The social dimension of high deity worship: Padmasambhava tsechu worship in Tibetan tantrist ritual culture (original) (raw)
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Religion and Society, 2018
Tantrists, non-monastic religious specialists of Tibetan Buddhism, constitute a diffuse, non-centralized form of clergy. In an area like Repkong, where they present a high demographic density, large-scale supra-local annual ritual gatherings of tantrists are virtually synonymous with, and crucial for, their collective existence. In the largest of these rituals, the ‘elders’ meeting’ is in effect an institutionalized procedure for evaluating the ritual performance, its conditions and effects, and, if necessary, for adjusting aspects of the ritual. At a recent meeting, the ‘elders’ decided to abandon a powerful and valued but violent and problematical component of the ritual, due to its potential detrimental effects on the fabric of social relations on which the ritual depends for its continued existence. Thus, a highly scripted, ‘liturgy-centered’ ritual (per Atkinson) can be adapted to the social context. The specialists of these textual rituals demonstrate collectively an expertise that extends into the sociological dynamics surrounding the ritual.
Buddhist–Christian Studies, 2007
In Tibetan Buddhism, there is a type of teaching called a dmar khrid, a ''red instruction,'' wherein the lama brings students through a teaching as a physician might dissect a corpse, pointing out and explaining the various parts and organs and their places and functions. In Identity, Ritual and State in Tibetan Buddhism, Martin Mills has done very much the same thing, with the exception that the body he examines is still very much alive, and emerges, to my eyes at least, as a new and wholly vital entity. Mills exposes the subcutaneous and sanguine body of Tibetan Buddhism, the bones and muscles that make up its structure, the blood that flows through it, and the organs that keep it alive, in ''a plain and open manner,'' just as in a dmar khrid. 1 The value of such a presentation truly cannot be overstated. An attempt to catalog the contents of each chapter would be both impossible and counterproductive, as the wealth of theoretical material and ethnographic detail is a large part of what makes this book so powerful. Instead, I will identify several topics, several of the vital organs alluded to, that are either not commonly noticed in the academic study of Buddhism, or that are given fresh perspective by Mills's anthropological and sociological methodology, and that are so crucial to understanding how it is that Buddhism lives in a typical Himalayan village. The latter portion of this review explains why I place such high value on this book and its potential place in Buddhist-Christian studies. Identity, Ritual and State is an ethnography of Kumbum Monastery in Lingshed, Ladakh (the eastern half of the Kashmir valley, located in Jammu and Kashmir, India), but its concerns are much more far-reaching than a single remote Himalayan village. The central question of the work is ''how we are to understand the nature of religious authority in Tibetan Buddhist monasticism'' (p. xiii), although it might more properly be the religious authority of Tibetan Buddhist-Christian Studies 27 (2007).
Monks, Money, and Morality: The Balancing Act of Contemporary Buddhism, 2021
The provision of Buddhist domestic ritual services (individual-or householdlevel apotropaic rituals, healing rituals, propitiation of deities, etc., carried out in a Buddhist idiom by Buddhist religious specialists) and the patronage relations within which this activity unfolds constitute an understudied domain in the larger field of Buddhist studies. As we will see, under certain circumstances, providing such ritual services can become the object of ethical critiques, even in strongly ritual-centered forms of Buddhism such as Tibetan tantric Buddhism. The emic value hierarchies that these critiques reflect (soteriological vs. worldly orientations, etc.) may have influenced the choices of a Western scholarship sometimes prone itself to Protestant biases (which express partly similar value hierarchies: higher valuation of the soteriological, the doctrinal/textual, etc.). In any case, if the rituals' "internal" ritual/religious logics in themselves have been deemed worthy of interest, 1 the economics and social embeddedness of this "lesser" dimension of Buddhist religion has received, on the whole, only much more modest scholarly attention. 2 As I have argued in a recent overview of the anthropological treatment of the "gift" and other religiously inflected modes of economic transfer
Review of Tibetan Ritual, edited by José Ignacio Cabezón
Published in Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 5, 2009
entitled, "The Practice and Theory of Tibetan Ritual." Beyond the seemingly simple title on the front cover there lies a series of articles that form a rich organic whole, despite the different approaches and topics represented. This volume is the first to focus solely on the burgeoning field of Tibetan ritual studies, and it has put its best foot forward. Each of the eleven chapters that make up this work is groundbreaking in its own right, applying methods found within a broad range of disciplines-anthropology, ethnography, history, philology, and textual analysis-to problematize and explore the multifaceted phenomena associated with Tibetan ritual.
Introduction | Theorizing the Secular in Tibetan Cultural Worlds
Himalaya: The Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, 2016
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Philosophy & Religious Studies at ODU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Philosophy Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of ODU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact digitalcommons@odu.edu. Repository Citation Gayley, Holly and Willock, Nicole, "Introduction: Theorizing the Secular in Tibetan Cultural Worlds" (2016). Philosophy Faculty Publications. 33. http://digitalcommons.odu.edu/philosophy\_fac\_pubs/33