Ritual Period: A Comparative Study of Three Newar Buddhist Menarche Manuals (original) (raw)
Related papers
Religion Compass
Among all the Sanskrit story narratives available in the vast archive of textual collections in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, certain Buddhist tales among them found special provenance in the Mahāyāna culture of the Newars, the indigenous inhabitants of this surviving oasis of later Indic Hindu-Buddhist civilization. This paper will examine how two stories, the Sṛṇgabheri Avadāna and the Siṃhalasārthabāhu Avadāna, have been domesticated into the local religious field and adopted with special meaning for subgroups in the local society. The former recounts the consecutive, linked lives of a husband and wife, in a story of karmic retribution and reunion, a narrative that has a role in contemporary Buddhist widow mourning rites at the major stūpa in Nepal, Svayambhu. The latter, among the most popular jātaka narratives in the Buddhist world, relates the fate of a group of Buddhist merchants who are shipwrecked and captured by cannibalistic demonesses; in Nepal, this story was transposed into a tale of trans-Himalayan conf lict, and its central figure is regarded as a hometown hero. Until today, a three-day festival procession of him circumnavigates the city of Kathmandu. This paper will explore these local domestications of Buddhist stories and analyze how these traditional celebrations have changed in the context of the shifting regional and political landscape of Nepal and the region. Among all the Sanskrit story narratives available in the vast archive of textual collections in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, certain Buddhist tales among them found special provenance in the Mahāyāna culture of the Newars, the indigenous inhabitants of this surviving oasis of later Indic Hindu-Buddhist civilization. Although they speak a Tibeto-Burmese language, Newars preserve the many strands of culture characteristic of later Indic Buddhism. In a community whose living Buddhist traditions trace its origins back at least 1500 years, and where later traditions of Vajrayāna Buddhism have been woven into a rich fabric of Mahāyāna Buddhism, it is still the case today that jātaka and avadāna narratives remain central to Newar Buddhists. This paper examines the prominent stories that have been domesticated into the local religious field and adopted with special meaning for subgroups in the local society. I have defined 'domestication' as the dialectical process by which a religious tradition is adapted to a region's or ethnic group's socioeconomic and cultural life. 1 While 'Great traditions' supply a clear spiritual direction to followers who are close to the charismatic founders, including norms of orthodox adaptation and missionizing, religious traditions' historical survival is related-often paradoxically-to their being 'multivocalic' so that later devotees have a large spectrum of doctrine, situational instructions, and exemplary folktales to draw on. The study of 'religious domestication' seeks to demonstrate the underlying reasons for selectivity from the whole as the tradition evolves in specific places and times to the 'logic of the locality' (Figure 1).
Hindu and Buddhist Initiations in India and Nepal
Schlagwort: Initiationsrituale, Initiation rituals 18330 Z.m.L. Zotter, Astrid / Zotter, Christof (Hrsg.): Hindu and Buddhist Initiations in India and Nepal. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2010. 380 S. m. Abb. gr 8° = Ethno-Indology, Heidelberg Studies in South Asian Rituals Vol. 10. Hartbd. 64,00 €. ISBN 978-3-447-06387-6. This edited volume (HBIIN) of fourteen essays highlights the revived interest in ritual studies. Enriched by both textual and ethnographic materials, these wide-ranging essays explore the role of initiation in constructing social identity at both the individual and collective levels, thus bringing to light multiple aspects of rituals. Of particular interest is the definition and overlap of borders that the rituals are directed towards creating. HBIIN not only points out the breach of boundaries among different religious and ethnic groups, it also draws attention to the overlap that exists between different life cycle rituals. In the case of the ihī and aśvattha 1 initiations, for instance, we can also see a human engagement with non-human agents in the ritual act. Striking examples can be found in the rituals of Buddhist initiation where the structure of one ritual (e.g. consecration of images) is overlaid onto another (e.g. initiation of human agents), or when rituals are taken over from one tradition (Śaivite) and reassigned to another (Buddhist). HBIIN vividly portrays how rituals are transferred and abandoned with the shift in religious tradition, and points out the infusion of new meaning when older forms are maintained in new
Dīpaṅkara Buddha and the Patan Samyak Mahādāna in Nepal: Performing the Sacred in Newar Buddhist Art
PhD Dissertation, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2014
Every four years, in the middle of a cold winter night, devotees bearing images of 126 Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and other important deities assemble in the Nepalese city of Patan for an elaborate gift giving festival known as Samyak Mahādāna (“The Perfect Great Gift”). Celebrated by Nepal’s Newar Buddhist community, Samyak honors one of the Buddhas of the historical past called Dīpaṅkara. Dīpaṅkara’s importance in Buddhism is rooted in ancient textual and visual narratives that promote the cultivation of generosity through religious acts of giving (Skt. dāna). During Samyak, large images of Dīpaṅkara Buddha ceremoniously walk in procession to the event site, aided by a man who climbs inside the wooden body to assume the legs of the Buddha. Once arranged at the event, Dīpaṅkara is honored with an array of offerings until dusk the following day. This dissertation investigates how Newar Buddhists utilize art and ritual at Samyak to reenact and reinforce ancient Buddhist narratives in their contemporary lives. The study combines art historical methods of iconographic analysis with a contextual study of the ritual components of the Samyak Mahādāna to analyze the ways religious spectacle embeds core Buddhist values within in the multilayered components of art, ritual, and communal performance. Principally, Samyak reaffirms the foundational Buddhist belief in the cultivation of generosity (Skt. dāna pāramitā) through meritorious acts of giving (Skt. dāna). However, the synergy of image and ritual performance at Samyak provides a critical framework to examine the artistic, religious, and ritual continuities of past and present in the Newar Buddhist community of the Kathmandu Valley. An analysis of the underlying meta-narrative and conceptualization of Samyak suggests the construction of a dynamic visual narrative associated with sacred space, ritual cosmology, and religious authority. Moreover, this dissertation demonstrates the role of Samyak Mahādāna in constructing Buddhist identity in Nepal, as the festival provides an opportunity to examine how Newar Buddhists utilize art, ritual, and performance to reaffirm their ancient Buddhist heritage. Supervisor: Dr. Dina Bangdel A review of this work by Aurora Graldi can be found on Dissertation Reviews: http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/13691
The Sacred Town of Sankhu: The Anthropology of Newar Ritual, Religion and Society in Nepal
This book presents a detailed view of Newar society and culture, and its socio-economic, socio-religious and ritual aspects, concentrating on the Newar town of Sankhu in the Valley of Nepal. The foundation of the town of Sankhu is attributed to the goddess Vajrayoginī, venerated by both Buddhists and Hindus in Nepal and beyond. Myths, history, and topographical details of the town and the sanctuary of the goddess Vajrayoginī and her cult are discussed on the basis of published sources, unpublished chronicles, and inscriptions. The book deals with the relation between Hinduism and Buddhism, with the interrelations between the Newar castes (jāt), caste-bound associations (sī guthi), and above all with the numerous socio-religious associations (guthi) that uphold ritual life of the Newars. All major and minor Newar feasts, festivals, dances, fasts and processions of gods and goddesses are discussed. http://www.cambridgescholars.com/the-sacred-town-of-sankhu-18
The homogeneity and unity of the whole ritual activity of the Buddhist rNyingmapa populations of Sikkim and Nepal could be found in the pervasiveness of the geometrical crossed threads constructions that we can see as ornaments for dough effigies, animals skulls or isolated in space, inside rNyingmapa's domestic as well as tantric monastic rituals. They can be pure ornamental figures to bring luck and chase bad influences away, or complex constructions with different meanings to lure the demons. One of the paradoxes of these crossed threads constructions is that they can be both container and contents: they can shelter or incorporate momentarily the demonic beings, which are summoned in order to be deceived and destroyed. The aim of this paper is to re-approach rituals with crossed threads called mdos in literary or nam mkha', zor, glud, yas (and eventually, many other local appellations) in Tibetan and non-Tibetan ritual and folk practices. We base our analysis on new and ancient research in Nepal and in Sikkim and we add a comparative perspective, opposing some Sikkimese and less known Nepalese Tamang examples of such rituals with mdos and nam mkha': a divinatory ritual in Sikkim and a ritual for ancestors in Nepal.