The death of paganism in Tibet

 

“Buried Bones and Buddhas Beyond. Ancestor Cults in 17th-century Khams and the Transcendentalisation of Tibetan Religion” is an article by Reinier J. Langelaar, originally published in 2022 in a collection of scholarly papers on Tibet. I found it free-standing (and for free) on the web. Langelaar has analyzed the works of 17^th century Buddhist Karma chags med, a native of Khams or Kham in eastern Tibet who was trained in both the Kagyu and Nyingma traditions. They apparently form an important milestone in how the pre-Buddhist ancestor cults of Tibetan villages and clans were “transcendentalized” and eventually replaced by Buddhism altogether.

The cults of the ancestors are very far removed from Buddhism. The most obvious difference is that the ancestral spirits don´t reincarnate. Indeed, it´s not even clear whether they are “spirits” at all, since they are conceptualized in purely material terms. The only material thing the ancestors lack is an actual physical body. Otherwise, they have exactly the same desires, thoughts and even foibles as their living relatives. They can experience hunger, thirst and cold. Perhaps they even crave sex or love, since there are occasional reports of ancestors haggling for spouses from among the living! For all these reasons, the ancestors must be appeased with food, drink, clothing and respectful worship in general. In return, they bestow good luck on their descendants. If treated improperly, they can cause misfortune instead, for instance by attacking horses or livestock.

The entire ancestral cult is very “this-worldly” from a Buddhist perspective. Indeed, Buddhists might even interpret certain aspects of it as an active attempt to stop reincarnation. After the usual “sky-burial”, the bones of the ancestors are gathered together and placed in whitewashed vases together with offerings such as jewels. They are hence supposed to stay around as protectors of the clan. By contrast, Buddhism is “other-worldly”, its goal is the super-intangible nirvana, it believes in some form of rebirth or reincarnation, salvation is not clan-based, and so on. 

It seems Karma chags med tried to reconcile the ancestral cults with Buddhism, but in such a manner that Buddhism remained on top. Thus, he claimed that Ban thung, the ancestor of the Brong pa clan in Khams, was a bodhisattva dwelling in a pure Buddha-field, while also emanating a kind of body double who acted as the chief ancestor of the clan on here on Earth. Conversely, Buddhist luminaries such as Padmasambhava (who had no known lineage) were recast as powerful “ancestors”. Karma chags med also introduced Tantric rituals during the secondary burials. Thus, when gathering the bones of the deceased ancestor, the powerful bodhisattva Manjushri should be invoked. But what about reincarnation? Here, the solution was rather obvious: humans have more than one soul or spirit, one of them remaining as an ancestor, while the other is reborn in a new body.

Flash forward 400 years. When the author visited Khams, he quickly realized that the ancestral cults had all but disappeared in the area inhabited by the Brong pa. Only one person was aware of their previous existence, and showed the author an old tree-shrine to Ban thung, who had fallen into disuse long ago. But…Ban thung *is* still worshipped in the area, in the form of an idol standing on the grounds of a Buddhist monastery! He is, after all, a bodhisattva now…

I suppose paganism has been successfully replaced in Tibet.