Oracles & Medicine Buddha: Heritage Ladakh

Journal of American Folklore, 2016

The Gesar/Geser epic cycle is a warrior epic known throughout the Tibetan and Mongolian-speaking regions of Asia and is still largely sustained through a shamanistically-tinted oral tradition. This article focuses on the epic motif of the hero’s divine descent and constructs both a “constitutional mythology” for the epic based on this motif and a reconstruction of the probable archaic core of the epic motif. It also focuses in particular on the representations of the hero’s sky-god father. The variability in the representation of this figure reflects the cross-cutting religious infuences on this Silk Road epic. These range from archaic “native” Inner Asian traditions concerning sky and mountain gods, to Buddhism (and its debt to Indian Vedic religion) and even Silk Road Manichaeism.

Himalaya - The Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, 2019

This paper contributes to the study of Tibetan oracles by analyzing a distinctive case of a contemporary Tibetan oracle living in exile in India. The oracular practice and personal history of Lhamo, or ‘Goddess,’ present several unusual features compared to other ethnographic accounts of Tibetan oracles. The ritual of possession is performed behind closed doors hidden from clients, and the medium typically engages in oracular ingestion multiple times during every trance. Her trance sessions also appear orderly and lack an intermediary figure who decodes the oracle’s enigmatic statements. What do these features of her oracular activities illustrate? How do they feature in her life story and relationships to other religious specialists in the area and the surrounding community? This paper outlines my ethnography of Lhamo’s practice and situates it in the context of Tibetan oracles, arguing that Lhamo’s oracular possession, which is a practice of a village oracle often regarded as involving mainly mundane and pragmatic ends, is conspicuously integrated with the soteriological, supramundane orientation of Buddhism.

In this thesis I analyze the tropes of suffering visible in the biographies of oracles in the Tibetan cultural world and found out that many of them – if not all – share difficult life experiences including domestic violence and gender discrimination. My hypothesis is that their personal background could have triggered the process of becoming a ritual specialist. I argue that by becoming a ritual specialist, the person can find her/his place within society which meets her/his special demands.

The thesis is entirely the work of the Doctoral candidate. No part has previously been submitted for degree examination at any other university or learning centre. All verbatim quotations are distinguished either by quotation marks or indented paragraphs, and the sources are specifically acknowledged as such.

This dissertation examines the place of traditional songs in the Tibetan Buddhist culture of the former Himalayan kingdom of Ladakh. I look at how Buddhism and pre-Buddhist religion informed the texts and performance contexts of traditional songs, and how Ladakhi songs represent cultural self-images through associated musical, textual, and visual tropes. Many songs of the past, both from the old royal house and the rural Buddhist populations, reflect the socio-political structure of Ladakhi society. Some songs reflect a pan-Tibetan identity, connecting the former Namgyal dynasty to both the legendary King Gesar and Nyatri Tsangpo, the historical founder of the Tibetan Yarlung dynasty. Nevertheless, a distinct Ladakhi identity is consistently asserted. A number of songs contain texts that evoke a mandala or symbolic representation of the world according to Vajrayana Buddhist iconography, ritual and meditative visualization practices. These mandala descriptions depict the social order of the kingdom, descending from the heavens, to the Buddhist clergy, to the king and nobles, to the common folk. As the region has become more integrated into modern India, Ladakhi music has moved into modern media space, being variously portrayed through scholarly works, concerts, mass media, and the internet. An examination of contemporary representations of “tradition” and ethnic identity in traditional music shows how Ladakhis from various walks of life view the music and song texts, both as producers and consumers. Situated as it was on the caravan routes between India, Tibet, China, and Central Asia, Ladakhi culture developed distinctive hybrid characteristics, including in its musical styles. Analysis of the performance practices, musical structures, form, and textual content of songs clearly indicates a fusion of characteristics of Middle Eastern, Balti, Central Asian, and Tibetan origin. Looking at songs associated with the Namgyal dynasty court, I have found them to be part of a continuum of Tibetan high literary culture, combined with complex instrumental music practices. As such, I make the argument that these genres should be considered to be art music.

Kindly note that this contains only the English language submissions from the colloquium; Dzongkha language submissions were edited by native Dzongkha speakers.

Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture and Ecology, 2013

In August 2010 the Himalayan Region of Ladakh, Northwest India, experienced severe flashflooding and mudslides, causing widespread death and destruction. The causes cited were climate change, karmic retribution, and the wrath of an agentive sentient landscape. Ladakhis construct, order and maintain the physical and moral universe through religious engagement with this landscape. The Buddhist monastic incumbents-the traditional mediators between the human world and the sentient landscape-explain supernatural retribution as the result of karmic demerit that requires ritual intervention. Social, economic, and material transformations have distorted the proper order, generating a physically and morally unfamiliar landscape. As a result, the mountain deities that act as guardians and protectors of the land below are confused and angry, sending destructive water to show their displeasure. Thus, the locally-contextualized response demonstrates the agency of the mountain gods in establishing a moral universe whereby water can give life and destroy it.

Multicultural Review

2006

This work examines the mythological and ritual significance of an important yet little-known Tibetan protector deity named Tsiu Marpo (Tsi’u dmar po). Tsiu Marpo is the protector of Samyé Monastery (Bsam yas, est. 779 C.E.), the oldest Buddhist monastery in Tibet. Very little is known of this figure in the available scholarship and what materials there are have their limitations. Due to this paucity, and in order to better understand this deity and his importance in Tibet, I explore Tsiu Marpo through four venues representative of his influential role. These are his origin story and its connection with Tibetan cultural history, his iconography and its representation of Tibetan expressions of violence, his involvement in apotropaic ritual, and his importance within the Tibetan oracle tradition. This last venue of exploration pulls from all previous ones in order to elaborate on the Tibetan oracle tradition as a dynamic outlet through which the ritual program of the deity is enacted for a social service, and which utilizes iconographically significant ritual implements to submerge the service within a realm of sacrality. Through this detailed case study of one Tibetan protector deity, I hope to provide a template for further studies on protector deities as a whole, an arena of Tibetan Studies that is still dim and disorganized. My thesis begins with an introduction to Tibetan protector deities, the texts through which they are encountered, and the various sources that have contributed to the figure of Tsiu Marpo and of protector deities in general. From there my focus contracts into a detailed exploration of Tsiu Marpo and expands outward into his iconographic, cosmologic, ritual, and oracular importance. My conclusion ties these observations together in order to illustrate the multifaceted connections between the ritual and the social in Tibetan Buddhism and the importance of protector deities as a cohesive force between multiple cultural milieus, particularly lay and monastic communities.

CIHCS DAHUNG, 2017

ABSTRACT Before the advent of Buddhism as a foreign religion in Tibet, Bonism or the Bon tradition was practised. An archaic or most respectably the tradition of Bon involves animistic and shamanistic practices. As mystical and alluring, it embraces the idea that all beings in the universe has soul and worships the spirits and deities of nature such as deities of the mountains, rivers, lakes, etc. Their unquestionable belief and faith made them dependant on the various deities for matters related to all aspect of life like marriage, war, harvest, health, death and welfare of the community, to name a few. Further, in an attempt to appease and mollify the deities various rituals were performed such as animal sacrifice, sorcery, fetishism, etc. This paper strives to take one through the journey of the Bon tradition that survived the persecution with the advent of Buddhism in Tibet around 7th century BC and how it manoeuvered its way to still exist and be relevant as a way of life for most people in Tibet, as well as in the West Kameng regions of Arunachal Pradesh, where amalgamation of both Bon and Lamaist tradition is seen. This paper proposes to highlight Bon and its relevance in the Sherdukpen tribe, located in West Kameng district of Arunachal Pradesh, while looking into the intricacies of Bon beliefs, rituals and its shamanistic practises. INTRODUCTION Is Bonism or bon tradition a thing of the past? Is it still relevant with the introduction and establishment of Tibetan Buddhism that is heading towards a scientific temperament under the aegis of His Holiness the Dalai Lama? These questions have often occurred to me, a Buddhist, belonging to a religious family where ‘pujas’ are of a daily occurrence than the number of ‘Likes’ in my Facebook posts. While looking into the origin of ‘Pujas’ and various traditional-religious practices, I chanced upon the Bon tradition that is deeply imbibed into the Buddhist way of life. Bonism or the Bon tradition, which is more mystical than the Lamaist tradition with shamans, meditation on mandalas, deities, astrology, and much more, is the native religion of Xizang (Tibet). It is a sect of animistic shamanism, a pantheistic cult embracing the belief that all beings in the universe have souls. It prevailed in Xizang (Tibet) before the introduction of Buddhism in the 7th century BC but Tibetan Buddhism had absorbed some beliefs and rituals of Bonism like the dependence on oracle, astrology, pantheism. For instance, the selections of tulkus/living Buddhas began with oracle, astrology and the observations of mirages on holy lakes and if there were several candidates, then sometimes the service of an oracle-priest was called. On the other hand, Bonism was modified according to the model of Buddhism to become a branch of Tibetan Buddhism. The rituals and beliefs of Bonism has now become an integral part of the Tibetan culture. At the present, although Bonism has lost its prominent position, nevertheless it still exists as a tradition enjoying equal position among the five traditions of Tibet: Mahayana, Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya and Gelug. Further, it is still practised in more than 150 villages in Tibet and also in some regions of India such as Ladakh, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. History of Bon Tradition Despite various efforts to persecute Bon religion by rulers such as King Drigum Tsenpo in the 7th century B.C and King Trisong Detsen in 779 A.D, and the danger of Buddhism’s popularity, Bon survived. The question remains, how did it survive the holocaust, the answer obviously resides in its history of three brothers and the three stages that it underwent.