from different sects of Tibetan Buddhism). Tibetan Buddhism contains some tantric beliefs which most westerners wouldn't even recognize as Buddhist, for example, consort practice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karmamudr%C4%81.

Edit - should also add, Tibetan Buddhism/Vajranaya has the fewest adherents of the major schools, making it the least important Buddhist school as far as demographics go. Mahayana Buddhism (Zen/Ch'an, Pure Land, and other smaller Mahayana sects/regional variations) has the highest number of adherents, although is fragmented and many adherents may also follow other religions like Taoism and Shintoism. Theravada is probably the largest school with the most consistent teachings across its regional variations (150 million adherents). By contrast, there's 3 million people in Tibet, perhaps 10 million people worldwide who nominally belong to a Vajrayana Buddhist sect (including Tibetan exiles)...

That doesn't make him the head of Buddhism, unless you also believe Pizza Hut is the head of Italian cuisine, or ManchuWok is the leader of Chinese food.

Buddhism is not a hierarchical religion like Catholicism. If a monk seeks power/fame or participate in political struggle, he's not practicing true Buddhism.

I suspect most Tibetans were rather worse off during the Cultural Revolution than in the quasi-feudal system that existed before. I'm not entirely convinced they're necessarily worse off today, but the Tibetan refugees risking their lives walking across the Himalayas into an exile where they get to "meet the Lama" couldn't really be any less focused on geopolitics...

I'm not aware of any parallel Cherokee diaspora.

I don't think the Uighurs' preferences for their own cultural practices is anything to do with them paying any attention to the US either.

For the US government, whatever it does is always about its interests, because that's what governments are about.

However, that's just the reason why being a small nation sucks, like any resident of a small country can tell you. Sometimes their plight even manages to gather some popular sympathy[, but as Dalai Lama can tell you, it doesn't help much anything]. The lucky ones are who happen to succeed at gaming at least two great powers against each other, instead of being surrounded by one large or its sphere of power, who will merrily invade you if it strikes their fancy.

IANAHistorian, and am likely well out of my depth here, but I'd venture a guess that the influence worked in both directions, due to overlap in philosophical positions. For example, from the Dalai Lama:

Both Buddhism and science prefer to account for the evolution and emergence of the cosmos and life in terms of the complex interrelations of the natural laws of cause and effect. From the methodological perspective, both traditions emphasize the role of empiricism. For example, in the Buddhist investigative tradition, between the three recognized sources of knowledge - experience, reason and testimony - it is the evidence of the experience that takes precedence, with reason coming second and testimony last.[1]

[0]http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/how-davi... [1]http://www.dalailama.com/messages/buddhism/science-at-the-cr...

Here's a good book on the subject:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195183274/

> This sweeping and sophisticated analysis of the ways in which westerners and Asians alike have constructed new forms of Buddhism under the pressures of modernity is thoroughly disillusioning, in the best sense of the word. McMahan shows that much of what has been written and said about Buddhism in the modern era only can be understood against the background of dominant western discourses.

This is astonishing. Can you let us know which buddhist principles were invented by white folks (and by whom) in the past 150 years.

Invented by white folks? What? Did you perhaps mean they made it mainstream for white people by giving it a western flavor?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Uyghur_Congress

So please don't tell me there is no interest. If the US government was impartial then they would at least refrain from funding this group as it is not their business to interfere in internal conflicts of foreign countries without UN resolution.

> it's pretty insulting to their culture to imagine they'd be freely and happily assimilating Han Chinese culture

China has pretty strong minority rights and the Uyghurs even have their own autonomous region.

But aside from that: No one will happily assimilate. The strong will always crush the weak. Did the native Americans happily assimilate? I heard there were 100 million of them before the settlers came. Where have they gone?

Edit: Nowhere did I insinuate that they would happily assimilate. Aside from that, this is not only a thing that authoritarian regimes do.

In the EU it currently seems as if every politician is thinking about how to assimilate the Muslims. Trust me, no one is going to ask them if they want to assimilate.

They will be forced. And this in a full fledged democracy.

There was no religious or ethnical union, of that I am 100% sure, and I'm also not convinced of nationalism there.

The unifying ideology was socialism/communism.

It is understandable why this did work so well in a country with no clear religious or ethnic majority because it tends to flat out deny any ethnic/cultural differences and restrict religions and places instead the socialist ideal in the center. (all are equal)

Once nationalism was on the rise it was the end of Yugoslavia. Now in place of being a socialist comrade everyone was either Serb, Croat, Bosnian and so on and demanded their own state.

And the fact Borobudur was only excavated in the mid 1800s and wasn't reconstructed until recently isn't exactly evidence that it was still considered an important part of the religion before then.

This article doesn't have anything to do with Western Buddhism. It's about how what people currently believe/practice as Buddhism in Asia comes from the west.

The point is that before 150 years ago there was no core set of ideas that could really be distilled into what we think of as Buddhism today. Rather there were just different peoples worshipping different local gods. Westerners then went to Asia and translated a smattering of ancient texts and then went around and told the local people that they were practicing their religion wrong, and what they should actually do/believe instead is X, Y, Z. That's what modern buddhism is, and then Western Buddhism is an offshoot of that which was designed to appeal to Americans as a practice. (As opposed to being designed to appeal to westerners as a reason not to genocide various Asian populations.)

If you are actually curious about this topic, I would suggest you look up the importance of lineage in the Tibetan, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Mongolian, and Japanese traditions. Warm hand to warm hand, as it is called, is extremely important. Lineage is legitimacy, and it's always the first line of defense against charlatans. That means that the most important thing in those actual traditions is where a practice comes from and who the teacher is (and their teacher, and theirs, etc.). It's even fair to say that the de-emphasis of lineage and tradition exists only in "Western" or "Mainstream" Buddhism.

If you're curious, Buddhist Geeks has long been far from the academic mainstream and has more recently gone much, much farther out.