Indian Buddhist sources speak of five sins of immediate retribution: murder of mother, father, an arhat, drawing the blood of a buddha, and creating a schism in the monastic community. This category provides the paradigm for sinfulness in Buddhism. Yet even these sins can and will, be expiated in the long run, demonstrating the overwhelmingly positive nature of Buddhist ethics.

This study examines thirteenth to twentieth century Tibetan and Mongolian monastic memorializations of the bodily violence enacted upon Köten Ejen at the center of the “Buddhist conversion of the Mongols.” Koten Ejen (Tib. Lha sras go tan rgyal po, 1206–1251) was Chinggis Khan’s grandson and a military leader involved in Mongol campaigns against the Song Dynasty and against Buddhist monasteries in eastern Tibet. In 1240, Koten famously summoned the Central Tibetan Buddhist polymath Sakya Pandita, by then already an old man, (...) to his court at Liangzhou. Examining Tibetan and Mongolian accounts about their meeting from the last seven centuries, this study shows that it was neither compelling philosophy nor some turn of faith that converted the Mongols. It was, rather, Sakya Pandita’s violent therapeutic intervention into the space of Koten’s ill body that wrenched the Mongol body politic into the Dharmic fold. (shrink)