The Fifth Dalai Lama’s Visionary Autobiography

Record summary

The Fifth Dalai Lama’s autobiographical writings, especially the Dukula, describe dreams, visions, ritual experiences, omens, and encounters interpreted within Geluk, Nyingma, and broader Tibetan Buddhist frameworks. They are valuable for comparing elite religious authority, dream practice, deity visualization, political prophecy, and retrospective self-fashioning. The texts are unusually close to an identifiable historical figure but remain literary, devotional, and institutionally situated. Translation, manuscript versions, editorial layers, and the distinction between ordinary dreams and ritual visions require specialist verification.