The ’go ba'i lha – usually translated with “personal protective deities” – are often approached as an integral part of Tibetan popular or folk religion. Typically five in number, these gods are said to be born with an individual, to reside in his or her body, and to protect various facets of his or her existence. As for the etymology of ’go ba'i lha, while “protective deities” is the dominant translation, it remains a highly communicative and contextual gloss of ’go, whose attested meanings do not include “to protect”. The present contribution offers a new analysis of the verb ’go based on attestations in Old Tibetan texts from Dunhuang from the ninth and tenth centuries. In doing so, the article not only proposes a new etymology of ’go ba'i lha, but also touches on the changing relationship between Tibetans and their gods over time.

Of all the myriad aspects of Indian learning to be incorporated into Tibetan Buddhist scholarship, one of the least likely would seem to be the Indian science of sensual pleasure, kāmaśāstra. Even so, we do find traces of Sanskrit kāmaśāstra transposed into Tibetan Buddhist idiom. The most innovative example is the Treatise on Passion (’Dod pa'i bstan bcos) written by Ju Mipam Jamyang Namgyel Gyatso (1846–1912). This article investigates the reasons why the polymath monastic scholar Ju Mipam included kāmaśāstra in his expansive literary output, as well as his sources and influences for doing so. It argues that Mipam's work builds on an intertextuality already apparent in late medieval Sanskrit tantric and kāmaśāstric works, but one that took on new importance in the context of the non-biased outlook (Tib. ris med) that characterized Ju Mipam's nineteenth-century eastern Tibetan milieu.

One early spring afternoon in 1982 I happened to find myself ambling along Fuzhou Road in Shanghai and coming by chance upon a small unattractive bookstore. The brown paint on its outer doors was peeling, the stucco surface of its exterior needed a good scrubbing, and more than a few tiles on its floor were broken. If then no different in appearance from the other bookstores I had earlier visited along this famous Shanghai book street, this store nonetheless boasted a strikingly different kind of stock: it specialized in selling second-hand Western books. While novels abounded on its shelves, the pre-war variety in hardback and the more recent in paperback, one thick non-fiction volume caught my eye. Entitled Domesday Book and Beyond, this classic 1887 treatment of early English history by the great English legal historian Frederic W. Maitland had long been on my reading list. Somehow a copy of it had ended up in this unpromising bookshop. When I opened the virtually virgin pages of this copy and noticed that it could be bought for a proverbial song, I readily leapt to the temptation and acquired it with delight.

During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, people in north China took advantage of a Mongol policy that gave Buddhist officials a status equivalent to what civil officials enjoyed, as a strategy for family advancement. Monk Zhang Zhiyu and his family provide a case study of an emerging influential Buddhist order based at Mount Wutai that connected the Yuan regime with local communities through the kinship ties of prominent monks. Within this Buddhist order, powerful monks like Zhiyu used their prestigious positions in the clerical world to help the upward social mobility of their lay families, displaying a distinctive pattern of interpenetration between Buddhism and family. This new pattern also fit the way that northern Chinese families used Buddhist structures such as Zunsheng Dhāranῑ pillars and private Buddhist chapels to record their genealogies and consolidate kinship ties.