How have Tibetan Buddhist communities and cultures throughout history enlisted bodily substances and fabricated material objects to make sense of the relationships between humans, their bodies, and their environments? Drawing upon Stacy Alaimo’s (2010) characterization of the “transcorporeal” as the “material interconnections of human corporeality with the more-than-human world,” this panel examines discourses and practices involving the natural elements, human sexuality, diseases, relics, and pills, to explore Tibetan Buddhist perspectives regarding the boundaries, connections, fluidities, and distributions of personhood within and between human and non-human bodies and environments.
An enduring motif in Buddhist writings on the primary elements (‘byung ba) of earth, water, fire, wind, and space is the distribution of matter into “inner” elements of the human body and “outer” elements of the surrounding environment. But the significance of this idea varies across Buddhist scholarly and practical contexts. In eleventh and twelfth century Great Perfection Seminal Heart (Rdzogs chen snying thig) texts known as the Seventeen Tantras (Rgyud bcu bdun), the inner and outer elements paradigm functions to order and cohere various perceptual, experiential, and doctrinal binaries and boundaries: between bodies and environments; individuals and worlds; and relative and ultimate dimensions of religious experience. Collocating these ideas with ecological feminisms that propose new ethical figurations of the body in its entanglement with material environments, this paper explores a distinctly Tibetan Buddhist transcorporeal form constituted in and by the elements.
This paper examines meditations on bodies full of buddha bodies, an integral aspect of life force cultivation and disease prevention in an important fourteenth century scripture of Tibetan Great Perfection (rdzog chen) called The Seminal Heart of the Ḍākinī’s Five Key Points (mkha’ ‘gro snying thig las gnas kyi gdams pa lnga pa). It prescribes visualizations of buddhas embracing buddhas (yab yum) throughout the bodily interior. The yab yum is a symbol that has been productively critiqued by feminist theorists for its centering of the male subject. However, another pressing issue remains to be considered, its function in redefining the boundaries of bodies, suggesting the porosity of bodies and an extended corporeality enmeshed with gnosis, the five elements and planetary cycles. This paper examines this expanded and extended version of corporeality signified in this case by the visualization of female-centric couples, the Ḍākki yab yum, pervading the bodily interior.
This paper explores the transcorporeal and intersubjective possibilities opened up by the ingestion of bodily substances in Tibetan Buddhist material culture. Drawing on nineteenth and twentieth century Tibetan biographies, historical chronicles, and funerary manuals, as well as ethnographies on contemporary embalming procedures, this study explores relic ingestion practices involving corpse salts (pur tshwa) sourced from the remains of Tibetan hierarchs. From its use as an embalming agent and quasi-relic to a medicinal substance and transnational commodity, pur tshwa and the sacred corporeographies enacted by its consumption reveal the plasticity of the mind-body-world complex. This paper demonstrates novel ways of thinking through the roles that relics play in and beyond the Tibetan Buddhist funerary context. As hybrid objects that create and exist in third spaces, salt relics are potent substances that mediate relations between human and non-human, living and non-living, past and present, blurring and reconfiguring the nature of these divisions.
This paper discusses the history of the maṇi pill, a Tibetan medico-ritual pill tradition incorporating bodily relics of the Buddhist special dead and Tibetan medicinal substances, and consecrated in rituals featuring Avalokiteśvara and his mantra. It specifically examines the influence of the Pacifying (Zhi byed) tradition of Padampa Sangyé (d. 1117) on the revelatory literature of Guru Chöwang (1212–1270) in which the maṇi pill first originated. Surveying the early narrative, ritual, and contemplative literature of the Pacifying tradition, the paper discerns emergent themes of transcorporeality, such as the transformation of the living body into a powerful relic, and its use in the production of pills. The paper brings attention to how the Pacifying tradition’s conceptions of mind-body-world porosity drew from Indian Buddhist tantric models to craft a uniquely Tibetan approach to embodiment that finds expression in a pill tradition whose popularity has endured to the present.
Following the introduction of Āyurveda to Tibet, physicians and scholars adopted wind, bile, and phlegm as the treatable causes of disease, centering Sowa Rigpa upon an etiology of humoral imbalance. Despite Sowa Rigpa’s explicit focus on the humors, however, an outbreak of widespread disease in the thirteenth century led to the addition of a further nosological category: nyen fever. In this paper, I will compare etiological explanations in the medical and religious texts of this period to demonstrate that nyen fever embodies a uniquely Tibetan etiology of invasion. Nyen fever marks a development that is at once etiological and ontological; when disease is invasion, pathogens are invaders. Rather than replace one etiology with another, however, Sowa Rigpa has retained both explanations of disease, resulting in methods for understanding the body as both an orderly system and a penetrable entity whose boundaries must be protected.
| Holly Gayley | gayley@colorado.edu | View |