When Kyabje Pabongkha first met Dagpo Rinpoche at a tsog offering ceremony in Lhasa, he cried out of reverence from beginning to end.

His attendant once demolished the small old building inhabited by Pabongkha Rinpoche while he was a way on a long tour, and constructed in its place a large ornate residence trying to rival the private quarters of the Dalai Lama.

[3] According to one 'reincarnate' lama who attended his teachings: "He was an exceptionally learned and gifted scholar, and his interpretation of the Doctrine adhered to the meaning of the Lord Buddha's words exactly.

In 1921, at Chuzang Hermitage near Lhasa, Pabongkha Rinpoche gave a historic 24-day exhibition on the Lam Rim, or "stages of the path," that was attended by around 700 people.

According to Rato Khyongla Rinpoche, who was present, noted: During that summer session several traders and at least two high government officials found their lives transformed by his eloquence: they forsook their jobs to study religion and to give themselves to meditation.

[9] When the regency of the 14th Dalai Lama was offered to Pabongkha Rinpoche, he declined to become the regent saying, "If one cannot give up the worldly dharma, then you are not a true religious person.

"[11] Pabongka attempted an alliance with Chinese warlord Liu Wenhui who controlled the opium trade as well as the Kham region.

Liu Wenhui had invaded Kham in the early 1930s, and, by breaking a truce with Lhasa, had pushed his own territory all the way to the Yangtse river.

The novelty of his approach is even clearer when we consider Pa-bong-ka's emphasis on Tara Cintamali as a secondary meditational deity, for this practice is not canonical in the strict sense of the term but comes from the pure visions of one of Pa-bong-ka's main teachers, Ta bu Pe-ma Baz-ra (sta bu padma badzra), a figure about whom very little is presently known.

He did not introduce these practices himself, for he received them from teachers such as Ta bu Pe-ma Baz-ra and Dak-po Kel-zang Kay-drub (dwag po bskal bzang mkhas grub).

This pattern, which is typical of a revival movement, also holds true for Pa-bong-ka's wide diffusion, particularly at the end of his life, of the practice of Dor-je Shuk-den as the central protector of the Ge-luk tradition.

[14] Stephan Beyer writes: P'awang kawa was undoubtedly one of the great lamas of the early twentieth century, but he was a man of contradictory passions, and he shows us two different faces when he is recalled by those who knew him.

In many ways he was truly a saint; he was sent to Ch'amdo by the central government to represent its interests and administer its Gelug monasteries, and he was sympathetic to the concerns of the K'am people over whom he had been granted jurisdiction, a scholar and an enthusiast for all aspects of Tibetan culture.

[15]Buddhist scholar Matthew Kapstein writes, "There has been a great deal of sectarian dispute among Tibetan refugees in India.

Much of this has its roots in the works of Pha-bong-kha-pa Bde-chen snying-po (1878–1937), whose visions of the Dge-lugs-pa protective deity Rdo-rje shugs-ldan seem to have entailed a commitment to oppose actively the other schools of Tibetan Buddhism and the Bon-po.

"[16] In his famous work Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand, he calls it an "evil system", "false dharma", "not worthy of being a refuge", "plagiarized", and "invented".

"[20] David Kay notes that Shugden was a key tool in Phabongkha's persecution of the Rimé movement: "As the Gelug agent of the Tibetan government in Kham (Khams) (Eastern Tibet), and in response to the Rimed movement that had originated and was flowering in that region, The Melodious Voice of Brahma (tshangs pa'i dbyangs snyan) and his disciples employed repressive measures against non-Gelug sects.

A key element of Phabongkha’s revival movement was the practice of relying upon Dorje Shugden, the main function of the deity now being presented as ‘the protection of the Ge-luk tradition through violent means, even including the killing of its enemies’.

Pabongkha's writings and accounts of his oral teachings show a unique rhetoric that both esteemed all traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, and simultaneously critiqued aspects of these (including the Geluk) which he considered degenerate.

"[13] This change is said to have been reflected in the artworks, since there is "lack of Dorje Shugden art in the Gelug school prior to the end of the 19th century.