Interpretation and context

This project is framed in response to previous scholarship on human remains in Tibetan ritual objects—primarily by European authors—which has engaged relatively little with the complexity of their context(s), material specifications, cultural history or ritual functions, and/or the relationships between these aspects of their use. Moreover, the vocabulary of these earlier authors has had a demonstrable effects on the interpretation of these objects in public institutions like museums and universities as well as tibetological and art historical discourse.

This is, in part, the legacy of early European tibetology as a product of British and other colonial authors’ intellectual priorities during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Clare Harris has elsewhere provided an extended discussion of how British historians and collectors exploited their access and mobility within colonial south Asia and the Himalayas to shape the display and interpretation of Tibetan objects in UK collections (and globally) after the mid-nineteenth century.^[1] In many present interpretations of ritual instruments made with human remains there is a lingering influence of the language of Laurence A. Waddell (1854-1938), who visited Tibet secretly from the then-British hill station of Darjeeling before his role as consultant to the 1903-4 invasive military expedition of Tibet by Francis Edward Younghusband (1863-1942). Through his role as a cultural historian, collector, educator and advisor to research institutions like the British Museum, Waddell facilitated a number of misrepresentations about these objects and their use in Tibetan Vajrayāna, which he viewed as a “degenerate” form of Buddhism.^[2]

In Waddell’s Buddhism of Tibet, or Lamaism, originally published in 1895, he writes, for example, that in the preparation of thighbone trumpets “an elaborate incantation is done, part of which consists in the Lāma [bla ma] eating a portion of the skin of the bone, otherwise its blast would not be sufficiently powerful to summon the demons.”^[3] Based on his observations and experiences in the region, this may refer, vaguely, to the use of rkang gling in bdud kyi gcod yul, (shortened to gcod, or “cutting”) where the object bdud is often translated as “demon” (see chapter 3). Waddell does not clarify these terms, however, and his description of eating “bone skin” is inconsistent with any other known source, yet his work has occupied a foundational role in the interpretation of these objects by European and American scholars.^[4] Moreover, his ethnographic perspective was supported by photographers within the British colonial sphere who generated and circulated images of their use as “curiosities”.^[5]

Figure 1.1: An historic object record from the Victoria and Albert Museum (IM.263.1916) for a set of bone ornaments donated by the mother of a former member of the British Trade Agency escort at Gyantse (rGyal rtse) from 1909-1911. The text below this image of a chest ornament—here depicting rDo rje rnal ‘byor ma or Vajrayoginī, a deity common to rus rgyan —reads: “The top plaque, coming at the back of the neck of the Black Hat Sorcerer (Nag-pa), is carved to resemble a lotus of five petals. The long bottom plaque, falling over his breast, is figured with a Grigug Dakini, holding a grigug [knife], blood bowl, and magic staff [khaṭvāṅga], and dancing on a corpse. Used at the exorcism of evil spirits, and at devil dance.” Image courtesy of John Clarke.

Records for these objects in UK museums—many collected between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries—sometimes preserve Waddell’s rhetoric on the use of human remains in Tibetan religious life. The caption for this chest ornament of human bone in fig. 1.1. and now at the Victoria and Albert Museum—donated by the mother of a former British military escort at Gyantse—describes the object as being used for “the exorcism of evil spirits, and at devil dance”. Mrs. Dora Creagh—mother of Aubrey Osborne Creagh (d. 1915), a British soldier killed on duty “in Mesopotamia”—donated a number of objects acquired by her son to the museum and wrote to the V&A curators that Laurence Waddell had been a frequent visitor and gave explanations of a “tantric sorcerer's apron of carved human bone… [w]orn by… sorcerers in driving out disease demons and in other necromantic ceremonies”.^[6] The British Museum would repeat this language in their presentation of a “necromancer’s bone apron” in a 1930 publication distributed to its members.^[7]

These distortions would be exported to the United States where collections of Tibetan materials were also accumulated during the last century and simultaneously sensationalized and made obsolete in their presentation to American audiences: In 1923, Berthold Laufer of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago referred to tantric ritual objects made with human remains as “relics of an age of savagery and a barbarous cult”.^[8] Moreover, Laufer implies that these instruments had no contemporary relevance, despite other anthropologists, ethnographers and travelers of the same era finding that they were an active and valued component of the region’s religious life (figures 1.2 and 1.3).^[9]

Figure 1.2: Non-monastic tantric practitioner (Tbt. sngags pa) drinking from a skull cup. Image by Heinrich Harrer (1912-2006) from Stein 1972.

Figure 1.3: rKang gling on display at the Pitt Rivers Museum (accession no. 1930.71.15), purchased by curators in 1930; the man in the photograph demonstrates the performance of gcod or “cutting” with thighbone trumpet and double-sided hand drum, September 2017. All photos by author unless otherwise noted.

Later authors on Tibetan cultural history would engage with the presence of these objects through more focused ethnographic research: In Oracles and Demons of Tibet—published in 1956—René de Nebesky-Wojkowitz notes that he did not find Waddell’s descriptions entirely accurate.

His work moreover preserves essential technical details on the specific materiality of these objects:

Various kinds of human bone, mainly skulls and thighbones, are used for magic purposes. From the former skull cups (thod phor, mi mgo'i phor pa) and drums (thod rnga) are prepared, from the latter the so-called rkang gling trumpets are manufactured. The bone-aprons, bracelets, etc., worn by Tibetan tantrics when performing their rites, are made, too, of human bone, the bones of a Brahmin being preferred for their manufacture. In some cases also ground human bones, human nails, teeth, which had been extracted from a corpse, the bone and hair of a woman who had died in childbirth, the hair of a widow or prostitute, hair taken from a corpse and human skins have to be applied.^[10]

This information is drawn from the author’s study and observation of practices associated with wrathful deities and protectors, undertaken near Sikkim in the mid-twentieth century and with contributions from a series of informants from central Tibet. While his work is an essential document for understanding the dynamic and idiosyncratic relationships between the materials, practitioners and textual sources which support Tibetan religious life, Nebesky-Wojkowitz’ description also provokes a number of unanswered questions about the value, longevity and manufacture of these instruments: Why are some bones preferred to others? Where do the remains come from and how are they useful for the purpose of the ritual? Why does it need to be human? This dissertation aims to discuss how these cultural narratives and ritual technologies have been and continue to be cultivated, expanded, formalized and socially conditioned.

An additional dimension of cultural history, social value and ritual logic is revealed through an examination of the relationship between burial practices in the Tibetan cultural region—particularly that of bya gtor, or “scattering to the birds”—and the use of human remains in material religion. This has been most elegantly proposed by Dan Martin in his model of “cultural ecology”, where the arid and treeless natural environment of the Himalayan plateau encourages the widespread use of exposure burial, which resonates with ritual dismemberment in practices like gcod, and where ritual objects like rkang gling and skulls used as vessels are illustrative of a latent availability and/or valorization for human remains.^[11] Moreover, it has been suggested that the soteriological value of human remains in Tibetan communities is made explicit through the interpretation of exposure burial as an opportunity to cultivate merit through the donation of the corpse as food to vultures and other living beings.^[12] This research addresses these larger narratives of social valorization and the utilization of available material resources through fieldwork documenting the present methods for the acquisition of human remains to be used in ritual objects and an historical examination of human remains as a platform for Buddhist and tantric practice.

The most comprehensive treatment of these objects to date was published in 2008 by Andrea Loseries-Leick and combines religious literature, practical experience and interviews with craftsmen working in northern India in the latter decades of the last century into an “ethno-historical study”.^[13] As both scholar and skilled practitioner, Loseries-Leick supplies various accounts of the selection and maintenance of these instruments, ritual applications and sources, many details of which will be further explored and re-contextualized here. In her fieldwork, Loseries-Leick indicates that the commercialization of these ritual instruments after their introduction to the global market in the past century has changed how they are made: The drive to produce objects for commercial sale and availability of electric hand tools have shortened the expected timeline for design and production, while the dominance of representational forms of material culture like thang ka and a dearth of committed apprentices willing to work as carvers have endangered the continuity of the tradition’s technical knowledge.^[14]

Loseries-Leick’s work sets an important precedent for documenting these objects in historical perspective by presenting technical models drawn from Tibetan texts, including one of the earliest commentaries on the implements for yoga in the form of Heruka by the Sa skya scholar Grags pa rgyal mtshan (1147-1216).^[15] Loseries-Leick moreover suggests how an anthropological study of ritual objects can be refined by engaging with Tibetan historiography and ritual literature, such as the genre of manuals for the examination of skulls known as thod brtags, where individual lineages have developed unique traditions of technical standards and interpretations for cranial morphology.17 To Loseries-Leick’s substantial (though methodologically uneven) effort, this dissertation hopes to add recent studies on early tantra and its iconography, an increasingly robust discourse about religion and material culture, and a broader perspective on Buddhist materiality and the technical specificity of tantric objects.

Shaped by these previous efforts, this project is thus an attempt at a more comprehensive study of this technical tradition as a body of knowledge passed within and between communities, both historically and at present. In the second and third chapters, each instrument is treated as the subject of a cultural historical narrative: Skulls and bone ornaments are introduced through the formation, circulation and practice of Buddhist mahāyoga and yoginī tantra. What is identified as a Buddhist mode of ritualized charnel asceticism is explored here as a textual, iconographic and liturgical tradition culminating in Tibetan depictions of siddhas (Tbt. grub thob) and the maṇḍala of Cakrasaṃvara (‘Khor lo bde mchog) as well as its deities (e.g. Heruka) and intermediaries (yoginī/ḍākinī).

The history of thighbone trumpets, on the other hand, is told in relation to the practice of gcod taught by Ma gcig lab sgron (1055-1149) and the earliest surviving visual evidence for these instruments found in representations of the Tibetan master from the fourteenth century in the western Himalayas. Though the wooden ḍamaru or Tibetan cang (r)te’u is found in a range of images and applications—through the practice and popularization of Buddhist tantra, yoginī iconography and Tibetan innovations in ritual performance after the tenth century—a double-sided drum made with skulls, or thod rnga, eventually comes to figure prominently in Tibetan representations of ritualized charnel asceticism and its teachers, deities and practitioners, as well as offerings made to protectors and other wrathful deities.

Finally, this dissertation will put these material cultural histories in context by documenting existing objects in museum collections and re-interpreting their technological specificities in relation to the diverse perspectives of active communities of practitioners and observers, gathered by interview across the Tibetan cultural region during a year of fieldwork. Each type of instrument will be described in terms of its diverse applications, formal characteristics and iconographic presence as an implement for practice or visual indications of ritual skill. This technical study moreover includes an exploration of the present methods for sourcing human remains for the manufacture of ritual objects and the effects of circulating these charnel instruments as global commodities and cultural properties.

Footnotes and references:

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[1]:

Clare E. Harris, The Museum at the Roof of the World: Art, Politics and the Representation of Tibet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Almost all of the objects to which I had access in UK collections, presented here, were found and acquired in the Himalayan region by British colonial and/or military representatives. See also Emma Martin, “Charles Bell’s collection of ‘curios’: Acquisition and encounters during a Himalayan journey,” in Narrating Objects, Collecting Stories: Essays in Honour of Professor Susan M. Pearce, eds. Sandra Dudley, et. al. (London: Routledge, 2012), 167-183.

[2]:

Charles Allen, The Buddha and the Sahibs: The Men who Discovered India’s Lost Religion (London: John Murray, 2002), 288. Waddell would also teach at University College London after his return from Asia and his attitude towards tantra is anticipated in the reception of later studies: David Snellgrove, for example, includes an explanatory preface for sexual yoga and charnel imagery in his critical study of Hevajra tantra as a ritual form of Buddhism sometimes viewed by non-specialists as “corrupt”, see idem., “Introduction 1. Apologetic”, The Hevajra Tantra: A Critical Study (Bangkok: Orchid Press, 2010 (1959), 1ff.

[3]:

Laurence A. Waddell, The Buddhism of Tibet, or Lamaism, second edition (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons Ltd, 1958 [1895]), 300.

[4]:

Waddell’s influence would moreover extend beyond museology and cultural history: He also presented his collection of Tibetan skulls at the Royal College of Surgeons, where they became the subject of comparative analysis by a craniometry student at Oxford in 1923. c.f. G.M. Morant, “A first study of the Tibetan skull,” Biometrika 14, no. 3 (1923): 193-260.

[5]:

Harris, op.cit., 83.

[6]:

“Nominal file: Mrs. Dora Creagh”, Victoria and Albert Museum, no. MA/1/C3162, accessed 12 May 2018. My thanks to the V&A collections staff and especially curator Dr. John Clark for facilitating access to these materials. I was very sad to hear of Dr. Clark’s passing the week before the initial submission of this dissertation.

[7]:

H.J Braunholtz, “A necromancer’s bone apron from Tibet,” The British Museum Quarterly 5, no. 1 (1930): 29-30.

[8]:

Berthold Laufer, Use of Human Skulls and Bones in Tibet (Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1923), 10. I was introduced to this text on a visit to the Field Museum in 2012; my thanks to JP Brown and museum staff for their guidance in finding this information.

[9]:

Alexandra David-Néel, for example, observed that human remains were a visible part of Tibetan material religion through tantra (“magic”) and that bone ornaments were worn by specialists as evidence of their ritual skill. idem., Magic and Mystery in Tibet (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969 [1929]), 41. On the American collection of Tibetan materials, see also Dianne McGowan, “Consuming the devil’s idols?: (Re)presenting Tibetan art in the United States” (PhD diss., Australia National University, 2010). Thanks to Dr. Rob Linrothe for sharing this with me.

[10]:

René de Nebesky-Wojkowitz, Oracles and Demons of Tibet: The Cult and Iconography of the Tibetan Protective Deities (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), 345.

[11]:

Dan Martin, “On the cultural ecology of sky burial in the Himalayan plateau”, East and West 46, no. 3/4 (1996): 353-370.

[12]:

Nancy Malville, “Mortuary practices and the ritual use of human bone in Tibet,” in Interacting with the Dead: Perspectives on Mortuary Archaeology for the New Millennium, eds. G.F.M. Rakita, et al. (Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 2005), 190-204. See also Margaret Gouin, Tibetan Rituals of Death: Buddhist Funerary Practices (London: Routledge, 2010).

[13]:

Andrea Loseries-Leick, Tibetan Mahayoga Tantra: An Ethno-Historical Study of Skulls, Bones, and Relics (Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation, 2008).

[14]:

ibid., 193-206.

[15]:

ibid., 107; Grags pa rgyal mtshan, “He ru ka’i chas drug”, in Grags pa rgyal mtshan gyi bka’ ‘bum, ed. bSod nams rgya mtsho (Tokyo: Thō-yō sBuṅ kho, 1968 [13th c.]), 266-278 (fl.185-196). See also chapter 2 and chapter 4, section 3 on rus rgyan (bone ornaments).