Jovic, ‘The Cult of the ’Go ba’i lha lnga’ (2010)

Nika Jovic. The Cult of the ’Go ba’i lha lnga: A Study With Pictorial and Written Material of the Five Personal Deities. M. A. thesis, Universitat Wien, 2010. 148 pp. [official site / PDF]

This thesis contains editions and translations of several Tibetan ritual texts: the ’Go ba’i lha lnga’i bsangs mchod by Ku saʼ li dha rma ba dzra (A), the ’Go baʼi lha lngaʼi bsang chog by Ku sa li dha rma ba dzwa (B), the ’Go ba’i lha lnga’i bsangs chog by the Ku sa li dha rma ba dzra (C) ‘Go ba’i lha lnga’i bsangs mchod by Ku sa li dha rma bdzra (D), the ’Go ba’i lha lnga’i bsangs mchod by Su pra mi dha rma ba dzra (E), the Lha lngaʼi gsol mchod bsod nams dpal skyed by Zhor sngags smyon (F), the ’Go ba’i lha lnga’i gsol mchod bsang dang bcas pa yar ngoʼi zla rgyas zhes bya ba by Ka rma ngag dbang yon tan rgya mtsho (G), the ‘Go ba’i lha lnga’i gsol mchod phen bdeʼi ʻdod ʻjo zhes bya ba by bTsun gzugs bLo bzang chos kyi nyi ma (H) and others.

From the Introduction

The following work is based upon my research on transcendental beings (Tib. lha) who belong to the category of Tibetan protective deities (Tib. srung ma). Continue reading “Jovic, ‘The Cult of the ’Go ba’i lha lnga’ (2010)”

Mori, ‘The Rituals of Tantric Buddhism in India’ (2011)

The Rituals of Tantric Buddhism in IndiaMori, Masahide. Indo mikkyō no girei sekai (The Rituals of Tantric Buddhism in India). Sekai Shisōsha, 2011, 340pp. ISBN 978-4-7907-1498-9. [official site / amazon.co.jp]

森 雅秀〮著 『インド密教の儀礼世界』 世界思想社 7140円

“The iconology of tantric Buddhist ritual.
[This book] makes the full picture of tantric Buddhist ritual emerge through elucidation of the structure and semiology of ritual in Indian tantric Buddhism. Its illumination of [a previously] unknown ritual world, Buddhist studies and Indology, as well as religious studies, anthropology, history, archaeology and art history and so on will have a wide impact on several areas.” [translated blurb]

Zotter, ‘Pūjā-Blüten in Nepal’; on the Puṣpacintāmaṇi (2009)

Flowers for the Newars' Ganesacaturthi
Pflanzen, die von Newars zur Gaṇeśacaturthī verwendet werden

Astrid Zotter (née Krause). ‘Pūjā-Blüten in Nepal: Bestimmungen des Puṣpacintāmaṇi‘. Universität Leipzig: PhD dissertation, 2009. [In German; PDF] 408 pp., illus.

Dr. Zotter’s dissertation on the medieval flower-offering manual Puṣpacintāmaṇi presents a critical edition of the Sanskrit and Newar texts, and discusses the role of this important work in Nepal from the reign of Pratap Malla onwards. This is a new milestone in Newar studies, and more generally another welcome contribution to the study of the transmission of Sanskrit texts and vernacular translations in medieval South Asia. A few words from the abstract (roughly translated):

From the Abstract

The Sanskrit text Puṣpacintāmaṇi (PuCi) treats flower offerings (upacāra) in the most important worship ritual of Hinduism, the pūjā. In 400 verses, about 200 names of flowers prescribed as appropriate or inappropriate gifts for various deities and pūjās are listed. The text is a compilation (nibandha), in which the contents of 47 named source texts are reported. […]

The aim of the thesis is not only to edit this text, which was published for the first time in 1966, anew on the basis of all traditional manuscripts and to translate it for the first time, but also to fit it into its context. Here, the context of the historical development of the text, the position of the PuCi in the textual tradition and the varieties of interpretation are taken into account. […] Continue reading “Zotter, ‘Pūjā-Blüten in Nepal’; on the Puṣpacintāmaṇi (2009)”

Zotter & Zotter, ‘Initiations in India & Nepal’ (2010)

Hindu and Buddhist Initiations in NepalAstrid Zotter and Christof Zotter (eds). Hindu and Buddhist initiations in India and Nepal. Ethno-Indology, v.10. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010. 380 p. ISBN 9783447063876. [worldcat/Lehmanns]

The contributors to this volume are from different academic disciplines and treat examples of both kinds of rituals in various religious settings. Of special interest in this collection of essays are interrelationships among initiations and their relations to other kinds of rituals. The papers are devoted to the study of minute details and point to the dynamics of initiations. The transfer of ritual elements accompanied by readjustments to new contexts as the modification of procedures or the reassignment of meanings is one of the recurring traits. Other aspects addressed by the authors include the relation of script (ritual handbooks) to performance or various forces of change (e.g. the economics of ritual, gender-related variations, modernization and democratization). Continue reading “Zotter & Zotter, ‘Initiations in India & Nepal’ (2010)”

Vajracharya & Allen, ‘The Daśakarma Vidhi’ (2010)

Pandit Vaidya Asha Kaji (Ganesh Raj Vajracharya); Michael Allen, ed. The Daśakarma Vidhi: Fundamental Knowledge on Traditional Customs of Ten Rites of Passage Amongst the Buddhist Newars. Kathmandu: Mandala Book Point, 2010. 191 pp. ISBN: 9789994655144. [official site (ordering details)]

From the blurb:

The daśakarma begin with the birth ceremony 
(jaṭābhiṣeka) and end in the ceremonial initiation of the Supreme Seniormost or Head of the Community (cakreśvarābhiṣeka). The system of the daśakarma is so instilled in the life of every Buddhist Newar that the rites have become part and parcel of the life-cycle, thus presenting as inseparable traditional and cultural rites unique among human beings on earth. […]

Asha Kaji Vajracharya (1908–1992) was one of twentieth-century Nepal’s most respected Buddhist figures. Having cultivated the traditional learning of a pandit, he became renowned in his native Lalitpur as an Ayurvedic doctor, tantric practitioner and raconteur of Buddhist lore. He published over thirty books, many of which were translations or commentaries based on Sanskrit originals, and opened up his own manuscript collection to photography by the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project. He advised and collaborated with a number of foreign scholars, and became the first Newar master to teach the Buddhist tradition of the Kathmandu Valley outside Asia, touring Japan at his students’ request, and bestowing initiation into the cycle of Cakrasamvara upon a non-Newar couple for the first time in the modern era. […]

Michael Allen was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1928. He received his B.A. degree in Philosophy from Trinity College, Dublin in 1950 and his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the Australian National University in 1965. He was appointed to a lectureship in Anthropology at Sydney University in 1964 and retired as Professor in 1993. ln addition to his extensive fieldwork on Newar society and religion, conducted mainly between 1966 and 1978, Professor Allen has also carried out anthropological research in Vanuatu (1958–82) and in lreland (1988–96).

BAUDDHATANTIS OF ORISSA

Sarita Dash. The Bauddhatantis of Orissa: culture, identity, and resurgence of an ancient guild of Buddhist weavers. Birahakrushnapur (Puri District, Orissa): Society for Environment Action and Restoration of Cultural Heritage, 2002. 67 p. [ Worldcat ]

So one of the surviving pockets of Indian Buddhism is in Orissa? Now, I don’t buy the claim that the manuscript used in Shastri’s Bauddha gān o doha (1916) epitomizes the Oriyan struggle against the British Rāj. But something Bauddha is still going on there, it seems. The question is: what?

Plea: Still looking for a copy of this obscure work; the only one I know if is at the Library of Congress. My attempts to order it from India failed.

Nepālāvatāra (III): The Paśus that didn’t become Patties

Yesterday, while visiting Kathmandu’s tantric sites with a number of scholars, we ran into a full-scale riot triggered by the cancellation of animal sacrifice. The normal thing to do on this day of the year, the conclusion of Indra Jātrā, is to offer living animals to the Bhairava worshipped in the festival. This year, however, royal patronage has been withdrawn for the first time, so that the government now foots the bill. And the government refused to pay for the traditionally prescribed slaughter. The result: spontaneous rioting, pitched street battles, city-wide disruption and “lockdown” (bandha) now in its second day.

This outcome is not only hard for modern Western minds to comprehend: the Nepalese nouveau elites who incited it had no inkling of what they were stirring up either. Today I heard a non-Newar local sneer, “If the government decided not to kill a chicken, they [Newar traditionalists] would still go crazy!” Actually, what the protesters were objecting to is not so much the loss of animal sacrifice per se, but rather the fact that the festival has not been carried out properly, yathāvidhi.

The fog of misunderstanding is not hard to dispel if one simply recalls how tantric Newar religion is. The idea that bloodthirsty deities must be sated with fresh rakta, found often enough in the tantras and the religious culture of the tantric age, runs particularly deep here. It runs deep enough that one finds it in tantric Buddhist texts too, going back as far as the ‘Indian Period’ of Buddhism.

Voting for God

Yesterday the ritual procedure for nominating candidates for the presidency of the United States of America drew to a close. Sen. John McCain’s acceptance speech was littered with references to the consecration of the United States by God:

We believe everyone has something to contribute and deserves the opportunity to reach their God-given potential … We’re all God’s children and we’re all Americans. […]

I’m going to fight to make sure every American has every reason to thank God, as I thank Him: that I’m an American, a proud citizen of the greatest country on earth, and with hard work, strong faith and a little courage, great things are always within our reach.

Frankly, I expected just a little more from John McCain, the self-styled reflective student of history. McCain, unlike his running mate, and the current incumbent (prior to holding office), at least has some personal experience of the wider world — even if it happened to involve pouring munitions from a great height onto civilian infrastructure (for which he can hardly be accused of being unpatriotic).

McCain, in following convention and pushing the buttons of his party’s faithful, neglects to mention what happens to governments that form compacts with Almighty Gods. At some inopportune moment, they disintegrate: inexorably, ignominiously, permanently.

This year Nepal’s monarchy became just the latest in a long line of national elites forsaken by the God(s) integral to their thinking and systems of power. In some respects I am inclined to think that Nepal — where every dinner is a candlelit dinner, thanks to the mismanagement of the country’s meagre resources — not only shows the past, but the way of the future.

When Bhikṣus Attack (I): Killer Zombies, and the Monks Who Send Them

In recent years, Gregory Schopen has done more than anyone to force a reality check on the West’s part-idealized, part-fantasized conception of the Buddhist bhikṣu. Going boldly into vinaya texts that no Buddhist Studies scholar has read before, Schopen finds that the image of monks as world-renouncing ascetics is far removed from the evidence available in these codes.

Monks in India, certainly those affiliated with the Mūlasarvāstivāda, are seen to be entangled with the world as owners, inheritors, and leasers of property; as active seekers of sponsorship for the fabrication of monasteries and images; and as individuals who very much retain their caste and family identities. Rules for performing ‘meditation’ are comparatively thin; in one passage, those who go to the forest to meditate are denigrated as slightly strange in the head. Indian monastics are, in short, anticipated to be doing the things that Newar Buddhists were long accused of doing as “debasements” of monasticism — activities which, we now know, fall within the normal spectrum of behaviour mandated for the Indian tradition.

The most common objection to Schopen’s work has been that the vinaya itself represents an idealization. But this is his very point: it is remarkable that such prescriptions, laden with provisions for a monk’s immersion in mundane business and social affairs, represent the way things are supposed to be done. Nor should these codes be regarded as something which just sit out there in the realm of the ideal: they are indeed binding, written for the purpose of being binding, on their adherents; and in governing the operation of a saṅgha, their word is final.

A contribution published not long ago in the JPTS, by Peter Skilling,* unearths an extreme example of the monk mired in profanity: a ritual for the bhikṣu to magically reanimate a corpse and dispatch it to kill his foe. In the selected passage from the Vinayavibhaṅga (now preserved only in Tibetan and Chinese) the monk is a necromantic performer and would-be murderer by proxy, in a rite that entails:

  • the monk going to a charnel ground at a suitable time;
  • finding a suitable corpse;
  • preparing it with unguents and so on;
  • reanimating the corpse by possessing it with a vetāḍa/vetāla spirit,** invoked by means of an (unspecified) mantra;
  • sending the zombie off, sword in hand, to kill a named victim, which it does, unless

    • the zombie turns on the monk and kills him instead.

As Mr. Skilling observes, with his characteristic good humour and learning (qualities not often found in abundance, much less together, in the Pali Buddhist Studies community), “The primary concern of our text is not the ethics of the matter as such, but what sort of infringements of the monastic rules might be involved” (p.315). If the monk is killed by his own zombie, “the monk incurs a heavy fault (sthūlātyaya)… I do not know whether there are any other cases of posthumous penalties in the monastic codes, but here we have at least one”. That such an outcome was definitely anticipated by the redactors of the vinaya is reflected in the long list of protective techniques provided within the ritual.

Among those defensive options available to the monk is the recitation of a number of “the great apotropaic classics of early Buddhism — notably the Dhvajāgra, the Āṭānāṭīya-, and the Mahāsamāja-sūtras”. Skilling adds, “We still know very little about how the Mahāsūtras were actually used as a set, or to what degree the rituals may have corresponded to [Theravādin rites or] the Rakṣā rituals of Nepal” (p.314). In the literature of Indo-Newar Buddhism there are, in this case as in so many others, more than a few indications to be found regarding the actual practice of such rites.

The Mṛtyuvañcanopadeśa*** of Vāgīśvārakīrti, an Indian master who played an important role in the formation of Newar Buddhism, is a work dealing with the prolongation of one’s life. Although it is concerned primarily with tantric methods such as subtle yoga, it is remarkable that Vāgīśvārakīrti also advocates the recitation of these same Mahāsūtras for the purposes of increasing longevity. This throwback to a much earlier era of monastic practice in a c.11th-century text incidentally marks its author as a monk, or one who at the very least is strongly enculturated in monastic convention.

Later, during the post-Indian period of Newar Buddhism, a number of Sanskrit works were composed on the mollification of life-threatening omens, usually framed as dialogues between Lokeśvara and Tārā. These works offer a kind of meta-protective solution: now one recites either the Pañcarakṣā, or the Mṛtyuvañcanopadeśa itself, in order to avert untimely incidents.

In Skilling’s reference to “the Rakṣā rituals of Nepal”, there is the apparent implication that the rites and literature of the Pañcarakṣā are primarily Nepalese. In fact both the constituent works/deities and the set of five belong to the pan-Indian tradition (the latter, for example, being known to Abhayākaragupta). Again, it would have been nice to see elements regarded as outside the Indian mainstream not being automatically, erroneously, relegated to the Nepalese periphery, where they can be excluded from consideration.

In any case, Peter Skilling’s article adds to the enormous body of scholarship showing that tantric Buddhism has its origins firmly within the monastic community. We do not find a trace of the “siddha” founders proposed by Ronald Davidson in the earliest and best evidence, as exemplified in this extract from the vinaya. Nor should we expect anything different for a tradition that was, right from the start, indeed up to the present, transmitted almost entirely by monks or in connection with monastic institutions, and which makes frequent reference to the practices and ideals of Buddhist monasticism.


* ‘Zombies and Half-Zombies: Mahāsūtras and Other Protective Measures’ The Journal of the Pali Text Society, Vol. XXIX (2007), pp. 313-30.

** We should distinguish between the possessing spirit, the vetāla, and the corpse in its possessed/zombified state, as per Somadeva Vasudeva, ‘Concerning vetālas I‘.

*** Johannes Schneider (ed. and tr.), Diss., München, 2006/7? [no details to hand].