King Trisong Detsen took Yeshe Tsogyal as one of his queens before offering her to Padmasambhava as a spiritual consort, recognizing her extraordinary capacity for tantric practice.
King Trisong Detsen is regarded as a human emanation of Vajrapani, the bodhisattva of power, his royal authority and military might serving as the worldly expression of Vajrapani's wrathful force to establish and protect the dharma in Tibet.
Padmasambhava, Shantarakshita, and King Trisong Detsen formed the trio that brought Buddhism to Tibet — the king provided royal authority, the abbot provided monastic discipline, and the tantric master subdued the hostile spirits that had blocked every prior attempt.
King Trisong Detsen summoned the Indian abbot Shantarakshita to build Tibet's first monastery, but hostile spirits tore down each night what was raised by day until the tantric master Padmasambhava was called to subdue them, and together the three founders raised Samye — a stone mandala of the Buddhist cosmos with Utse temple as Mount Meru at its center.
The Three Dharma Kings of Tibet are Songtsen Gampo, who first brought Buddhism to Tibet, Trisong Detsen, who established it through Padmasambhava and the founding of Samye, and Tri Ralpachen, whose extreme devotion provoked his assassination and ended the imperial era.
King Trisong Detsen convened the Great Debate at Samye after Shantarakshita prophesied that a Chinese doctrine would threaten the dharma and urged that his student Kamalashila be summoned from India to defend the gradualist path against the Chan master Moheyan's teaching of sudden enlightenment — a contest the king ruled in favor of the Indian position, binding Tibetan Buddhism to the Indian scholastic tradition.
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