page_title: 5th Dalai Lama
section_title: Relations with the Panchen Lama
hierarchical_section_title: 5th Dalai Lama / Monastic life / Relations with the Panchen Lama
caption_attribution_description: For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. Taschilumpo [Tashilhunpo], Tempelhof im Kloster Taschilumpo [Tashilhunpo]
context_page_description: Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso was the 5th Dalai Lama and the first Dalai Lama to wield effective temporal and spiritual power over all Tibet. He is often referred to simply as the Great Fifth, being a key religious and temporal leader of Tibetan Buddhism and Tibet. Gyatso is credited with unifying all Tibet under the Ganden Phodrang after a Mongol military intervention which ended a protracted era of civil wars. As an independent head of state, he established relations with Qing Empire and other regional countries and also met early European explorers. Gyatso also wrote 24 volumes' worth of scholarly and religious works on a wide range of subjects.
context_section_description: Lobsang Chökyi Gyaltsen (1570–1662), the Panchen Lama and the first to be accorded this title during his lifetime, was the tutor and a close ally of the 5th Dalai Lama, who, according to Thubten Jigme Norbu and Hugh E. Richardson, declared or pronounced the Panchen to be 'an incarnation of Dhayani Buddha Amitābha' – although other sources all appear to indicate that he was considered as such from the start.
  After the 5th Dalai Lama returned from China, on a teaching tour of Tsang he visited his senior tutor and close friend the elderly Panchen Lama at Tashilhunpo to receive lineage transmissions which he still lacked and at this point he requested the Panchen to accept Tashilhunpo Monastery, built by the 1st Dalai Lama, as his multi-lifetime seat for future incarnations.
  Since then, every incarnation of the Panchen Lama has been the master of Tashilhunpo Monastery and it is there that they have all received their education and their mummified bodies were enshrined.
  When Panchen Gyaltsen died in 1662 at 93, the 5th Dalai Lama immediately commenced the tradition of searching for his next incarnation.  He composed a special prayer asking his master "to return" and directed the monks of Tibet's great monasteries to recite it. He also reserved the traditional title of Panchen (short for Pandita chen po "Great Scholar") – which had previously been a courtesy title for all exceptionally learned lamas – exclusively for the Panchen Lama and his successors (and, for those who consider him the 4th Panchen, for his three predecessors as well). He had also predicted that Gyaltsen would continue to be reincarnated in future as the 'Panchen Lama'.
  The two had a teacher/disciple relationship going back to the 1st Dalai Lama Gendun Drup and his teacher Khedrup Je, considered by some in retrospect as the 1st Panchen Lama. From the time of the 5th the two offices were known as Yab Sey Gonpo or "Father/Son Protectors" characterising their spiritual provenance as emanations of Amitābha and Avalokitesvara as well as their interchangeable guru/disciple relationship. This continued, lifetime after lifetime well into the 20th century with whichever was elder becoming the teacher of the younger, giving both monastic ordination and passing on tantric lineage transmissions.
caption: Tashilhunpo Monastery, 1938 Tibet expedition photograph by Ernst Schäfer in German Federal Archives.
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