On the use of Human remains in Tibetan ritual objects
by Ayesha Fuentes | 2020 | 86,093 words
The study examines the use of Tibetan ritual objects crafted from human remains highlighting objects such as skulls and bones and instruments such as the 鈥渞kang gling鈥� and the Damaru. This essay further it examines the formalization of Buddhist Tantra through charnel asceticism practices. Methodologies include conservation, iconographic analysis, c...
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Terms and concepts
This research draws from a variety of sources in order to discuss these ritual instruments and render their categorization in the religious life of the Tibetan cultural matrix.[1] The language and hermeneutical rhetoric used here is unique to the multi-disciplinary approach of this research and aims to clarify many of the ambiguities and inconsistencies of previous scholarship.
Relics, for example, represent a different historical model of Tibetan material religion and Buddhist valorization for human remains and as such, are not explicitly treated here. The popularity of relics precedes the formation and spread of Buddhist tantra and its ritual instrumentation of human remains: Gregory Schopen has written, for example, on the 鈥減ublic value of relics鈥� in the Buddhist world in the first centuries of the common era, as well as their capacity to inspire the production of material culture through the creation of 蝉迟奴辫补蝉.[2] The veneration of human remains through the circulation of relics is likewise testified by the Chinese scholar Xuanzang (c.602-664), who documented the distribution of teeth, bones, and other remains of the historical Buddha, as well as their installation in 蝉迟奴辫补 as demonstrations of civic prestige across central and southern Asia.[3] He moreover noted that these relics attracted pilgrims and were known to propagate through devotional action.
More recently, in a 1994 article on signs of saintly death in Tibetan cultural history, Dan Martin indicates that 鈥渞elic鈥� is a broad category including several types of material (e.g. bodily remains, words, textiles and images) which have the capacity to confer blessing (byin rlabs) to the practitioner and establish an ontological continuity with the sacred. The value of this continuity, Martin argues, can be illustrated by the proliferation of relics in Indian and Tibetan Buddhist traditions, where 鈥渁uthenticity鈥� is established through practical mechanics that were 鈥渕ore 鈥榮ocial鈥� than 鈥榯heological鈥欌��.[4] This emphasis on the communal maintenance and promotion of relics illustrates a distinction between these and tantric ritual objects made with human remains, where the latter are more likely subject to skilled activation by ritual specialists in controlled settings. Loseries-Leick, on the other hand, discusses relics through the shared, often interdependent value of human bones which are used in ritual instruments, but without making any social, practical or technological distinction about their religious function.[5] While the Tibetan term ring bsrel (鈥渞elic鈥�) is a general category, in practice it often refers to the pearl-like concretions resulting from the cremation of a saintly person.[6]
As this dissertation will explore in depth, ritual instruments are designed, fabricated and valorized in a way that relics鈥攚hich can replicate through devotional action鈥攁re not. The description of these objects as instruments is meant to emphasize their use, construction and interpretation as material culture and ritual technology. This perspective has been inspired by recent work in social and material anthropology and an increasing body of academic knowledge on Tibetan ritual.
Daniel Miller has described object-making and acquisition as an expression of individual agency or identity known as objectification, a discursive process between people and things resulting in the creation, circulation and use鈥攐r consumption, in his modern examples鈥攐f material culture.[7] As an object of study, objectification describes the formation and perpetuation of cultural knowledge as the reproduction, legitimization and transformation of values and ideas as they are represented in the material record.25 Here, this continuity in knowledge and skill is also called a tradition, which is both historical and contemporary. The study of methods for that material knowledge transfer will be discussed and defined here as cultural technology.
This interpretation of objectification as a cultural process is heavily indebted to the field of social anthropology, in particular the French thinkers Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) and Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002), for whom technology could be understood a form of externalization conditioned by social practice and communal logic.[8] In this dissertation, materials and techniques are interpreted as a reflections of these cultural mechanics and the product of dynamic social and historical processes of exchange and knowledge transfer. Moreover, by documenting the continuity of these instruments as a material cultural tradition for two millennia until the present, this perspective means to address not only the biography or cultural history of individual objects, or types of objects, but rather entire processes of object-making through the study of technique, (i.e. technology).[9]
In the Tibetan cultural and historical paradigm, these processes are largely shaped by an emphasis on ritual in religious life, often exhibiting tantra鈥檚 characteristically dynamic physical or material expressions paired with a narrative emphasis on Buddhist authority. Jos茅 Ignacio Cabez贸n notes that the word commonly used for ritual in some Tibetan communities (cho ga) can be translated as 鈥渁 means to attain a goal鈥� and that ritual elements鈥攙erbal, gestural and material鈥攕hare common rhetorical and performative aspects which are managed and expressed through the mastery of tantra as an adjustable, modular grammar or method.[10] The use of human remains in ritual objects can be understood as an element of this grammar, conditioned by the purpose, skill and resources of the practitioner, including their training and the knowledge of their teachers.
An historical and practical reliance on Buddhist pedagogy in Tibetan religious life is pervasive in the majority of contexts in which these ritual objects have been used or valued. Janet Gyatso notes that methods employed by Buddhist teachers are valued for their capacity to transmit more than one type of knowledge or skill, for example, in the Tibetan medical tradition where discourse 鈥渞eveals the value of the permeability between subject and object, the tending of one towards the other before their full collapse鈥�, while at the same time facilitating the acquisition of practical knowledge (emphasis the author鈥檚).[11] This articulation of object-nature is essential to understanding the value and function of these objects as instruments within the Buddhist and Tibetan intellectual and ritual traditions.
More recently, James Gentry has articulated a role for Tibetan ritual materials as 鈥減ower objects鈥� with the capacity for social, liturgical and political relationships, as demonstrated through seventeenth century writings on the preparation of accomplished medicine (sman sgrub) from the flesh of a brahmin seven-times over (bram ze skye bdun pa鈥檌 sha).[12] By relating the use of materials or substances with particularly antinomian criteria to the broader mechanics of the Tibetan author鈥檚 political, cultural and historical context, Gentry has shown how rituals have been used to mediate volatile relationships between political institutions and religious authorities, individuals and their social status, experience and knowledge, and non-humans and their manifestations. Moreover, by connecting the value of ritual materials to their specific historic environment and social priorities, Gentry describes how only these rare and problematic materials were effective in establishing the appropriate relationships between various channels of religious authority and social power.[13] Through ritual action, substances associated with the death of the body or corpses, otherwise a source of impurity, are transformed into pure and positive materials with a lasting cultural legibility and capacity to empower or enlighten.
Figure 1.4: Guru Rinpoche with 办丑补峁璿腻峁単补 and skull, left hand, rdo rje in the right, Thimphu valley, Bhutan, October 2013. The tantric master is associated with the subjugation of the landscape here and elsewhere in the Tibetan cultural region and throughout its religious historiography.
The longevity of this relationship between the ritual, material and social is furthermore discernible in the visual culture of Buddhist tantra and Tibet. This dissertation integrates an iconographic study of deities, teachers and ritual masters like the eighth century Padmasambhava鈥攐r the more familiar Guru Rinpoche, in popular discourse鈥攚hose characteristic depiction with skull and skull-topped staff (Skt./Tbt. 办丑补峁璿腻峁単补) represents the promotion of tantric method and charnel implements in the cultural and religious history of the establishment of 痴补箩谤补测腻苍补 in the Tibetan cultural region (figure 1.4). This story has been written in part by art historians like Robert Beer, for example, who places implements made with human remains within the historical relationship between鈥漈he Hindu 碍腻辫腻濒颈办补蝉, Padmasambhava, and the Buddhist 惭补丑腻蝉颈诲诲丑补蝉鈥�.[14] Beer鈥檚 summative association of these three identities reflects a model for the dominant cultural historical narrative offered in this dissertation, where the illustrated use of skull and 办丑补峁璿腻峁単补 by Guru Rinpoche, for example, reflects the popularization and transmission of Buddhist tantra conditioned by the charnel materials and ritual methodologies of Indian sources, including 艢补颈惫补 ascetics and other siddha yogins, after the eighth century.[15]
As noted by Beer, these implements鈥攖he skull and 办丑补峁璿腻峁単补 especially鈥攚ere common to representations of the Buddhist 尘补丑腻蝉颈诲诲丑补蝉 (Tbt. grub thob chen po, 鈥済reat accomplished ones鈥�), a group of charismatic teachers and tantric innovators whose collective visual identity emerged in Tibet and Nepal after the twelfth century (figure 1.5). Unknown amongst Indian sources and authors, a collective biography of the 84 尘补丑腻蝉颈诲诲丑补蝉 was assembled in the twelfth century in the 颁补迟耻谤补艣颈迟颈蝉颈诲诲丑补辫谤补惫峁泃迟颈 (Grub chen brgyad bcu rtsa 产锄丑颈鈥檌 rnam thar) and attributed to an Indian scholar named Abhayadatta as it was translated into Tibetan.[16]
Figure 1.5: Accomplished tantric ritual specialist known as siddha, with skull and 办丑补峁璿腻峁単补 at the Alchi gSum brtsegs, c. 1220, image by Jaroslav Poncar. This monument records some of the oldest preserved examples of siddha iconography in the Himalayas.
Moreover, Rob Linrothe has observed that the iconography of the 尘补丑腻蝉颈诲诲丑补蝉 is a Tibetan and/or Himalayan visual innovation that is intended to illustrate the diversity (and extremity) of Buddhist tantra鈥檚 methods as well as the origins and ritual expertise of its community of founders.[17] While many of these individuals are key historical figures in the spread and formalization of Buddhist tantra, as an iconographic program 尘补丑腻蝉颈诲诲丑补蝉 often illustrate a mode of practice that incorporates the use of charnel implements as a foundational aspect of Tibetan material religion and its ritual methodologies. This dissertation will examine the origins of the siddha as a model practitioner of Buddhist tantra in Tibet.
There is, however, no automatic correspondence in the relationship between the iconography of ritualized charnel asceticism and Tibetan material religion: Though the 办丑补峁璿腻峁単补 has been described in 艢补颈惫补 and Buddhist sources and iconographies since the seventh and eighth centuries, the object itself is extremely rare and/or inaccessible.[18] No 办丑补峁璿腻峁単补 has been documented, observed in use, or examined as part of this research. Another object which is often valued in textual sources as a charnel implement and/or iconographic feature but which is fairly rare in surviving examples is the skull garland (Skt. 尘耻峁囜笉补尘腻濒腻, Tbt. thod pa鈥檌 phreng ba) or bone garland (asthim膩lik膩, rus pa鈥檌 phreng ba) (figure 1.6). Though these objects have similar cultural historical narratives to the four instruments examined here, they exhibit fewer consistent liturgical applications and/or surviving examples on which to base a material and technical study.
However, while iconography and visual culture will be treated here as a form of documentation, Christian Luczanits has emphasized how a study of evidence for material religion in tantra produces an unreliable chronology for ritual use:
In principle, it is the esoteric nature of the teaching involved that accounts for the absence of early art-historical evidence in this regard. We are actually faced by the interesting fact that laying down such teachings in writing as well as in art meant that the secrecy of the topic was to some extent already given up.[19]
Here, Luczanits is referring to the study of painted 尘补峁囜笉补濒补 as the monumentalized version of a ritually-established visual program, where, though known in Buddhist sources recorded prior the eighth century, there are relatively few surviving examples of painted 尘补峁囜笉补濒补 dated before 1100. Instead of trying to establish their origins, this dissertation aims to extract narratives on the use of these objects from visual and written sources as a process of formalization in the adoption and refinement of Buddhist tantric methods and materials.
Figure 1.6: A set of 112 beads made of discs cut from human crania in the collection of the National Science Museum, London (1987-716 pt 3) collected in the late 20th century in the Kathmandu valley, February 2017. Though often suggested by the earliest visual and textual sources examined here, the skull 尘腻濒腻 was too rarely encountered as an object to be treated as part of this study. This is a highly specialized object for use by skilled ritual practitioners.
Nevertheless, as an iconological exercise, this project will attempt what Hans Belting has called an 鈥渁nthropology of visual practice鈥�, or an approach to art history, even religious images, as the documentation of cultural forms.[20] This approach assumes an intellectual or rhetorical continuity between images, texts and practice. Moreover, in his recent study on the historiography of antinomian methods and materials in tantra, Christian Wedemeyer applies Roland Barthes鈥� articulation of connotative semiology to suggest how the ritual use of charnel materials was neither literal nor figurative but rather discursive.39 Similarly, Jacob Kinnard has observed that in the ritual systems of early tantric Buddhism 鈥渋mages, really, function as what we might call metapractical objects: they provide, at once, an opportunity for practice鈥� as well as an opportunity for reflection on such a practice鈥�.40 Though this project necessarily assumes a literal interpretation for the use of charnel materials鈥攔esulting in physical objects made from human remains鈥攊t also adopts a similar connotative and pedagogically-motivated rubric for interpreting their materiality within the tradition of Buddhist tantra and Tibetan material religion.
Footnotes and references:
[1]:
The 鈥淭ibetan cultural matrix鈥� encompasses Bon as well as chos, or Tibetan Buddhism, as well as the types of public, non-monastic and/or practical applications sometimes referred to as popular religion (mi chos), e.g. the control of weather, subjugation of disease, etc. This heuristic term is also meant to encompass the dynamic cultural geography of the Himalayan plateau, including A mdo, Khams, dbU and Tsang as well as Sikkim, Ladakh, Bhutan, areas of Nepal and Himachal Pradesh, and the increasingly mobile Tibetan diaspora further south in India and abroad.
[2]:
Gregory Schopen, 鈥淏urial ad sanctos and the physical presence of the Buddha in early Indian Buddhism: A study in the archaeology of religions鈥�, in Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks: Collected Papers on the Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Texts of Monastic Buddhism in India (Honolulu: University of Hawai鈥檌, 1997), 131. Likewise, the secondary burial practice of creating tsha tsha (molded clay figures, made with post-cremation ash) represents a different鈥攖hough related鈥攑rocess of object-making which values or incorporates human remains, see Gregory Schopen, 鈥淪t奴pa and 迟墨谤迟丑补: Tibetan mortuary practices and an unrecognized form of burial ad sanctos at Buddhist sites in India,鈥� The Buddhist Forum 3 (1994): 273-293.
[3]:
Xuanzang, The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions, trans. Li Rongxi, BDK English Triptaka 79, vol. 51, no. 2087 (Berkeley: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 1996), 190.
[4]:
[5]:
Loseries-Leick, 鈥淗uman bones & the wonders of precious relics鈥�, in Tibetan Mahayoga Tantra, 133-151.
[6]:
Grags pa rgyal mtshan, A rga cho ga鈥檌 dang rab tu gnas pa don bsal ba (Clarifying the meaning of the arga and consecration rituals), trans. Yael Bentor (Kathmandu: Vajra Books, 2015), 51. This thirteenth century text gives four categories for relic including organic materials like hair and nails, and 诲丑腻谤补峁嚹� (speech relics), and also treats the creation of tsha tsha. My thanks to Dr. Rob Linrothe for bringing this text to my attention and Dr. Yannick Laurent for helping me clarify this technical distinction.
[7]:
Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell Publishing, 1987), 27ff; Miller defines objectification as a phenomenological process of differentiation between the self and material culture.
[8]:
Marcel Mauss, 鈥淭echniques and technology鈥�, in Techniques,Technology and Civilisation, trans. J.R. Redding (New York and Oxford: Durkheim Press/Berghahn Books, 2009 [1941]), 150. See also Pierre Bourdieu, Outline for a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977 [1972]) for the discussion of habitus as the performance of social and cultural standards.
[9]:
This is a departure from the object-biography approach for individual examples as social agents, for example in Igor Kopytoff, 鈥淭he cultural biography of things: Commoditization as a process,鈥� The Social Life of Things: Commodities in cultural perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64ff.
[10]:
Jos茅 Ignacio Cabez贸n, 鈥淚ntroduction鈥�, in Tibetan Ritual, ed. Jos茅 Ignacio Cabez贸n (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 14.
[11]:
Janet Gyatso, 鈥淗ealing burns with fire: The facilitations of experience in Tibetan Buddhism鈥�, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67, no 1 (1999), 142.
[12]:
James Duncan Gentry, Power Objects: The Life, Legacy and Writings of Sokdokpa Lodr枚 Gyeltsen, (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017). See also chapters 2 and 4, section 2.
[13]:
ibid., 301.
[14]:
Robert Beer, The Encyclopedia of Tibetan Symbols and Motifs (London: Serindia Publications, 1999), 249.
[15]:
Any traveler in the region should be familiar with Guru Rinpoche鈥檚 pacification of the landscape and his role in establishment of a tantric Buddhist cultural territory across the Himalayan plateau: I have heard and seen first-hand evidence of his feats as cultural hero and ritual master in Ladakh, Sikkim, Bhutan, and Khams. See also chapter 2 on the early recorded use of charnel materials within the Tibetan 尘补丑腻测辞驳补 tantra corpus.
[16]:
[17]:
Rob Linrothe, 鈥淕roup portrait: 惭补丑腻蝉颈诲诲丑补蝉 in the Alchi Sumtsek鈥�, in Embodying Wisdom: Art, Text and Interpretation in the History of Esoteric Buddhism, eds. Rob Linrothe and Henrik H. S酶rensen (Copenhagen, The Seminar for Buddhist Studies, 2001), 198.
[18]:
These are used nevertheless by practitioners of a few current traditions such as the non-Buddhist Aghori, and by some Tibetan sngags pa or ritual specialists, though usually in restricted settings (Westin Harris, personal communication by e-mail, 10 May 2019). At present, the name 办丑补峁璿腻峁単补 may also be used for liturgical objects not made with human remains, according to a practitioner in Leh, April 2018.
[19]:
[20]:
Hans Belting, 鈥淚conic presence. Images in religious traditions鈥�, Material Religion: The Journal of Art, Objects and Belief 12, no. 2, (2016): 235.