Teacher of Teachers

The Magical Play of Illusion: The Autobiography of Trijang Rinpoche Translated by Sharpa Tulku Tenzin Trinley

Wisdom Publications, 2018 476 pages; $34.95

FOUNDED AROUND 1400 by the great master Tsongkhapa, the Geluk order of Tibetan Buddhism is famed for its rigorous scholasticism, its social conservatism, and the incarnation lineage of the Dalai Lamas, through which the Geluk dominated politics in Tibet from 1642 to 1959. The Geluk was, in effect, the Tibetan “establishment,” and as the nation endured the traumas of the twentieth century—from a British invasion in 1904 to the Chinese takeover of the 1950s to the struggle to maintain Tibetan culture both on the plateau and in diaspora after 1959—the Geluk often found themselves at the center of the storm of events.

Few Tibetans viewed Tibet’s twentieth-century history from as lofty will be welcomed by anyone interested in Tibet’s recent political and religious history or in Tibetan Buddhism more generally.