ruler, Phagmodu, about 135o A.D., succeeded in taking away the strictly lay power from the monks, and his dynasty was recognised by the Imperial Court at Pekin, but by the middle of the fifteenth century his course seems to have been run. Indeed, while his family were yet on the throne, there were several great monasteries exercising independent lordship over the properties belonging to them, independent except as they were subject to the overlord in Pekin. As against the royal authority in Tibet, they constituted a true imperium in imperio. Monastic orders were constantly recruiting from the body of the people, hence their organisation was not subject to the deterioration of luxury which saps every royal family, determines dynastic changes, and would overthrow monarchy itself were its principles not so important to certain societies that instinctively there develops a ruling aristocracy or family or class which yet declares itself as acting only in the name of royal decoy—awaiting a resurrection of kingly merit, or a revolution.
It is worthy of remark that Phagmodu, the founder of the kingly power just mentioned, was in the maximum of his activity when the great Mongol dynasty, founded by Jenghiz Khan, was in the agonies of dissolution, its last representative (1333-1368 A.D.), Shun-te, presenting the perfect type of the royal scion debauched by inherited power and luxury.
The Ming dynasty, of true Chinese blood, flourished and weakened, falling before the present Manchu rulers in 1644. A.D. The affairs of Tibet, as to governmental authority, were much complicated during all of this period. Religious considera-
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