Death and Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism

In-Between Bodies

Tanya Zivkovic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134593767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Buddismo

Contextualising the seemingly esoteric and exotic aspects of Tibetan Buddhist culture within the everyday, embodied and sensual sphere of religious praxis, this book centres on the social and religious lives of deceased Tibetan Buddhist lamas. It explores how posterior forms – corpses, relics, reincarnations and hagiographical representations – extend a lama's trajectory of lives and manipulate biological imperatives of birth and death.

The book looks closely at previously unexamined figures whose history is relevant to a better understanding of how Tibetan culture navigates its own understanding of reincarnation, the veneration of relics and different social roles of different types of practitioners. It analyses both the minutiae of everyday interrelations between lamas and their devotees, specifically noted in ritual performances and the enactment of lived tradition, and the sacred hagiographical conventions that underpin local knowledge.

A phenomenology of Tibetan Buddhist life, the book provides an ethnography of the everyday embodiment of Tibetan Buddhism. This unusual approach offers a valuable and a genuine new perspective on Tibetan Buddhist culture and is of interest to researchers in the fields of social/cultural anthropology andreligious, Buddhist and Tibetan studies.

1 Introduction

It is often taken for granted that our lives will come to an inevitable, irreversible end. Generally, we know not when or by what means the animating physiological processes of our bodies will become exhausted and finally cease, yet shared understandings about life tell us that the flesh and blood of our bodies will irretrievably perish away. Rancid and putrefied, the material substance contained within will leak out from defunct orifices; skin will rot and decay; all constituent parts eventually decompose; death is thus an irrevocable and grotesque termination of our lively existence.

The lifecourse appears to be organized by the biological processes of birth, aging and death. Shaped by certain (usually Euro-American) assumptions about the beginnings and ends of life, the spatiotemporal situation of the body is seldom questioned in our quotidian existence.¹ Bringing into play Tibetan Buddhist understandings of the body, its life and death and location in space and time, this book is concerned with religious figures whose manner of dying appears to challenge biological imperatives. In line with Tibetan notions of the lifecourse, it takes as its point of departure the premise that life can be extended beyond death, raising questions about the temporal and spatial dimensions of our position in the world and our interrelations with others.

This is a book about the continuing lives of Tibetan lamas who have a critical and influential social presence, yet lack a finite, separate living body. These spiritually advanced incarnate lamas are not representative of the majority of Tibetans, or even the majority of monastics. Although all beings reincarnate, it is the highly revered pre-eminent members of the Buddhist community who intentionally direct their rebirth and they are marked out from the relative ‘ordinariness’ of the layperson or the common monk (Mills 2003: 266). Even the category of the incarnate lama is multidimensional in character with varying levels of spiritual development. The incarnate lama does not belong to an homogenous group: some are born enlightened and others have to relearn the realizations of their previous incarnation (Ray 1986: 54). Nevertheless, Tibetan Buddhists commonly share the belief that the deceased lama can continue in new bodies, in various modes of presence: a corpse, an amalgam of relics, an appearance in the dreams of devotees, a reincarnation of the deceased, a rematerialization in the form of rainbows, a migrating presence that can reign in the body of another or a textual representation in religious biography (hagiography). Devotees' engagement with these posterior forms enables a distinctive interexperience of and with lamas' bodies.

In both religious doctrine and to some extent common discourse, high-status lamas are believed to possess the three ‘bodies’, kusum (sku gsum, Skt. trikaya) of a buddha: the unmanifest, formless chöku (chos sku, Skt. dharmakaya); the subtle enjoyment bodies of longchöku (longs spyod sku, Skt. sambhogakaya) in which the lama is able to emanate as and appear to the celestial buddhas and bodhisattvas; and tulku (sprul sku, Skt. nirmanakaya), or emanation body, the vehicles into which spiritual exemplars consciously incarnate and reveal themselves to ordinary human beings over successive lifetimes. While the historical Buddha appeared in this form, the Tibetan term tulku is conventionally applied to any lama who is a recognized rebirth and therefore includes the Dalai Lamas and countless other lines of reincarnate lamas. These lineages unfold within a social universe of cosmological entities including buddhas, gods, demigods, hell beings, hungry ghosts and demonic others. Only a select few Buddhist lamas acquire mastery over this cosmos and their ‘power’ or wang (dbang) filters down to affect the common Buddhist practice of the majority. An empowerment ritual is the transfer of wang from a lama as they initiate the disciple into a particular deity practice. It both involves and enables intercorporeality, in the sense that it is an engagement requiring openness to the bodies of others. A technique acquired from practice, it forms a learnt repertoire of sensory experience that shapes the way Buddhist practitioners perceive their own and others’ bodies. In cultivating techniques to increase the possibilities of embodied experience, the Buddhist ideally aims to make their body like the body of a buddha (Desjarlais 2003: 98), that is, to make their body receptive and entwined with the greater cosmos.

The lama's ability to affect the bodies and minds of their disciples is an important part of the wang ritual process, in that these ‘empowerments’ bestow blessings or jinlab (byin rlabs) from the lama to the recipient, but transmission is not confined to this arena. It is generally believed that any contact with a suitably qualified lama, whether personally or imagined, can be a sufficient cause to receive jinlab. The many lay devotees who do not have regular access to reincarnate lamas receive jinlab through other forms, such as contact with and service to local monasteries and the monastic community therein, a community that represents and serves as a mediating body between the higher lamas (with their tutelage of tantric deities) and lay practitioners. Jinlab can also be received through various visual meditative practices; uttering mantras; reciting religious texts; physical gestures of prostration and circumambulation; paying homage to relics, images and iconography, which are often held as empowered objects, along with any items personally received from or blessed by high-lamas in consecrating or initiatory ceremonies; and the reading or recall of a lama's life-story.

Within this book these various means of access to a lama's blessing are explored as methods that can induce the presence of deceased lamas in the lived experience of disciples. This exploration arises from the contradistinctions of life and death, presence and absence, past and present that practitioners negotiated time and again during my period of fieldwork. Here, I should mention that Buddhism does not ascribe any inherent existence to phenomena, which are instead characterized by interdependence. The philosophical idiom states that all things are interconnected and impermanent: the reality of our minds, bodies and the external world is a mistaken assumption arising from a false belief in a truly existing self. In a chain of causation, the experience of being a singular self-existing entity derives from contact between the sense-organs and their objects. This contact leads to grasping and craving, perpetuating the drives and impulses that obscure our experience and propagate the ignorance that leads us to take rebirth. Cyclical promulgation of death and rebirth reflects the impermanence of phenomena and the inseparability of distinctions such as birth and death, self and other, mind and body, for these conceptualizations are intertwined. Importantly, the adept does not aim for a purely theoretical knowledge of these causal conditions or only a personal liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth. Ideally, they endeavour to experience liberation from the illusory nature of the self and external phenomena and to cultivate jangchub kyisem (byang chub kyi sems, Skt. bodhicitta), an altruistic intent for this realization to arise in all sentient beings. Critical to this liberation is the transmission of blessings from a lama. Described as emanations of deities or recognized reincarnations of previous lamas, tulku are held to be inseparable from the historical Buddha in that their lines of descent can be traced back to him. The lama then continually returns to worldly existence to lead others toward liberation from the cycle. On the one hand, characterizing phenomena as permanent and inherently existing is the cause of worldly existence, and on the other hand, the continuing essence of the Buddha abiding in physical form is integral to the receipt of jinlab that can enable transcendence of death and rebirth. This system both propagates the Buddha's teaching on the inherent non-existence and impermanence of self and phenomena and maintains an embodied presence of the Buddha in the world over time (Strong 2004; Cuevas and Stone 2007).

Further, in Buddhist doctrine the body is but an illusion borne from the mind's capacity to manifest appearance and yet there is an extensive and elaborate tradition of worshipping the relics of the Buddha and other spiritual adepts. Relics can be body parts – teeth, hair, bones, blood, urine, reproductive substances, mucus, crystallized products from the body or embalming salts; other material objects associated with buddha(s) – clothing, bowls, ritual objects or other possessions; and Buddhist teachings that pervade the minds of disciples before being documented in scripture. Stupas and iconic images are other objects widely considered to derive from, emulate or represent a buddha (Bentor 1995). Across Buddhist Asia, bones, hair, nails and other apparently transmogrified corporeal material are placed in reliquaries, where they are revered and vested with spiritual, even economic capital (Tambiah 1984; Taylor 1993, 1997). Unique to Tibetan Buddhism, the continued material presence of the lama is not confined to posthumous relics but extends into human form through the tradition of recognized successive reincarnations.

Biographical process

In articulating the social presence of the deceased, I expand Strong's (2004) thesis on the biographical process of the Buddha to include the lives of spiritual masters in the Tibetan tradition. While Strong asserts that ‘relics of the Buddha can best be understood as expressions and extensions of his biography’ (2004: 229), I contend that relics, along with other posterior conditions – including reincarnation, possession, transmogrification, devotional practice and hagiography itself – are also ‘spreaders and continuators’ (2004: 229) of the lama's presence.

According to Strong, the relics of the Buddha are extensions of his life-story. Bodily relics including bone, hair, nails and teeth and secondary relics such as his footprints, bowl, robe and bodhi tree, develop a ‘powerful narrative’ (2004: 7), inscribing new chapters in a biographical process that ends not with the death of the Buddha but with the production and dissolution of his relics. Even after the passing of the Buddha his biography goes on: relics are seen to embody a biographical blueprint, the coming and going of the Sakyamuni Buddha in the same way that other buddhas have come and gone before.² Directly implicated in Strong's notion of biographical process is a common Buddhist belief that persons can reside in objects and different temporalities, beyond the confines of a singular corporal form (Empson 2007, Swearer 2004). Extending agency beyond the lifecourse, continuing posterior biographies can inhabit various forms:

A person and a person's mind are not confined to particular spatio-temporal coordinates, but consist of a spread of biographical events and memories of events, and a dispersed category of material objects, traces and leavings, which can be attributed to a person and which, in aggregate, testify to agency and patienthood during a biographical career which may, indeed, prolong itself well after biological death.

(Gell 1998: 222)

In the context of Tibetan hagiography or namtar (rnam thar), the story of ‘full-liberation’ often documented after the passing of a spiritual master, the person is ideally present in posterior forms. Lamas' life trajectories become extended in and through their new modes of presence and the followers who revere them. The biographical process refers both to the dialectic between presence and absence that these post-mortem manifestations signify and the various conduits through which the lama is re-embodied and believed to be accessible to others. In becoming a continuation and extension of an exemplary life, these re-presentations of the deceased reinscribe a religious ideal into the world and, at the same time, reincorporate the lama into the lived daily experience of followers in textual, embodied and performative practice. By exploring this biographical process, rather than biographies per se, the posterior forms of the lama are not subjugated to the semantic, but re-embodied and grounded in intersubjectivity (cf. Jackson 1989: 122).

Navigating an amalgam of contradictions and divisions, the biographical process occurs in an intersubjective arena. Carried on through collectively agreed upon animate and posterior forms, the creation and recreation of contrasting categories of knowledge and practice are put on display, negotiated, reconciled or unresolved in the social praxis of a lama's followers. The very objects that signify decease memorialize the lama and become an extended presence, effectively negotiating distinctions between life and death. As the biographical process is fashioned, relations between human beings and spiritual others, the personal and the collective, biography and mythology, history and imagination, the past and the present are pragmatically intertwined. The reciprocal nature of these interrelations is negotiated through social processes of memorialization in the writing and reading of hagiography, the narration of oral stories, as well as in the course of bodily and ritual interaction.

Drawing on Connerton (1989), Stoller advocates the sensory arena as an embodied and powerful carrier of memory (1997: 59). Stoller claims that the potency of collective memory does not abide in textual inscription alone (1997: 61). It stems from stories (oral accounts) and bodily practices (gestures, sounds and movements). This book recognizes the role of bodies and objects in trans-porting the past into the present (cf. Empson 2007; Swearer 2004). Tibetan Buddhists, as the coming chapters will demonstrate, continually re-fashion the physical presence of the lama in the present. Recalled in the minds of followers, re-embodied in relics and reincarnation and recollected in textual inscription, collective representations of the lama endure through time. I use the term ‘memo-rialization’ to ground the abstract and formalized reasoning of a social or cultural memory (Connerton 1989) in material things and social processes. In practice, the process of memorialization is simultaneously shaped by the cultural constraints of tradition and the pragmatics of interexperience. In the relations that take place between a sense of self and a community, ‘personal memories become collectivized and historicized; they cease to be properties of individual minds and enter into intersubjectivity’ (Jackson 1998: 140).

Intersubjectivity

Jackson links ‘the intersubjective turn’ in anthropology to Schutz's social phenomenology (Jackson 1998: 5). Extending phenomenology beyond the indi-vidual to encompass the social world, Schutz questioned how people, despite individual differences, hold commonality with others, a shared experience (Schutz 1980 [1932]; Schutz and Luckmann 1973). Schutz asserted that a shared meaning among people is taken-for-granted in the ‘commonsense’ of daily life. Differences between people are bracketed out in the practical, mundane engagements of day-to-day living (Schutz and Luckmann 1973). Intersubjectivity refers to the consensual, public and historically pre-given nature of our conceptual frameworks. It postulates that the self, others and the world in which we operate and interact are grounded in shared ideas, without which we would not have the capacity to interrelate with others.

Schutz emphasized that a shared space and shared time marked by physical accessibility corresponds to degrees of intimacy integral to our primary relationships. His social world is divided into ‘consociates’, being those who share the same temporal and spatial access to each other's bodies, ‘contempo-raries’ or those that share not in space but in living time only and ‘predecessors’ who being dead are like unborn ‘successors’ in that neither have accessible living bodies (Schutz 1980 [1932]: 142–3). While predecessors can influence and be understood by contemporaries and successors through their inscriptions on the world, in photographs, writings, film and other devices, successors, on the contrary, cannot be known in the here and now. In this temporal order, the future is not yet within reach (Schutz 1945: 547) and time is encountered as a linear and finite movement towards death. Each of us is born, experiences a continuity of events in a chronological order and some day dies; the world is experienced as having existed prior to our birth and we assume it to continue beyond our death. ...