Too often, general histories of Tibet are religious histories, recapitulations of the chos ’byung, or “sources of the dharma,” the indigenous histories of the origin and spread of Buddhism in Tibet. Or, to the extent that a history of Tibet avoids leading the reader through the vagaries of the factions and subfactions of Tibetan Buddhism and does, in fact, include political, social, and economic change, it often starts at the beginning—in imperial Tibet of the seventh century—and proceeds to march dutifully through time to the twentieth century, when history comes to an abrupt end in 1950. There, the reader is often left wondering what happened, what fundamentally changed at that moment in time. Not so for Peter Schwieger's Conflict in a Buddhist Society: Tibet under the Dalai Lamas. Schwieger adopts a social scientific, thematic approach to Tibetan history and leaves the reader with a satisfying answer to the...
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