The Dalai Lamas are a Geluk incarnation line whose Ganden Podrang government ruled Tibet from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century. It was the Third Dalai Lama, Sonam Gyatso, who was given the title of Dalai Lama by the leader of the Tumet Mongols, Altan Khan, which was posthumously applied to his previous incarnations, Gendun Drub and Gendun Gyatso. The Fourth Dalai Lama's Mongolian heritage cemented the Geluk-Mongol alliance, and with the Fifth Dalai Lama, the governance of Tibet by the Dalai Lamas began. It was the Fifth who also shifted the Dalai Lama’s residence from Ganden Podrang at Drepung Monastery to the newly constructed Potala Palace in Lhasa, henceforth the seat of the Tibetan government. The Thirteenth Dalai Lama declared independence from Beijing and ruled as head of a sovereign state. In 1950 Chinese forces occupied the country and the Fourteenth Dalai Lama fled to India, where he still lives in exile.
Biographies
The Fifth Dalai Lama, Ngawang Lobzang Gyatso
b.1617 - d.1682
The Fifth Dalai Lama, Ngawang Lobzang Gyatso, popularly known "The Great Fifth", was the first Dalai Lama to assume political rule of Tibet, forging lasting alliances with Mongol armies and the Qing court in China. He was both a brilliant tactician and a religious thinker, authoring numerous commentaries and ritual manuals, as well as histories and biographies. Although responsible for considerable sectarian violence and Geluk hegemony, including the suppression in Tibet of the Jonang tradition and the forcible conversion of many monasteries to the Geluk faith, the Fifth Dalai Lama never abandoned his family’s Nyingma affiliations, and he sponsored the establishment or renovation of several Nyingma monasteries. The great palace of Potala that he built as his residence and seat in Lhasa was named after that bodhisattva’s pure land, Potalaka, a naming that contributed to the dissemination of the identification of the Dalai Lama as an emanation of Avalokiteśvara.
