Khenpo Kunga

A lucid and landmark translation that offers an intriguing glimpse into Tibetan history, the Mongol Empire, and the spiritual development and remarkable lives of the early luminaries of the Sakya lineage of Tibetan Buddhism.

In this first of two volumes of The Amazing Treasury of the Sakya Lineage, translators Khenpo Kunga Sherab and Matthew W. King capture a truly remarkable period in Buddhist and Asian history. Here, Ameshab Ngakwang Kunga Sonam (1597-1659), a member of the Khon aristocracy and the twenty-seventh throne holder of Sakya Monastery, offers a narrative that recounts the lives of numerous iconic leaders of the Sakya school of Tibetan Buddhism during the transformational period between the tenth and fourteenth centuries. This landmark volume reconstructs that long era of religious and political innovation and upheaval through the rise of the Mongol Empire.

In this book, you’ll see how Sakya Buddhist leaders emerged in this early period as translators, adopters, arbiters, and innovators of newly circulating Indian Buddhist scholastic and tantric cultures. In the thirteenth century, when the Mongol Empire forever transformed medieval Eurasia, leaders of the Sakya school became confidants and tutors to some of its most powerful leaders. The biographies of numerous Sakya luminaries are retold here, like Sakya Pandita and Phakpa Lodro Gyaltsen; along with their Mongol contemporaries, Koden Ejen and Qubilai Qayan, these leaders laid the groundwork for forms of patronage, religious and political sovereignty, scholasticism and tantrism, and righteous rule that would endure for the next eight centuries down to today.

Ameshab Ngakwang Kunga Sonam (A myes zhabs ngag dbang kun dga’ bsod nams, 1597-1659) was the long-serving twenty-seventh throneholder of the Sakya lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. Deeply trained in his tradition, Ameshab was ordained as a monk around 1618 and undertook extensive scholastic study. After the death of his father and brother, however, in 1620 Ameshab returned his vows and was enthroned as Sakya Trizin. In the decades that followed, Ameshab widely promoted the transmission of the Sakya tradition and mediated peace amid rising military conflict in Central Tibet. A prodigious historian, Ameshab wrote impactful histories of the Sakya school; the Lamdré, or ＂Path and Result,＂ tradition; and the Hevajra Tantra, which were read for centuries in Tibet and across the Inner Asian Buddhist world.

Khenpo Kunga Sherab was born in Lhoka, near Lhasa, Tibet, and is a monastic scholar and teacher. He is the author of several studies in Tibetan on the Abhidharma and on Middle Way philosophy. He holds several advanced monastic degrees, including the Madhyamaka diploma, and shastri, acharya, and khenpo degrees from Dzongsar Institute for Advanced Studies in Buddhist Philosophy and Research, India. Following his monastic education, in addition to taking on teaching roles at Dzongsar, from 2000-08 Khenpo Kunga served as abbot of Zurmang Monastery in Sikkim, India while teaching continuously at Dharma centers around Asia. In 2014, he received a MA and then, in 2023, a PhD in Buddhist studies from the University of Toronto. His major English-language academic work to date has examined the cultural history of practices used to identify incarnate lamas between the thirteenth and twentieth centuries. He has long been involved in teaching Buddhist meditation and philosophy in settings as diverse as traditional Tibetan monastic colleges, interfaith institutes, Dharma centers across North America and Asia, as well as university classrooms. Since 2017, he has served as Buddhist chaplain at Warkworth Correctional Institute, in addition to serving other prisons in southwestern Ontario, Canada. Since 2010, Khenpo Kunga has worked as a team member on various international research projects examining Tibetan Buddhist history with colleagues in Canada, the United States, and Asia.

Matthew W. King is Professor of Transnational Buddhism at the University of California, Riverside. He specializes in Inner Asian Buddhism with a special focus on the Tibet-Mongol interface during the Yuan and Qing periods. He has published widely on the history of Buddhist scholasticism, medicine, and institution building, and on political theory in Inner Asia. He has also explored the history of Inner Asian Buddhist interactions with circulating intellectual traditions during this period, including European natural philosophy and humanism, biomedicine, nationalism, state socialism, and Buddhist Studies. His first book, Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood: A Mongolian Monk in the Ruins of the Qing Empire (Columbia University Press, 2019), won several awards, including the American Academy of Religion’s 2020 award for Best Book in Textual Study. His most recent book is In the Forest of the Blind: The Eurasian Journey of Faxian’s Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (Columbia University Press, 2022).