Incarnation on the Roof of the World: A History of Practices to Identify Trülku (sprul sku) in Tibetan Buddhism.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation is a cultural history of practices used to identify certain children as trülkus (Tib. sprul sku; Mong. khubilgan; Ch. huofo 活佛). Trülku were elevated as religious and political authorities in Tibetan cultural regions beginning in the thirteenth century and continuing today. The practices used to identify trülku adapted and grew as this institution grew in religious, social, political, and economic importance across Inner Asia, from practices that were extremely local in scale in the early period to large scale, public examination and blind texts in the later period. New practices were innovated to satisfy competing sources of trans-regional authority, such as the identification and testing of multiple candidates during the rapid growth of new trülku lineages during the escalation of early Géluk-Kagyu confrontations of the 15th century and the extension of new Qing imperial policies aimed at centralizing imperial authority and foreign relations at the end of the 18th century. During each new period of growth, older and more local practices of identification endured, such as dream interpretation and analyzing the self-statements and unusual behavior of young children. This multi-sited and comparative study of practices to identify the enlightened among human children over eight centuries offers new insight into wider themes in religious and political history in Tibetan Buddhism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".