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In order to document the use of human remains which are modified through technique and knowledge transfer into ritual objects in the Tibetan cultural region, it is necessary to first describe these materials’ relationship to burial practices, their social and economic valorization, and the process of sourcing, preparing and circulating human bone.

Firstly, as suggested by the interpretive model of “cultural ecology”, access to human remains —and bone in particular—might be facilitated by the practice of bya gtor, where the corpse is dismembered, flesh separated from the bone and scattered to vultures and other scavengers in a form of exposure burial which has been practiced historically in the largely pastoral and arid landscape of the Tibetan plateau.^[1] This method of corpse disposal is similar to some Zoroastrian methods for corpse disposal which also used de-fleshing and dismemberment and were known to central Asian regions in contact with Tibetan and Buddhist communities by the eighth century.3 Yet, as Heather Stoddard has observed, the historic spread and popularity of bya gtor was also conditioned by the decline and decentralization of the Tibetan political and civic institutions after the ninth century and the simultaneous spread of tantric methodologies which incorporated charnel materials and imageries.4 The result was a ritual value for corpses and human remains in Tibetan material religion which was complementary to a method for the disposal of bodies that was conducive to the natural and geo-cultural landscape of the Himalayan plateau.

At the same time, this exposed treatment for corpses resonates with historically Buddhist renunciant charnel practices like 补?耻产丑补产丑ā惫补苍ā, or the contemplation of decay, which was popularized during the first millennium of the Common Era across south and central Asia.^[2] Furthermore, in northern Chinese Buddhist communities of the seventh to tenth centuries, natural exposure of the body in a forest or cave became a popular donative practice with householders and lay practitioners of the Tang Dynasty, previously having been documented as the result of ascetic practice or indication of saintly death.^[3] Moreover, Gregory Schopen has elsewhere presented evidence for exposure burial—without dismemberment and as an alternative to cremation—being sanctioned in Indian monastic discourse after the first centuries CE.7 Thus there is an historical precedent for the Buddhist use of exposure burial which informs the adoption of bya gtor across the Tibetan plateau.

Some of the earliest indications of the use of exposure burial in the Tibetan cultural historical corpus can be found in accounts of the deaths of disciples of the twelfth century teacher and ascetic yogin Pha dam pa Sangs rgyas, where a small number were carried to the mountain (rir skyel)—though there is no mention of feeding them to birds or dismemberment—while the majority were cremated.^[4] Descriptions of de-fleshing and exposure are found in accounts by visitors to Tibet from the fourteenth century, while the phrase bya gtor is found in later sources from the eighteenth century.^[5] Yet, as noted by a scholar of Zoroastrian exposure practices and their geographical distribution, there is an historical bias towards the study of burial methods in settled, literate populations who constructed monuments or kept written records, meaning that the widespread adoption of de-fleshing, dismemberment and exposure by nomadic or non-literate social groups is somewhat speculative.^[6]

However, historical documentation from the past few hundred years as well as recent study suggest that bya gtor is only one of the ways in which corpses are processed after death in the Tibetan cultural region. Cremation is a common option and there exist as well alternative forms of dismemberment and/or exposure in water and (rarely) forests, with no consistent application for these practices across social groups or regional communities.^[7] Rather, the historic popularity of bya gtor in Buddhist communities of the Tibetan plateau and Himalayas—based on both secondary and anecdotal sources representing a diversity of perspectives—represents a social and soteriological concern for the utility of the corpse as an opportunity to cultivate beneficial influence through a public act of donation.^[8]

Moreover, as a method for recovering bones from a corpse, bya gtor is not necessarily more reliable than other burial practices: Where bones are intended for use as ritual objects, they are recovered as part of the preparation of the corpse for disposal.^[9] The rest of the body, as a donation and vehicle for the exchange of merit, is distributed completely to be eaten by the assembled scavengers, leaving trace evidence (figure 4.1.1).^[10] Where a donation—i.e. the skull or femur to be prepared as a ritual object—is made or sought directly by a practitioner, consent is given by the family of the deceased, their monastic community or a specialized religious authority.^[11] This represents a different type of donation and instrumentalization for human remains than the disposal of the corpse by exposure burial and bya gtor.

Figure 4.1.1: Aged and exposed fragment of a human cranium resulting from bya gtor, found in the charnel grounds of a Tibetan community in Khams, November 2017.

Donation at the time of death is only one of the ways in which human remains are sourced for ritual objects and at present, theft and resale from burials, hospitals or mortuaries is also a common method for procurement. This is especially noteworthy in urban areas with non-Buddhist communities which practice interment of the entire corpse, for example in the southern Himalayas where Muslim and Christian groups are living in proximity to Buddhists and tantric specialists.^[12] Commissioned theft is also used by practitioners as well as commercial traders to procure raw materials throughout the region.17 This illicit system of exchange for human remains used in ritual objects—including international systems for transport and smuggling—is sustained both within communities of practitioners and larger commercial networks (figure 4.1.2).^[13] This moreover includes trade with adjacent non-Buddhist tantric specialists and charnel ascetics, for example the Aghori residing at cremation ghats along the Ganges or in the Kathmandu valley.^[14]

Figure 4.1.2: A selection of skulls of uncertain provenance for sale on the pavement in a Tibetan neighborhood of Chinese city, 2017. Image courtesy of a local source.

Where an individual practitioner has a specific requirement for their implement—i.e. a certain type of skull or femur best suited to their ritual methods and purpose—sourcing these remains might take many years of waiting and study as well as significant financial support.^[15] These material criteria may include a donor of specific age, gender or biographical profile (e.g. male or female, Buddhist, non-Buddhist) and/or be qualified by the nature of their death as well as any other number of morphological features—color, shape, size, etc.—which are determined, selected and activated through the ritual expertise of the user and their mode of practice. It is noteworthy that these types of specific criteria and valorizations—some of which are explored in the following sections—are often repeated by contemporary vendors as well as cultural historical and anthropological scholars who emphasized narratives of violence and transgression rather than the longevity and diversity of historical sources and social values for these objects, significantly contributing their misinterpretation by non-practitioners and non-Tibetan authors and care-takers.^[16]

The current network for theft and resale is supported by a global market for these materials and increasingly enforced legal restrictions on the transport, sale and possession of human remains across the region has stimulated their economic value as cultural properties and/or commodities.^[17] In the past few decades, this has resulted in the confiscation of ritual objects made with human remains from religious sites in Nepal and India as well as an increased international regulation of online sales for these instruments.23 This has had an adverse effect on the continuity of material knowledge needed to produce these objects: Andrea Loseries-Leick observed that the bone ornament fabricators from Tibet whom she met in West Bengal in the last decades of the previous century were no longer able to specialize in human bone because suitable materials were too difficult to acquire.24 The same types of technicians working in the Kathmandu valley at present—the current manufacturing center for Tibetan Buddhist material religion—report similar legal obstacles and prohibitive fines for the use of human remains in their commissions for rus rgyan.^[18]

The legal marginalization of these materials and the ritual objects into which they are crafted—as well as their relatively high economic value—add a layer of opacity in the study of this technical tradition: Where many practitioners might admit to having purchased human remains for ritual use, few could or would relate the sources for these materials. At the same time, multiple informants—vendors and practitioners—emphasized that the bones were very old, indicating that they were more valuable because they had already been used as ritual objects and thus had accumulated merit and prestige.^[19] The majority of informants on fieldwork had acquired their objects by purchasing them, though less often in a monastic context where human remains were more easily acquired by direct donation from someone within the community; many practitioners in a diversity of settings received them as gifts.^[20]

The value for techniques and materials evident in these objects is thus socially established: They are not necessarily inherently valuable because they are human but rather because they illustrate a system of shared cultural or religious standards informed by the historical practice of tantra in the Tibetan cultural region as well as economic necessity.^[21] Moreover, these instruments, like relics, have the capacity to transmit soteriological benefit (byin rlabs, the gift of positive influence) and establish an ontological continuity between the practitioner and the accumulated merit of the donor, as well as that of the skilled specialist who administers the ritual.29 As James Gentry has observed in his study of Tibetan tantric materiality, objects are only one aspect of a ritual method and they must be properly activated in order to be efficacious.30 Furthermore, in some religious institutions, the skulls of lineage founders, teachers, and their incarnations (sprul sku) are reserved for specialized purposes within the community while other less economically, historically or liturgically significant materials can be used for public rituals, indicating their relative value.^[22]

As ritual instruments, human remains are rendered into methods for the transmission of seemingly intangible values and qualities—i.e. impermanence, detachment from ego, empowerment, the accomplishment of the nondual, etc.—in an expression of what Janet Gyatso has identified as a Tibetan Buddhist and tantric pedagogical “tendency for the more absorbed experiences to move into the domain of the objective”.^[23] Furthermore, though meeting specific criteria—such as a bone being human, or a specific type of human—is an advantage, the materials used are of less consequence than the religious education of the skilled practitioner, ritual specialist or teacher who activates or interprets them.33 The efficacy or value of these objects is therefore not only social and religious, but performative as well.^[24]

Figure 4.1.3: A plastic bowl painted as a skull with pink interior and sutures or veins in red on the exterior; the bowl holds bdud rtsi (alcoholic liquor) in a rNying ma lha khang in Sikkim, August 2018.

This informs the historic and present use of objects made from alternative substrates to facilitate ritual practice, including animal bone, artificial vessels shaped or decorated as skulls and more examples discussed in the following sections. Because of restrictions on the transport and sale of human remains, material specificity is increasingly determined by economic and logistical factors: Many present ritual users—including those within monastic communities and religious institutions—use objects made from plastic, resin, buffalo bone, plaster and ceramic.^[25] As part of the greater relational strategy of tantra, for many of these practitioners the substrate is of less importance than the social value of that material specificity, what Hugh Urban has described as a dynamic of “notoriety” historically cultivated through the practice of ritualized charnel asceticism.36 The intra-regional and global popularity of Buddhist tantra has furthermore stimulated the creation of many alternatives for the construction of these ritual objects which has facilitated the participation of a greater diversity of practitioners and, at the same time, resulted in the specific use of human remains being understood as expression of orthodoxy, potency or religious authority.^[26]

It is therefore possible to summarize the sourcing of human remains for Tibetan ritual objects as a dynamic and varied process which can be very discerning for the specialist and unscrupulous or commercial for the rest. At present, this acquisition is less dependent on the local method of corpse disposal or burial than the social or economic setting in which the donor’s body is being treated. Moreover, the complex value for human remains in Tibetan material culture is conditioned by interrelated Buddhist soteriological goals, cultural historical narratives and economic factors, as well as the specific ritual methodology for which it will be used. Individual attitudes vary as well from indifference to skepticism, respect and/or intimidation, depending on the interests, religious education and unique personality of the practitioner or observer.

Where human bones are used, after being procured they can first be cleaned by boiling, soaking or a period of burial.^[27] Cleaning methods can also be used to evaluate the suitability of the bone: One monastic specialist in the dKar rdze district of Khams relates that skulls can be buried at the base of a tree for one year, during which the fruits produced by the tree are examined to determine the skull’s character.^[28] At the same time, the plasticity of the material is essential to its workability and desiccated bone which has been left exposed to strong sunlight and dry air—such as that which might be recovered from an open charnel ground—is unsuitable for carving. Soaking these materials in water, beer or other solutions for a defined period facilitates them being carved, cut or smoothly shaped by allowing the retention of lipids and other organic material (figure 4.1.4).40 Over-soaking can result in a brittle or scorched bone, which is considered damaged and unsuitable for use.^[29]

Figure 4.1.4: Reverse detail of an ornament carved from a cranial fragment at the Fowler Museum at UCLA (X69.300 C), photographed in raking white light. Ridges of raised and displaced material along the carved edges indicate the workability of the material at the time of manufacture and the control of organic components within the bone’s mineral matrix.

The human bones most often found in Tibetan ritual objects are skulls and femurs, with occasional use of fingers, ribs and smaller limb bones for supplementary elements like beads. This preferential use of skulls and femurs is not only a matter of cultural historical and liturgical continuity in the practice of Buddhist tantra—as the first two chapters have illustrated—it is also a technical necessity since these are the two bones with the densest and/or thickest cortical layer and therefore the most workable from a material cultural perspective.^[30] In the preparation and selection of these bones, they are often evaluated for their specific morphological characteristics, many of which will be described in the following sections. Still more of these idiosyncratic criteria are unknown outside oral transmissions and explanations in a post-initiatory or religious pedagogical setting.^[31]

While some ritual methods and ascetic observances recommend that the practitioner source and prepare these materials personally, in many cases the construction of these objects engages a number of specialists and functionaries.^[32] Especially where these instruments are intended to preserve or demonstrate the prestige of a religious institutions or its lineage—i.e. in a monastic setting—there is often an investment in the quality of ornamentation through fine carving or the addition of metalwork and precious stones.45 There is moreover a division of labor between those responsible for the recovery of human remains from the corpse or burial and those commissioned to fabricate or circulate them as ritual instruments and cultural properties.46 This indicates an interrelation of technologies—ritual, material and cultural—used to shape these objects.

Figure 4.1.5: Shop front with bone ornaments for sale, carved from animal bone by a specialist technician in the Kathmandu Valley or nearby in Nepal, June 2018. This object is also intended as a sample for those who would commission similar for export and/or liturgical use.

At present, the circulation of these objects is largely organized through commercial vendors who purchase them directly from owners or practitioners for re-sale, sell them on consignment or facilitate the commission of new products from skilled craftsmen (figure 4.1.5).^[33] Historically and locally, these objects have also been exchanged as gifts between family members or between a teacher and their student.48 These mechanisms for exchange—gift or purchase—operate within the Tibetan cultural region as well as the larger global Tibetan and 痴补箩谤补测ā苍补 Buddhist community, where permitted. Based on observations and interviews from fieldwork within the region, the majority of new bone ornaments are made in the Kathmandu valley—almost entirely of animal (buffalo) bone—whence they are exported throughout the Tibetan cultural sphere as well as China, Taiwan, and abroad to Buddhist institutions or collectors in Europe and North America.^[34] Where human remains are utilized, this mobility is severely limited.

Though international circulation and exchange is facilitated by the use of alternative substrates, the relative high economic value of human remains results in their scarcity within the region and inaccessibility to practitioners from local communities.^[35] This is partially the result of the global exhibition and valorization of these objects as cultural properties after the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries and their acquisition through (predominantly British) colonial and military routes of access.51 This mass export of Tibetan material culture was and continues to be facilitated by vendors within the region whose clients might be local or international, as well as the migration or displacement of practitioners of Buddhist tantra from their historical region of residence.52 In the following technical study, it will be seen that those objects housed in museums and older than one hundred years are more likely to be human, while newer examples increasingly use mixed and alternative substrates.

This indicates a fundamental tension between the use of human remains as ritual objects and their collection as cultural properties: Where early curators and anthropologists may have felt they were encountering a material practice and ritual methodology which would not be sustained after its exposure to global commerce and infrastructure, by acquiring and valorizing these objects over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they precipitated their endangerment. This attitude is best summarized by former Pitt Rivers Museum curator Henry Balfour who wrote that “the interests of culture demand the suppressions of such ascetic doctrines, but the interests of anthropology demand that they should be thoroughly investigated before it is too late.”^[36] However, the results of this research into historically and presently continuous modes of ritualized charnel asceticism—including their adaption to current social, political, economic and material contingencies—show that these practitioners and their technologies are indeed still active.

Discrepancies between the interpretation of these objects as ritual instruments and their acquisition as artifacts or cultural properties have had a substantial effect on the maintenance and handling of Tibetan material culture. As Dianne McGowan has explored in her 2010 dissertation, the curation of Tibetan collections in the US, for example, has relied on the “aestheticization” of these materials and their presentation as art during the twentieth century.^[37] Museums and collectors have therefore largely displayed and acquired Tibetan ritual objects with interest as fine art or material prestige, yet those ornaments with fine carvings and complex iconographies—facilitated by a characteristic density unique to human bone and similar only to ivory, which is rarely used—and other instruments with ornate embellishment are more likely to be human because they are highly specialized. The result is that some of the most historically valuable Tibetan ritual objects made with human remains have been made inaccessible to practitioners and craftspeople through preservation or sequestering in museum collections.

Moreover, the treatment of these materials as anthropological specimens in museums and cultural institutions has also been problematic where policies governing access to human remains often prioritize scientific materialism and proprietary concerns of consent or liability characteristic to the displacement of ancestral remains and funerary materials by colonial predecessors.^[38] However, because the remains discussed here have been altered—having undergone a “process of skill”—they can be interpreted as cultural objects which is a distinction that provokes the engagement of epistemologies, practices, values and narratives that supports beyond their re-contextualization in the museum.^[39] Nevertheless, there is currently an on-going and unresolved reconciliation with these materials in museological and academic discourse while institutions actively review their handling, exhibition and curatorial policies towards human remains as well as cultural materials.^[40] It is hoped that this research into the history and technology of these objects will contribute to this effort.

In summary, this section has provided an overview of the current sourcing, preparation and circulation of Tibetan ritual objects made with human remains. The following four sections will describe each of these implement types and attempt to relate the cultural histories and social values of their ritual applications and religious historical use to their technology and construction as well as their illustration in visual cultural sources. These results are based on the examination of some 60 objects in museum collections (see Appendix) as well as observations of their use and fabrication at over 150 sites across the Tibetan cultural region (see chapter 1 on methodology). This investigation is further supplemented by information provided through a series of informal interviews conducted on fieldwork with over 100 lay practitioners, monks, nuns, tantric specialists, craftspeople, vendors, artists, scholars, and students. The following account is therefore a generalization drawn from various documented forms and functions for these ritual objects, as well as the dynamic cultural narratives, values and identities which have generously informed them at present.

Footnotes and references:

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[1]:

Martin, “On the cultural ecology of sky burial”, 360.

[2]:

Greene, “Death in a cave”, 270. Greene finds that the contemplation of skeletons and corpses was an especially active pedagogical tradition in south and central Asian Buddhist communities from the fourth to seventh centuries, see also chapter 2.

[3]:

Liu Shufen, “Death and the degeneration of life exposure of the corpse in medieval Chinese Buddhism,” Journal of Chinese Religions 28, no. 1, (2000), 17. Liu moreover describes evidence from Dunhuang for the promotion of this form of burial as an opportunity for the practice of 补?耻产丑补产丑ā惫补苍ā, which was also introduced from central Asia after the fourth century.

[4]:

‘Gos lo tsā ba, op.cit., 919. See also the Zhi byed snga bar phyi gsum gyi skor, op.cit., passim. Thanks to Dr. Dan Martin for clarifying this in person, July 2019.

[5]:

Martin, “On the cultural ecology,” 355-6. The term “sky burial” is a translation of the Chinese tian zang (天葬) and largely absent from historical Tibetan sources.

[6]:

Grenet, op.cit., 36.

[7]:

Gouin, Tibetan Rituals of Death, 1ff. Gouin’s conclusion that there is no “standard” form of burial in Tibetan communities at present is largely confirmed in my fieldwork across the region (see map, fig. 1.7) where I found that the method of burial was more often determined by financial or astrological concerns than the natural environment (i.e. availability of fuel for cremation): For example, one female informant from a high-altitude nomadic community in a treeless region of Ladakh mentioned that dung could be used to cremate bodies where it was determined appropriate by the bla ma or religious authority, (personal communication, February 2018). Cremation is an increasingly popular option in urban communities of the Himalayas as well as within the global diaspora, and is used preferentially in areas with small or threatened populations of vultures and/or restricted intraregional movement; as told by male and female lay and monastic informants in Thimphu, Labrang, Nangchen and Dharamsala, January 2015, November and December 2017, and February 2018.

[8]:

See Gouin, ibid., 69.

[9]:

This was repeated by multiple informants, predominantly monks and tantric specialists, in Khams, Ladakh and Sikkim, April and August 2018. See also Bhagawan Singh, “149. Disposal of the dead by mutilation in Spiti (W. Tibet)”, Man 33, (1933): 1441-143. Gregory Schopen has also speculated on an undefined monastic post-mortem procedure known to Indian Buddhists of the sixth and seventh centuries as ?补谤ī谤补辫ū箩ā, which was performed after death and before disposal, typically by cremation, and was translated from Sanskrit by one Tibetan as rus ba’i mchod byas; idem., “On avoiding ghosts and social censure”, 211 and 227n38.

[10]:

Lay practitioners, various monastic and tantric lineage holders in multiple locations of dKar rdze, Nangchen and Labrang, November and December 2017; Dharamsala, February 2018. In bya gtor, the body should be eaten entirely and in a timely manner—e.g. within three days—before it must be further processed with additional rituals for purification and/or a successful rebirth of the deceased.

[11]:

This was information repeated by monastic informants, ritual specialists and lay practitioners from various lineages in dKar rdze, Nangchen, Dharamsala, Ladakh and Kathmandu, November 2017 -July 2018. See also Loseries-Leick, op.cit., 172.

[12]:

Buddhist and non-Buddhist lay practitioners (male and female) and vendor informants in Thimphu, Kathmandu and Sikkim, January 2015, June and August 2018. The archaeologist Marion Poux finds that the skulls and femurs are often missing from historic high-altitude burials in Mustang; idem., “Early Buddhist period archaeology in Upper Mustang”, paper presented at the 15th Seminar of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, Paris, July 2019.

[13]:

One female lay practitioner from western Bhutan has recounted how human remains intended for use in ritual objects—many for legal export—are sourced in West Bengal or Bihar and brought into the country with its food, which is facilitated in part by their national prohibition against industrial meat processing (Thimphu, January 2015). Nancy Malville has also recorded anecdotal evidence of precautions against theft during bya gtor in some Tibetan communities, op.cit., 197.

[14]:

Traders and crafts people in Khams and A mdo, October-December 2018; and a male gcod specialist in Kathmandu, June 2018. See also Jonathan P. Parry, Death in Banaras (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 253 for anecdotal evidence of a contemporary Aghori (?aiva) charnel ascetic in Varanasi using skulls from a hospital mortuary.

[15]:

rNying ma bla mas and gcod practitioners in Kathmandu and West Bengal, June -July 2018.

[16]:

See chapter 1 and Nebesky-Wojkowitz, Demons and Oracles of Tibet, 398; Waddell, The Buddhism of Tibet, 300 and Balfour, “Life of an Aghori Fakir”, 347. Christian missionaries and European visitors from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries similarly spoke of the use of human remains as sorcery or magic, rather than religion; c.f. Loseries-Leick, op.cit., 26-27.

[17]:

This was repeated by many vendors, crafts people and a police officer (almost all practitioners as well) across the region in A mdo, Khams, Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, and the Kathmandu valley as well as Bodh Gaya and Varanasi, September 2017 -December 2018.

[18]:

As told by two Newar carvers specializing in stone, bone and shell, Kathmandu valley, June 2018.

[19]:

Monastic and lay informants including shopkeepers and traders in areas of Khams and A mdo, September -December 2017.

[20]:

ibid., as well as lay and monastic practitioners and local collectors in West Bengal and Ladakh, March -April 2018.

[21]:

This is a qualification shared by other religious traditions which have instrumentalized human remains as relics and cultural properties, see Patrick Geary, “Sacred commodities: The circulation of medieval relics,” in The Social Life of Things, op.cit., 169-194.

[22]:

Monastic informants including bKa’ brgyud and rNying ma lineage holders in Ladakh and West Bengal, April and July 2018.

[23]:

Gyatso, “Healing burns with fire,” 126. Bodily evidence for effective practice and religious knowledge resonates with another method for sourcing skulls: those which form or are preserved as self-arisen (rang byung) vessels during the cremation of an accomplished practitioner, an event known to lay informants of various ages in Ladakh, Kathmandu and Sikkim, April -August 2018.

[24]:

This can also be understood as the “metapractical” aspect of tantric visual and material religion, see Kinnard, Imaging Wisdom, 179.

[25]:

This was observed and reported by lay and monastic practitioners and seen in markets in Khams, A mdo, Dharamsala, Ladakh, Kathmandu and Sikkim, September 2017 -August 2018. See also Loseries-Leick, op.cit., 169.

[26]:

One gcod specialist and teacher in Kathmandu explained that, from his perspective, the tradition was by definition an ascetic one, necessitating real human bone and the commitment to procure it in order to master the 蝉ā诲丑补苍补, June 2018. This resonated with one rNying ma bla ma in Kathmandu as well who stated that advanced practice requires advanced commitment to material specificity, July 2018.

[27]:

Boiling may include use of sodium bicarbonate; the use of other chemical agents has been reported but unspecified (i.e. “acid”) by material specialists and observers (many lay practitioners) in Khams, Dharamsala, Kathmandu and West Bengal, November 2017, February, June and August 2018. Loseries-Leick records that one craftsman placed his fresh bones in a natural hot spring for a short period in order to clean them, op.cit., 177-178.

[28]:

Sa skya monastic practitioner and bla ma, dKar rdze, November 2017.

[29]:

One lay practitioner and female observer reported that the failure to control this process—over-boiling in an unsuitable vessel—was responsible for the destruction of a skull donated by a recently deceased member of a monastic community near Dharamsala, February 2018.

[30]:

For more on the material characteristics of human bone used in Tibetan cultural objects, see Fuentes, “Technical examination of a bone ornament ensemble”, appendix F.

[31]:

For a practitioner’s perspective on knowledge of these objects received through specific teachings or lineages, see Loseries-Leick’s use of personal narrative and direct observation, op.cit., passim.

[32]:

See Loseries-Leick, op.cit., 170. The acquisition of human remains for ritual instruments is interpreted as an opportunity for advanced practice in the Bon tradition according to Helffer, Mchod-rol, 257. Moreover, monastic informants and tantric specialists of various lineages in dKar rdze and Dharamsala (November 2017, February 2018) have each described methods for selecting a skull through personal contact—e.g. holding the cranium up to one’s chest—through which a unique connection is established, making the object suitable for use.

[33]:

Vendors (both Buddhist and non-Buddhist, all laymen) in Chengdu, Khams, areas of A mdo, Dharamsala, Ladakh and Kathmandu, September 2017 -July 2018.

[34]:

These observation were supported by vendors and material specialists (mostly lay practitioners as well) in Ladakh, the Kathmandu valley and West Bengal, March -August 2018.

[35]:

This is particularly true in Ladakh, where many of its older or more prestigious ritual objects—including those made of human remains—have been sold to collectors and exported since the region was opened to tourism in the past 50 years; as described by multiple informants (vendors, lay and monastic practitioners of various lineages) in Ladakh, March and April 2018.

[36]:

Balfour, “Life of an Aghori Fakir”, 341. He predicted that the Aghori yogis, in particular, would “likely die out at no very remote period” which has yet to be realized. See, for example, Parry, Death in Banaras, passim.

[37]:

McGowan, “Consuming the devil’s idols?”, 2ff.

[38]:

In the UK, these restrictions, written in 2005, are limited to remains which are dated within 100 years of the present; see Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums, op.cit. as well as Ryan M. Seidemann, “Bones of contention: A comparative examination of law governing human remains from archaeological contexts in formerly colonial countries”, Louisiana Law Review 64, no. 3 (Spring 2004): 546-588.

[39]:

Neil G.W. Curtis, “Human remains: The sacred, museums and archaeology,” Public Archaeology 3, no. 1 (2003), 23. This distinction between bodies and cultural properties which utilize human remains was repeated by Dr. Daniel Antoine, Institute for Bioarchaeology Curator of Physical Anthropology at the British Museum (personal communication, 21 November 2019).

[40]:

In the course of this research I have been contacted by curators, conservators and researchers in the UK, US, Austria, Canada, France, Sweden and Australia regarding the care and display of these objects. In each case, the concern is the material substrate (i.e. human remains) and its controlled access. This redress has been focused, for example, by the British Museum in consultations and workshops—July and October 2019, January 2020—organized with ritual specialists, tibetologists and members of the UK-based Tibetan community in collaboration with myself, curator Dr. Imma Ramos and University of Oxford doctoral researcher Thupten Kelsang and made in advance of an upcoming show which will exhibit a selection of these objects. See Mark Brown, “Tibetan objects made of human remains to go on show at British Museum”, The Guardian, 23 February 2020; see also Kelsang’s forthcoming dissertation.