Death and Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism

Abstract

Awashed through the temple courtyard and with saturated luggage and attire, my arrival at the Sakya Guru Monastery in Ghoom coincided with the beginning of the monsoon. After a year of correspondence, and inside a damp room exposed to the Darjeeling Hill region’s ubiquitous fog, I met with the resident monks. Over beverages of heavy butter tea they asked me curiously about my interest in Buddhism. Questions about wang (dbang) or ‘empowerments’ received from high-lamas advanced any queries on my family life back home. In Australia, I had attended public talks and several empowerment ceremonies led by Sakya Trizin Rinpoche, the head of the Sakya lineage. Having listed these to an attentive audience, I instigated an echo of appraisal. The verdict was unanimous: I had been blessed by a great lama and was considered incredibly fortunate to receive wang from him. Engaging in some public initiation rituals when they were offered by the head of the Sakya lineage during his 2003 visit to Australia was an attempt to develop a familiarity with some of the sensibilities of Tibetan Buddhist culture. I did not anticipate that they would form the focus of my initial conversations in the field or shape the way that others perceived my interest in Buddhism. Something had been transmitted, connecting me to the monastery before arriving in ways apparently more substantial than written communication. Thus, as soon as I entered the monastery I became aware of the value accorded to particular types of social transmission as I was, according to my monastic acquaintances, already caught up in a nexus of relationships. Monks arranged my accommodation in a house that belonged to two Tibetan widows and that bordered the monastery. Living next door, I had access to monastic residents, yet could remain within the parameters of Tibetan cultural codes of conduct. I was able to attend early-morning rituals, receive lessons in Tibetan language and Buddhist philosophy, eat meals with the monks and then retire to my own quarters before the monastery gates were locked at night. These arrangements reflected the limitations of being a young, female researcher; monastery staff informed me that if I were male, or even an older woman, I could board inside the monastic compound. Throughout my time at the monastery, engagements with monks occurred in public and open spaces. Conversations took place along busy village pathways and roads, in family houses, at cultural events and sporting occasions, in the outer grounds of the monastery or the reception office; teachings and ritual activities usually occurred in classrooms, teachings halls and inside the temple. While my project diversified to include other Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and traditions in the Darjeeling Hills, the village of Ghoom remained my fieldwork base due to its proximity to the conveniences of Darjeeling town and because of the strength of relations established in the early fieldwork period.1 In the monastery monks and laypersons alike talked of and engaged with a deceased abbot in his multitude of forms. Chapter 2 details devotees’ understandings of the death, relics and reincarnation of this lama and the everyday religious practice through which his biography was extended in their own lives. My first venture beyond Ghoom took place with the Sakya monks. At the invitation of a nearby monastery they performed a ritual sand mandala or kyil khor (dkyil’khor) in Mirik village as part of the funerary rituals for a renowned incarnate lama (bla ma Skt. guru). Straddling the Nepali border and 48 kilometres south of Darjeeling, Mirik, at the time of my fieldwork, housed a rapidly expanding monastery that overlooked the region from hilltop. It was here that the traditional 49-day mortuary ceremonies and subsequent commemoration rituals were held, transforming an ordinarily quiet locality into a hive of activity. Hundreds and on occasion thousands of disciples arrived to receive jinlab (byin rlabs), commonly translated as ‘blessings’, from the deceased lama and other major figures in his Kagyu lineage who presided over the rituals. I returned to Mirik periodically, both in order to attend various ceremonial events and to meet with monastic and lay practitioners during informal occasions. Here I met a large number of international Buddhists who had flown in to pay their respects to the lama. Like the monastic and local populace they were there to receive blessings and to pray for the lama’s swift reincarnation during the critical juncture when he remained in-between bodies. The cross-cultural understandings of Tibetan Buddhist embodiment that came to the fore during these ceremonies are examined in Chapter 5. Life-stories of lamas presented a recurrent theme in Ghoom and Mirik. Narrated tales of these lives emphasized a mastery over death and the importance of documenting their manner of dying in hagiography. Accordingly, the death and reincarnation of Tibetan spiritual exemplars became a major focus of my research, leading me to accept an invitation to reside in the college branch of the Sakya Guru Monastery in Rimbick, which housed the then 14-year-old incarnation of the Sakya Guru Monastery’s former abbot. Here the topic of continuing lives increased in prominence when a renowned local Tibetan lama passed away and later ‘returned’ to the village as a migrating presence that reigned in the body of a young woman. Meetings with this reclusive practitioner, members of diverging religious factions and the wider lay community reflected the plural ideologies of Tibetan Buddhism that are recounted in Chapter 3. After the death of the above-mentioned revered and charismatic lamas in the region, my research became grounded in the intersubjective lives of spiritual exemplars: the ways in which biography, relics and physical re-embodiment can become vested with shared meaning, extending a biographical process of the lama. My other primary location for fieldwork was Yiga Chöling, a Gelug monastery in Ghoom where I accompanied monks and laypeople in nyungne (smyung gnas), an annual fasting ritual that recalls the life-story of Gelongma Palmo (dge slong ma dpal mo), a revered female lama. Chapter 4 explores how participants re-embody the devotional practice of Gelongma Palmo in a series of ascetic rites, reconfiguring the body’s borders as they engage with and invoke the deceased’s presence. This book is a response to the questions that confronted me: How do hagiographies, relics, ritual performance and other living beings come to be seen as the very presence of the lama? And what influence does the lama’s multidimensional presence bear on the religious lives of followers? The research for this book was carried out using a range of methodologies available to the anthropologist. Fieldwork involved varying degrees of participant observation. In the nyungne rituals, I joined fervent Buddhist followers in 16 days of fasting and silent retreat. During other elaborate rituals which could span several days, I was often a silent observer, though once having learnt to slowly read Tibetan, I would from time to time, attempt to accompany the monks in chant. In accord with the hierarchy of the Buddhist system, I (as a woman and layperson) would sit among young monks whose initial reactions to my presence ranged from hospitality as they made sure I had enough room to sit and a cup of butter tea to drink, to amusement at my clumsy pronunciation and prostrations. Interaction with monks between the ages of 6 and 16 extended into the classroom where I intermittently taught English in the Sakya Guru Monastery and their aligned monastic college in nearby Rimbick when the institutions were short of teachers. Despite these short periods of participating in the course of everyday monastic life as a teacher, I was more commonly identified as a student. Monastic staff, aware of my interest in everyday Buddhist life, but uncertain of the relevance of having general conversations with a lay populace organized my private tuition with ‘reputable teachers’ in Tibetan language and philosophy. Most conversations and interviews were conducted in English as the majority of participants were sufficiently versed in the language. When talking to the older generation of Tibetans, who spoke variant dialects of Tibetan and Nepali in a manner that extended beyond my rudimentary comprehension, I would have somebody accompany me to translate. In some cases, the conversations were recorded and professional translators were employed for increased precision. Professional translators were involved in the translation of textual information, including hagiographical materials. When monasteries had already commissioned the translation of a hagiography from Tibetan to English, I used their English publication. Most of the interviews with incarnate lamas were conducted through the lama’s own translator, who rendered their Tibetan into English. Usually, I refrained from recording these conversations and transcribed them from memory. Though I lived in a highly ritualized environment, much of my research was undertaken informally, over cups of tea, walks in the hills, meal times and general conversations. In these day-to-day activities I used my memory in preference to a notepad and a notepad in place of a sound recorder or camera. At times I felt uncomfortable about this seemingly more concealed form of research, at times others were more uncomfortable when I came with pen, paper and recording equipment. Nevertheless, depending on circumstance, I used these tools to take notes, drawings, photographs and sound recordings. In the production of this text and its accompanying images, I have changed some names to protect the identities of the participants concerned. In many cases, particularly the life-stories of the lamas, I used their real names to uphold individual histories. For the ease of phonetic expression, Tibetan words are spelt how I heard them. For scholar, I have included the Wylie system of transliteration in parentheses after the first appearance of each Tibetan word. Sanskrit words are used (without diacritical marks) when they denote terms that are commonly circulated in Tibetan studies (e.g. bodhisattva, bodhicitta) and, to some extent, common usage (e.g. dharma, karma, samsara, etc.). The photographs included in this text are my own.