The Precious Lord: The history and practice of the cult of the jo bo Sakyamuni in Lhasa, Tibet

From the eleventh century to the present, the Jowo (jo bo) S akayamuni statue, the "palladium of Tibet" has served as a perduring index of Tibetan Buddhist ecclesiastical history. Tibetan writers employed the Jowo as a discursive site where religio-political paradigms were negotiated and transformed through accounts of ritual observance and visions received. This is the first extensive study of the history and cult of the Jowo, which devotees call, "Precious Lord" (jo bo rin po che).;Though some Tibetans believe the Buddha Sakayamuni created the Jowo in India in his own lifetime (c. 484-404 B.C.E.) as an indexical envoy for the benefit of Tibetans, and that the Jowo arrived in Tibet around 641 C.E., there is no reliable evidence for his existence prior to the late eleventh century. A close reading of the earliest Jowo-narratives in Tibetan historical literature, especially the Pronouncement of Ba (Sba bzhed), Vase-shaped Pillar Testament (Bka' chems ka khol ma), and Mirror Illuminating the Royal Genealogies (Rgyal rabs gsal ba'i me long), demonstrates the evolution of the significance of the jowo from a Chinese dowry item to the Tibetan national palladium.;The etiology of the Jowo, the death and absence of the Buddha, connects him to the pan-Asian practice of venerating specific images as the supposed unique "First Image of the Buddha.";The Jowo dwells in the Central Chapel (Gtsang khang dbus ma) of the Rasa Trulnang Temple (Ra sa 'Phrul snang gtsug lag khang ), also called the Jokhang. This study contains the first investigation of the history and significance of the renovations to the Jowo's chapel in the period of the thirteenth through twentieth centuries.;In 1409, Tsongkhapa Lozang Drakpa crowned the Jowo, changing his doctrinal and iconographic representations. A multidisciplinary perspective, combining texts, photographs, and ethnographic interviews in Tibet, Nepal, and India, explicates the controversial implications of the Jowo's appearance, and serves as a model for the study of Tibetan lived religion.;This work serves as paradigm for future research into Tibetan Buddhist material culture, an urgent desideratum in Tibetan Studies, as well as a contribution to the nascent study of Tibetan "living images."...