Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyel
Bhutanese Lama (1594-1651) / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyel, (1594–1651) known colloquially as The Bearded Lama, was a Tibetan Buddhist lama and the unifier of Bhutan as a nation-state. In addition to unifying the various warring fiefdoms for the first time in the 1630s, he also sought a distinct Bhutanese cultural identity separate from the Tibetan culture from which it was derived.[1]