This panel compares logics of ritual efficacy that guide the hands-on practices of Buddhist craftspeople and ritual experts. In a clash of interdisciplinary perspectives, regions, and historical eras, these papers eschew the symbolic and the performative in favor of the procedural, the substantive, and the “becoming-with” of ritual. This panel is specifically motivated by Tim Ingold’s (2013) call to abandon abstracted notions of “materiality” in favor of bounded practices of making use of particular materials. Accordingly, each paper engages a specific material or object—the Gobi Desert, a rare Green Tārā image, ritual cloths, salt, mercury, milk, medicinal herbs, living rooms, and ritual implements. Attending to what each does (not just represents)—and does not do— “sensory forms” (Meyer 2009) and “material affordances” (Keane 2003) emerge as vastly understudied models of causation and agency in Buddhist rituals, societies, and histories.
The Gobi is not a consensual idea. It is a contrarian stage of desire and repulsion, of mobility and obstruction. Forged in the negative space of sea, sky, and land, the material Gobi has long been a membrane of past and the present; so much sand blowing and settling atop the longue durée of its ecology. How were those who sought to overcome the absence that marks its vast topography—whether Buddhist philosophers or paleontologists, prophets or botanists, tantric hermits or archaeologists—made anew in time by working with and through the planes of its geologic media?
In Kathmandu, Newar women, known as dyaḥmāṃ, while possessed by the Buddhist goddess Hāratī and her children perform ritual healings and divinations for clients in their living rooms. On possession days, clients come seeking solutions to their problems. Devotees chant in unison, the dyaḥmāṃ inhales smoke, then she sits on her throne, and the event ends with her swallowing a burning piece of string. The solutions to client’s problems involve substances such as rice, incense, and water, and implements such as a vajra and a broom. Throughout the session, these items are manipulated and deployed by the dyaḥmāṃ in various ways. How do these concrete items participate and how are they used in the discourse of ritual success and failure? Using ethnographic data, this paper will consider the role of these materials in constructing the intersubjective notion of ritual success, and ritual failure, especially as it pertains to healing rituals.
The Mañjuśrīmūlakalpa (Mmk) outlines in exacting detail the labor-intensive crafting of the ritual cloth (paṭa). However, the text also offers an easier abbreviated ritual without compromising on efficacy. Anticipating a degenerate future when performing elaborate rituals would be impossible, the text allows us to explore the changing relationship between practitioners and ritual material. Focusing on the role of ritual objects in early Buddhist tantra, the paper examines the flexibility that the Mmk envisions for ritual material. The crafting process employs oral (mantras), visual (painting) and tactile (grasping the cloth where the practitioner’s image is painted) means through which the practitioner is transformed and transported from the periphery of the paṭa to the center. The paper complicates the transformational potency of the paṭa by analyzing the dynamic crafting process, which straddles the specialized ritual sphere as well as the public space of the fabric bazaar where the paṭa is born.
This paper considers questions of ritual expertise and efficacy by examining Tibetan Buddhist bodily preservation practices and the hands-on work of transforming the corpses of Tibetan lamas into whole-body relics. Instructions for how to handle the Thirteenth Dalai Lama’s (Thubten Gyatso, 1876–1933) remains are detailed in a little-studied embalming treatise by the Gelugpa scholar Phabongkha Dechen Nyingpo (1878–1941). In the manual, three potent mortuary substances emerge as primary active ingredients: corpse salt (pur tshwa) as an embalming agent and quasi-relic; mercury (dngul chu) as a purgative (sku sbyong); and milk (’o ma) as a litmus test of efficacy. Mapping the lifecycles of these ingredients alongside technical inflection points in Phabongkha’s text, this study considers what signs of ritual success look like in materially embedded—and embodied—terms for Tibetan caretakers who specialize in and preside over the “special dead.”
This paper examines how the inclusion of medicinal botanical substances with purgative and cleansing properties in the Tibetan Treasure revealer Guru Chöwang’s (1212–1270) Buddhist relic pill known as the “maṇi pill” could have contributed to its sense of efficacy and popularity in thirteenth-century Tibet. The discussion traces in particular the material properties, histories, and valances of two substances that figure as key ingredients in Guru Chöwang’s maṇi-pill tradition: tarnu (thar nu) and takngu (rtag ngu). It relates the properties of these botanical substances to details in Guru Chöwang’s maṇi-pill consecration liturgies, which feature Avalokiteśvara and his mantra, and promise that consumption of a pill will result in rebirth in his pure land. In so doing, it argues that the pharmacological properties of these substances worked hand in hand with liturgical imagery and aims to produce an embodied sense of efficacy above and beyond the sum of its parts.