Delivering the Lotus-Born

Traditionally recognized as the first of the great Buddhist treasure revealers, Nyang-rel Nyima Ozer (1124-1192) historiographically reconstructed the Imperium into a golden age of Tibetan Buddhism. An analysis of his two early biographies demonstrates that he was among the first to recall an unbroken series of preincarnations in real historical time, which was a crucial link that led to the ascension of concatenated reincarnates like the Karmapas and Dalai Lamas. For Nyang-rel, his past life as emperor Tri Song-detsen (d. 800) provided the teleological karmic basis for his life as a finder of the old texts and relics deemed "treasure." According to his biographies and the two narratives that are attributed to him, Nyang-rel's treasures were uniformly material objects extracted via quite mundane methods, though the discovery of old manuscripts seems to have been only an initial step in a process of compilation, redaction and composition that resulted in their reintroduction.