Methodology and structure

This project will add a contemporary perspective from a diversity of actors in the present Tibetan cultural matrix to existing scholarship and the visual or textual historical record. This is inspired by historians like John Cort, who proposed an ethnographic and material cultural approach to the study of Jain sculpture, for example, as part of an art history which engages with the dynamism and longevity of ritual methods.^[1] The extended historical narrative of this research—from the emergence of kāpālika (“skull-bearer”) practices in south Asia in the first centuries of the common era, to the establishment and perpetuation of charnel instruments in Tibetan material religion until the present day—is meant to illustrate the technical continuity and dynamic interpretive complexity of these objects.

By engaging with how ritual and material knowledge has been transmitted throughout the centuries—through images, texts and cultural historical narratives—this dissertation aims to document the technology of using human remains in ritual objects as an enduringly innovative process. The understanding of documentation as a collective production of knowledge is essential to the discipline of information science, for example, where data is recorded, interpreted, and organized as a cultural technique for understanding relationships between forms of information.^[2] Here, the relationships between objects and their visual or material histories, individual practitioners and communities, cultural history and social value, and materials and efficacy will be described through an object-focused study.

The methodologies used in this research—both historical and ethnographic (that is, interview and observation-based)—are intended to privilege information which is publicly available and avoid details or descriptions which, as part of the tantric tradition, should be restricted to qualified or initiated practitioners. This represents a shift from the study of the content or experience of protected information in esoteric communities to its forms of knowledge exchange in a model of intellectual engagement proposed by Hugh Urban, a scholar of esoteric social and religious groups.^[3] The negotiation of access to and protection of tantric boundaries, information, narratives and ritual objects represents the primary ethical consideration of this project’s methodologies, simultaneous to a concern for the safety and security of the informants and objects.^[4]

Alternatively, for European and American cultural institutions, access to these objects is controlled primarily by policies governing the study and handling of human remains as anthropological specimens or funerary materials.^[5] In this project’s first phase of fieldwork, skull vessels, bone ornaments, thighbone trumpets and skull drums were examined in the collections of the British Museum, Victoria and Albert, Wellcome Collection/National Science Museum (London), Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford) and National Museums Liverpool. At each institution, protocol for handling, documentation and access was managed in accordance with the Human Tissues Act of 2004 and copyright laws for academic researchers.^[6] Approximately 50 objects and their curatorial records were studied and their materials, construction, condition and evidence of use or repair were recorded (see chapter 4 and Appendix). Where these objects are restricted by ritual specialists and tantric practitioners in one setting, they are restricted for different, legal reasons by public museums and academic institutions, demonstrating a range of values and priorities for the maintenance of these objects by different types of custodians.

The technical examinations undertaken at the above-mentioned institutions during the first year of doctoral research facilitated an accumulation of formal details, material information and images to form a basis of comparison and series of hypotheses to be tested in a year-long campaign of fieldwork across the Himalayas and south Asia from September 2017 to August 2018. Sharing objects from UK collections via digital images on a phone (i.e. photo-elicitation) became essential to engaging informants across the region in Tibetan—or Tibetic—communities of A mdo and Khams (China), Himachal Pradesh, Ladakh, West Bengal and Sikkim (India) and the Kathmandu valley (Nepal) (see map in fig. 1.7).

Figure 1.7: Key research locations visited from September 2017 to August 2018; the route was planned according to seasonal weather patterns, travel conditions, language skills and accessibility, and included visits to archaeological collections and pilgrimage sites in Kolkata, Varanasi, Sarnath and Bodh Gaya.

Approximately 140 sites were visited during this period of fieldwork including monasteries, temples (Tbt. lha khang) and pilgrimage destinations as well as workshops, markets, regional museums, arts organizations and private collections within the region. Individuals within monastic communities, ritual specialists, lay practitioners (both male and female), craftspeople, vendors and non-practicing observers were surveyed informally and anonymously on their knowledge or experience of these objects, their use, and the circulation or sourcing of raw materials; the answers of 102 of these people are included here.^[7] These included lay and monastic lineage holders in various rNying ma, Sa skya, dGe lugs and bKa’ brgyud traditions as well as gcod and brtul zhugs practitioners and non-Buddhist tantric specialists including Śaiva Aghori.

Active participant observation was an essential component of this research though as an uninitiated non-Buddhist, this was limited to large and/or publicly accessible practices such as ‘chams (masked ritual dance), sgrub chen (large ritual accomplishments which may include ‘chams, sman sgrub and a number of other subsidiary practices discussed in this dissertation), monthly feasts and offerings (e.g. mkha’ ‘gro tshogs) according to the lunar calendar, funerary proceedings and installations or offerings made in the ‘du khang (assembly hall) and specialist spaces of wrathful deities and protectors (e.g. mgon khang, srung ma khang). These conversations and observations were documented as daily field notes and the data gathered from interviews and observations—including digital photographs taken with the verbal permission of object custodians—will be integrated throughout the narrative of this dissertation.

There are no doubt many ways the cultural history of these objects can and will be told. The following represents a best attempt to utilize available resources and propose an essential narrative architecture and chronology which, at the very least, expands on previous scholarship by indicating the complexity and longevity of the material tradition of using human remains in Tibetan ritual objects and its means of knowledge transfer. At the same time, this work is meant as a complement to religious scholarship and ritual knowledge, a technical study which is accessible to non-practitioners, yet indicates the diversity of narratives and sources by which these objects have been conditioned and perpetuated.

In the second chapter, skulls and bone ornaments are explored through evidence of the formation of Buddhist mahāyoga and yoginī tantras and it is argued that, especially in the latter, an emphasis on yoga and ritual empowerment through the use of charnel implements represents a major source for the iconographic and liturgical valorization of human remains in Tibetan material religion. The foundations of Tibetan traditions for ritualized charnel asceticism will be explored through textual and visual sources that document the cultivation of yoga in the form of the wrathful deity Heruka, and the iconography of the Samvara maṇḍala, including the intermediaries the yoginī and ḍākinī, as well as the practice of gaṇacakra (Tbt. tshogs kyi ‘khor lo) and representations of the aṣṭaśmāśana, or eight charnel grounds. This chapter will also explore how kāpālika methodologies and materials were exchanged with brahmanical and Śaiva groups such as the Pāśupata.

In the third chapter, images of Ma gcig lab sgron (1049-1155) from bKa’ brgyud sites in the western Himalayas constructed in the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries will be interpreted as evidence for the use of rkang gling in the gcod sādhana of lus sbyin. Earlier images of her teacher Pha dam pa Sangs rgyas (d. 1115) as an Indian siddha from the same monuments are furthermore used to emphasize how lus sbyin was interpreted within the greater traditions of ritualized charnel asceticism and the performance of the nondual. Though ḍamaru emerge much earlier than gcod in yoginī imagery and yoga tantra, in Tibet the double-sided skull drum or thod rnga is promoted as a specific type of ḍamaru suitable to the charnel methods and teachings of gcod and/or the observance of brtul zhugs spyod pa. These instruments are explored as part of the expansion of Tibetan ritual traditions, lineages and monastic institutions after the widespread adoption of Buddhist tantra during the phyi dar (late tenth to twelfth centuries).

Finally, these historical narratives will be contextualized through an object-based technical study on the use and construction for each instrument type based on direct observation, the knowledge and experiences of informants, and surviving or accessible material evidence. This fourth chapter is divided into parts, one each devoted to the most prominent ritual object types made with human remains in Tibetan material religion: skulls, bone ornaments, thighbone trumpets and skull drums, plus an introduction describing current mechanisms for sourcing raw materials, producing, activating and circulating these objects. These sections will also describe formal variations, techniques for ornamentation and their illustration in Tibetan or tantric visual culture. This section positions the cultural histories of the second and third chapters in relation to information supplied by present individuals or communities of practitioners, as well as material evidence preserved in the objects themselves.

Overall, this dissertation proposes a narrative platform and technical vocabulary for the interpretation of human remains in Tibetan ritual objects as a cultural historical and material study, from the earliest recorded evidences for their use and collective value, to their expanding and increasingly complex functions in Buddhist tantra, and finally to present global trends in their manufacture, handling and circulation.

Footnotes and references:

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[1]:

John Cort, “Art, religion and material culture: Some reflections on method,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64, no. 3 (1996): 613-632.

[2]:

Suzanne Briet, What is Documentation?, trans. Ronald E. Day, Laurent Martinet and Hermina G.B. Anghelescu (Paris: Editions Documentaires, 1951).

[3]:

Hugh B. Urban, “Elitism and esotericism: Strategies of secrecy and power in south Indian tantra and French Freemasonry”, Numen 44, no. 1 (1997): 3.

[4]:

Throughout this dissertation, informants will remain anonymous unless they have given explicit permission for the inclusion of their identity and personal information. Moreover, informants in Dharamsala are often migrants whose observations were made elsewhere in the Tibetan cultural region including in or around Shigatse, Lhasa, Chamdo and Gyantse. Likewise objects which are not publicly accessible in museum collections, on display, through ritual use or on sale will be described generally in terms of location and affiliation (e.g. “a monastery in Ladakh”); this is to protect these objects from confiscation or theft.

[5]:

For previous work on these objects as a postgraduate researcher in conservation, see Ayesha Fuentes, “Technical examination of a bone ornament ensemble from the Himalayan region with comments on handling, treatment, storage and display,” (MA thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 2014).

[6]:

UK Department for Culture Media and Sport, Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums, http://www.culture.gov.uk/reference_library/publications/3720.aspx, (accessed 26 December 2016).

[7]:

These participants were informed of the purpose of my research as well as the condition of their anonymity and in regulation with the SOAS Doctoral School Code of Practice for Postgraduate Research Degrees, available at https://www.soas.ac.uk/registry/degreeregulations/, (accessed 1 February 2017). This work includes observations made during periodic work in Bhutan with the Department of Culture between 2013 and 2015.