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E-book
Author Bell, Christopher (Religious studies scholar), author.

Title The Dalai Lama and the Nechung Oracle / Christopher Bell
Published New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021]
©2021

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Description 1 online resource (xiv, 313 pages) : color illustrations
Contents Note on Tibetan Transcription -- Introduction -- 1. Pehar and the Five King Spirits -- 2. The Fifth Dalai Lama's God -- 3. The Central Rituals -- 4. The Liturgical Calendar -- 5. Nechung Monastery -- 6I. Institutional Networks -- 7. The Nechung Oracle -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index
Summary "This book is about two immortals whose friendship has spanned nearly five hundred years across the Tibetan plateau and beyond. The first immortal is the Dalai Lama, the emanation of a bodhisattva, an enlightened being who voluntarily takes rebirth in the world to benefit sentient beings. The second immortal is a wrathful god named Pehar, who has possessed the Nechung Oracle since the sixteenth century. This book is the first to examine the relationship between these two monolithic figures that began in the seventeenth century during the reign of the Fifth Dalai Lama (1617-1682). This study is also the first extensive examination of the famed Nechung Oracle and his institution. In the seventeenth century, the protector deity Pehar and his oracle at Nechung Monastery were state-sanctioned by the nascent Tibetan government, becoming the head of an expansive pantheon of worldly deities assigned to protect the newly unified country. While the Fifth Dalai Lama and his government endorsed Pehar as part of his larger unification project, the governments of later Dalai Lamas continued to expand the deity's influence, and by extension their own, by ritually establishing Pehar at monasteries and temples around Lhasa and across Tibet. Pehar's cult at Nechung Monastery came to embody the Dalai Lama's administrative control in a mutually beneficial relationship of protection and prestige, the effects of which continue to reverberate within Tibet and among the Tibetan exile community today"-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (Oxford Scholarship Online, viewed August 12, 2021)
Subject Ngag-dbang-blo-bzang-rgya-mtsho, Dalai Lama V, 1617-1682 -- Teachings
Bstan-ʼdzin-rgya-mtsho, Dalai Lama XIV, 1935- -- Teachings
Pehar (Buddhist deity) -- Cult
SUBJECT Bstan-ʼdzin-rgya-mtsho, Dalai Lama XIV, 1935- fast
Ngag-dbang-blo-bzang-rgya-mtsho, Dalai Lama V, 1617-1682 fast
Subject Nechung Monastery (Dharmsāla, India)
SUBJECT Nechung Monastery (Dharmsāla, India) fast
Subject Lamas -- History
Lamas -- Lineage.
Nechung oracles.
Cults
Lamas
Lamas -- Lineage
Teachings
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2020041261
ISBN 0197533361
9780197533383
0197533388
9780197533376
019753337X
9780197533369