Chapter 5 - Conclusion: Human remains in Tibetan material religion

This dissertation has described the cultural technology of Tibetan ritual objects made from human remains by means of material-centered analyses in the examination of accessible examples in museum collections, an iconographic study of Buddhist and tantric visual culture, interviews with living practitioners and fabricators, and the historical formation of liturgical and textual sources. The resulting discussion of these objects as vessels, instruments and implements is intended to suggest a technical vocabulary for their interpretation by non-practitioners which has been synthesized from diverse bodies of knowledge and documented ritual practices, as well as local traditions or narratives. This research has moreover sought to indicate the social, historical and soteriological value of human remains to the practice, material culture and illustration of tantra and Buddhism in Tibet.

While the skilled ritual use of these objects is conditioned by advanced religious training and specialized instruction, there are many ways in which skulls, carved bone ornaments, thighbone trumpets and double-sided skull drums have been made accessible and socially legible in the Tibetan cultural landscape and its historical narratives. In the second and third chapters of this dissertation, representations of charnel ascetic ritual methodologies are explored through preserved sources and descriptions of teachers, observances, deities, protectors and intermediaries (e.g. ḍākinīs) that together indicate how objects made with human remains have been valorized within the iconography and practice of Buddhist yoga tantra since the eighth century. The fourth chapter in five parts puts these historical narratives in perspective with present evidence for the sourcing, preparation, fabrication and circulation of these objects. The result aims to demonstrate a continuous tradition of cultural and ritual technologies, material skill, and dynamic social values that suggest the various ways in which the body is instrumentalized through Buddhist tantra and Tibetan material religion.

As this work has explored, skulls can be used as liturgical vessels to collect, contain, prepare or distribute offerings made to protectors and wrathful deities; at monthly or annual communal observances (i.e. at the new year); at periodic, often public empowerments (e.g. sgrub chen) performed by ritual specialists on behalf of the community in order to facilitate religious education and contribute to practitioners’ accumulation of beneficial action or merit; and in deity yoga and/or tantric practices which accomplish the nondual and/or the transformation and subjugation of adversities. Iconographically, the skull demonstrates tantric expertise, the observance of an oath, and/or an association with a mode of practice which utilizes, purifies or undermines antinomian narratives and social values. Skulls can moreover be used for individual practice but also by institutional specialists on behalf of the public, local or monastic community wherein the vessel is used as a point of engagement to transform, empower or accumulate. This represents a diversity of historically innovated functions derived from the earliest material expressions of the kāpālika vow.

Likewise, rus rgyan were formalized through the expansion of Buddhist mahāyoga and yoginī tantra in the eighth to eleventh centuries before they were adopted and refined by Tibetan practitioners and illustrators following the phyi dar. The ornaments can be worn by specialists for individual practice but often they are integrated into public empowerments, representations of religious authority and ritual performances. The ensemble of six components most commonly includes an apron, crown, chest piece or necklace, and bands for the upper arms, hands and feet, and are meant to facilitate the yogin’s identification with a wrathful deity (e.g. Heruka). In assuming this form through the use of ornaments, a ritual performer can be empowered to cultivate religious insight, subjugate local deities or transform adversities, and other actions which are interpreted as beneficial to the well-being and stability of the community. At the same time, in public displays like ‘chams for example, bone ornaments are used as instruments for religious education, an expression of shared cultural historical narratives and the accomplishment of Buddhist soteriological goals such as liberation or an auspicious rebirth.

Thighbone trumpets are most consistently and prominently associated with the Tibetan tradition of gcod and ritual specializations of ascetic yoga practitioners (e.g. brtul zhugs spyod pa) where they are often used to engage, subdue or neutralize adversities which can be characterized as obstacles to enlightenment and the realization of Buddhist religious knowledge. Moreover, this ritual instrument has a practical application to public well-being as a form of offering to local or wrathful protectors and through the control of disease, weather and a seismically-unstable geographical region. The skull ḍamaru has also been used by yogins as well as lay and monastic practitioners as an instrument specialized to the charnel methodologies of Buddhist tantra, use, like the rkang gling for example, as a sound offering to guardians and other wrathful deities. Both of these instruments can be applied in forms of mahāyoga and yoginī tantra—including the practice of gcod —though there is thus far very little evidence for their use beyond Tibetan sources dated after the eleventh century.

The ritual traditions and practices summarized here are generalizations drawn from the inter-related teachings, oral transmissions, regional variations, cultural historical narratives and social contexts described throughout this dissertation. Yet for every object explored in this research, there are a number of exceptions to be found as idiosyncratic liturgical functions, local interpretations and formal variations based on unique technical skills or an availability/dearth of resources. Some of this complexity reflects the diversity of settings or modes of use, where an ascetic yogin is more likely to have a simple implement than a monastic institution with access to the wealth and skilled craftspeople needed to execute complex ornamentation. Likewise, individual objects exhibit a potentially infinite variety of shapes and levels of technical refinement, with human remains having been purchased, inherited or gifted and subsequently altered through ritual criteria and supplementary materials.

Within communities of practitioners, attitudes to human remains vary according to the religious education, interests, experiences, location and unique identity of the individual, making it impossible to articulate an essentially “Tibetan” or Himalayan Buddhist interpretation for these objects and their use. Handling strategies vary between people and settings from casual or indifferent to highly formalized and restricted, and where objects have been made accessible through public display—for example in local religious institutions or monastic museums—they are presented in a manner appropriate to their ritual and social function, as determined by an informed specialist from within the community. Moreover, at present and across the region, the handling and interpretation of ritual objects made from human remains is increasingly conditioned by the active enforcement of restrictions on their sale, transport or possession through political and legal control, as well as their high economic value to an expanding group of global and regional practitioners and collectors, resulting in a relative scarcity of materials available to local religious communities and increasingly restricted access to these objects in ritual settings.

However, a number of technical innovations and alternatives have been cultivated by ritual users and fabricators in response to the challenges and risks of acquiring human remains. This change is especially evident after the mid-nineteenth century when these objects were introduced to the global market for cultural properties through acquisition and display by non-practitioner communities (e.g. British colonial institutions and collectors). At the same time, these substitutions and alterations have facilitated the continuity and expansion of this tradition of object-making and a broader, global accessibility to its ritual applications. Though recorded evidence emphasizes a material specificity which is characteristic to the tantric methodologies explored here, it has been suggested by many local informants that efficacy is primarily determined by the skill and religious education of the practitioners, observers and other participants, rather than the technical details of the instrument.

Furthermore, human remains have been valued and venerated as relics in Buddhist communities since the construction of their earliest monuments in the third century before the Common Era. Relics, however, are not fabricated or constructed through technology or skill, nor are they exclusively made of human remains, being also identified as texts, teachings, physical impressions, textiles and other materials which originate or have been in contact with an accomplished practitioner recognized as an embodiment of a buddha. This represents an alternative, yet tangentially related category of Buddhist material cultural history. At the same time, where a donor and/or their family have consented to the use of remains as ritual objects, the social value of this instrumentalization for the corpse is informed by historically Buddhist cultural narratives on the soteriological benefit of donative gestures made with one’s body and as a demonstration of accumulated merit and religious understanding.

In this study, rather than individual corpses, human remains can be understood as having the potential to demonstrate fundamental Buddhist doctrines of interdependent origination and impermanence, to undermine the ontological relationship between the perceived self and its body through tantric action or yoga, and to cultivate religious insight, knowledge or merit. The human body is moreover valued in cultural and soteriological narratives as an accumulation of past positive actions which have resulted in the practitioner’s capacity to hear, teach and do Buddhism, by which they may be liberated from rebirth. The objects studied here are thus conditioned by these treatments and strategies for handling the human dead, and while charnel materials may be interpreted as volatile, but they are not invisible nor lacking a discernible cultural history and social value. Though death is nevertheless treated as a dangerous occasion in Tibetan communities and charnel materials can be regarded as a source of pollution or impurity, the skulls, femurs and other remains used in these ritual objects demonstrate the transformative capacity of Buddhist tantra and its methods.

Finally, within this conservation-led investigation into visual and technological history, there have been a number of opportunities for critical engagement with the interpretation and display of Tibetan material religion and human remains in cultural institutions both globally and within the Himalayan region. In both museums and religious communities, these objects are treated as a protected category and subject to restrictions in handling and access though where the former qualify a corpse through its association with an unique individual, group or cultural identity, the latter do so primarily according to the ritual and educational utility of human remains for the realization of Buddhist or tantric goals. For one group of specialists, restrictions address issues of liability, proprietary or political control and the historical displacement of funerary materials, yet for ritual users—in addition to protecting the objects from theft, confiscation or sale—access and interpretation is controlled through the gradual acquisition of religious and cultural knowledge. For many practitioners consulted in this research, where someone is disturbed by human remains, from the perspective of Buddhism and tantra, they have failed to realize the nature of the self and its material existence.

These hermeneutical intersections can be understood as an opportunity for growth and revision in historical and present museological discourse and conservation practice: How can other definitions or cultural narratives on the death of the body be engaged through display and handling? How, when and by whom can human remains be interpreted as cultural objects?

Moreover, how can global circulation work to support, rather than threaten or sequester, the continuity of Tibetan material religion and this traditions of object-making? Finally, how can these objects be made accessible to informed users from the global Tibetan community and other practitioners of Buddhist tantra with the capacity to reactivate a broader range of their publicly beneficial and educational functions and resolve their de-contextualization or misinterpretation? The preceding dissertation had aimed to provide an interpretive platform and technical vocabulary towards a model of responsible custodianship for these objects which addresses these concerns and is qualified by the complex, dynamic and irreducible diversity of perspectives in Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist communities.

This dissertation has intended to contribute to the disciplines of material culture studies, technical art history, and Buddhist studies, and as a supplement to the ongoing technical and intellectual discourse of religious scholars, authors, practitioners and institutions. Using conservation as a research methodology, this project hopes to frame an object-based discussion of Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist material religion as an opportunity to explore specific ritual traditions, teaching lineages, or regional bodies of knowledge in relation to cultural objects and their diverse histories. This work has also re-evaluated the formation of characteristically Tibetan iconographies for siddhas, ḍākinīs and the wrathful deities of Buddhist tantra in its visual culture.

Building on the historical and liturgical relationships introduced here, future investigations might be shaped around the material traditions and observances of brtul zhugs spyod pa and other ascetic practitioners, for example, or a comparative study of the implements and methodologies of ritualized charnel asceticism in rNying ma, gSar ma and even Bon sources. Further yet, this work might inform an investigation of how the interpretation and presentation of these objects by various colonial administrations have been (and are still) used to limit Tibetan or practitioner communities’ capacity for self-determination through active custodianship of their material heritage or the articulation of local histories, shared narratives and social values.

This project is perhaps too ambitious for one document and many alternate versions of the cultural history of human remains in Tibetan ritual objects can and should be written: What has been presented here is a structured consolidation of what was most accessible and relevant to material and technical research. This dissertation has moreover sought to investigate and document surviving evidence for the continuity of this tradition of material knowledge transfer and its ritual applications, and to cultivate technology—both historical and present—as a point of engagement for connecting cultural objects with a diversity of dynamic sources, narratives and values.