The Cult of Tara: Magic and Ritual in Tibet

HERMENEUTICS Studies in the History of Religions GENERAL EDITOR Kees W. Bolle UCLA ExECUTIVE EDITORS University of California Press

R. Y. Zachary

Alain Henon

ADVISORY BoARD Robert N. Bellah Gerhart Ladner (California, Berkeley)

(UCLA)

Giorgio Buccellati

Jaan Puhvel

(UCLA)

(UCLA)

Wilhelm Dupre

William R. Schoedel

(Niimegen)

(Illinois)

Mireea Eliade

Guy R. Welbon

(Chicago)

(Pennsylvania)

Amos Funkens.tein

Hellmut Wilhelm (W ashingfon)

(UCLA)

Thorkild Jacobsen (Harvard)

1. Stephan Beyer, cuJ.T OF TARA 2. Edward A. Armstrong, SAINT F~NCIS: NATURE MYSTIC

THE CULT OF

TARA

>-,?. Fig. 1. White Tara. From a wood-block print by Roger Williams.

.f9Y9YO\

THE CULT OF

-

TARA Manic and Ritual 1n

Tibet

by STEPHAN BEYER

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFO-RNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London

U!liversity of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of Calil9rnia Press, Ltd. London, England ISBN: 0-520-02192-4 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 74-186109 Copyright © 1973 by The Regents of the University of California Designed by W. H. Snyder Printed in the United States of America

Foreword

T

real histor~ of man is the hi~tory of religion." The tr~t~ of the famous d1ctum of Max Muller, the father of the H1story of Religions, is nowhere so obvious as in Tibet. Wes~ern students have observed that religion and magic pervade not only the forms of Tibetan art, politics, and society, but also every detail of ordinary human existence. And what is the all-pervading religion of Tibet? The Buddhism of that country has been described to us, of course, but that does not mean the question has been answered. The unique importance of Stephan B~yer's work is that it presents t.he vital material ignored or slighted by others: the living ritual of Tibetan Buddhists. The reader is made a witness .to cultic proceedings through which the author guides him carefully. He does not force ·one to accept easy explanations nor does he direct one's attention only to aspects that can be counted on to please. He leads one step by step, without omitting anything, through entire rituals, and interprets whenever necessary without being unduly obtrusive. Oftentimes, as in the case of the many hymns· to the goddess Tara, the superb translations speak directly to the reader, and it is indeed as if the reader himself were present at the ritual. If any blame attaches to this book, it is that it presents itself too modestly. It is, in fact, the first major work on the core of Tibetan life. I do n,ot want to imply that all the most meaningful things in Tibetan culture or religion have been overlooked by others. The author begins his work with a discussion of great Western scholars who have studied Tibet before him. Few students, however, have been able 6r willing to deal extensively with the cultic procedures of Tibetan Buddhism. Instead they have focused on. other subjects, such as the sublime paintings and sculptures of Tibet, the philosophical texts, the biographies of saints. These subjects are no doubt important, but their treatment has too often left the general impression of Tibetan religion as a collection of primitive customs and odd superstitions. HE

v

FOREWORD

Tibet has retained an aura of mystery and fascination for travelers; and, as it happens, scholars have been slow in demystifying Tibetan religion. While most Asian traditions· have become almost the exclusive domains of le.arned specialists, who sometimes seem to make it their chief concern to dampen loose enthusiasms, the history of Tibetology, in contrast, is rich in romantic details. In 1820, Aiexander Csoma of Koros set out from Hungary in quest of the original homeland of the Hungarians. In the end, his journeyfor the most part by foot-brought him to Tibet, and this wanderer became one of the founders of Tibetology. Our own century has seen the travelogue of Alexandra David-Neel, the fearless lady who journeyed across Tibet from one marveious adventure to another. In spite of great political changes in our age, it is not impossible that Tibet will continue to appeal to travelers. Nevertheless, the romantic .zeal that has accompanied the study of Tibet has not succeeded in unveiling Tibetan religion.Tibet, inde~d, may present one of the last great religious traditions to be interpreted. The word "last" should not sound fatalistic. I mean only that Tibet is a latecomer on the horizon of our religiohistorical un,.derstanding. Perhaps we may say: Tibetan religion gives us an extraordinary opportunity for a genuine understanding of religious data. The peculiar place of Tibet in the history of Western scholarship may even be a novel chance for an under.standing of man, for in our approaches to various religious traditions we have to face the fact that our understanding of man must strive to be unified if it is to be anything at all. The search for a unity in our understanding of religious man is not an idle dream. The stimulus for such a search comes from the religious data themselves. For indeed, every religious tradition has a center, and no serious interpretation is possible if that center is ignored. Stephan Beyer has rendered us a great service by pointing to what can truly be regarded as centr~l in Tibetan Buddhism: ritual forms, especially those in the worship of Tara. Beyer shows Tibetan religious ritual and magic in their mutual relationship as set forth in the Tibetan documents themselves, and not by relying on familiar biases concerning magic and religion. The ritual forms of religion and the practice of magic are very different fro~ what the reader might imagine beforehand. They are different also· from what most experts-often victims themselves of biases that made Tibetan .religion "harmless" before it was con-

FOREWORD

vii

fronted in earnest-have led us to believe. Magic and ritual. as defined in the Tibetan Buddhist sources complement each other. They do not contrast in the way most of us have assumed. In particular, they are not opposed to each other in the manner of a psychological attitude of reverential submissiveness ("religion") versus the will to manipulate the sacred for one's own ends ("magic"). In Tibetan tradition, it would be meaningless to speak of an individual's control over anything empirical or mental, if such control did not depend on something else. This "something else" is the perfection of a being far .beyond random individual wishes. Such a being is either a Buddha, who is free from the endless 'chain of finite existences, or a Bodhisattva, who is perfect in every way, is "almost a Buddha," yet chooses to relate to the world out of compassion. Such a being is Tara, the great Goddess. Whatever reality is seen or "made up," whatever is done religiously or magically, and, l;lltimately, what is done, whether with good or evil intentions, can be realized only when it is directed toward the pure goal manifest in those beings. Stephan Beyer records the story concerning the king Langdarma, who had to be killed by a type of magic that seems "black" indeed. Yet the act was necessary in order to prevent the king from accumulating still more evil deserts than he had already. This little episode is a vivid instance of Beyer's ability to select data that illuminate religious structures and at the same time nullify extraneous assumptions. (Obviously, the story makes a very different point from the ideal of Calvin's democracy that might come to the mind of a Western intellectual looking for reas(!ns to justify a rebellion ....) Elsewhere in the manuscript there is an eloquent example where a "ritual of subjugation" (magic, obviously I) has in its later stages a sort of meditation or prayer in whose expression the practitioner becomes, in all important ways, like a Buddha himself; hence the concrete object of subjugation seems itself lifted up and spiritually transformed in the process. The magic while being performed-the devotees in full awareness of its magic character-turns into universal bliss. The subtlest, hardly fathomable ·Buddhist lore-that of skill in m.eans (upayakau~alya)-becomes manifest, tangible in the ritual. The image of the goddess Tara, the focus of this work, is of great importance to our understanding of Tibetan religion. Tara is the principal superhuman being in Tibet who might be called divine

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FOREWORD

without further qualification. She is prayed to by millions; her help in all adversity is divine. How 'may a·.person be sure that his need is observed by a higher power? A real fear in Tibet's Mahayana Buddhism was that the most qualified more-than-human powers might pass into nirval)a and thus disappear from the world in which need was felt. These more-than-human beings are the Bodhisattvas, the beings who are able to become Buddhas, yet are still present in the world. With Tara, the fear that she would pass beyond this world did not seem to exist. It does not help much "to search for "causes" to explain this trust in Tara and her eternity. It would be misleading to think, for instance, of the widely held Indian tradition that only a male birth can be a last birth. Such rationalizations are too thin, especially if the cause for the formation of a deity is the issue. The help provided by Tar:i was real. She was real, she was divine. Tara was, had always been, and still is the almighty support of her devotees wh? address her. In fact, she is mightier than _Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The author convinces us that "Tara in all her forms transcended any monopoly" (p. 15 ). And we hear that in a hymn she is addressed as " ... mother who gives birth to all the Buddhas qf the three times" (p. 215 ). To understand something of her cult is to understand something of the mainstay of Tibetan culture and religion. Certainly, no study of magic can be undertaken from now on that does not take the present study into full account. A serious beginning has here been made on a deep understanding of Tibetan religion, and the general history of religions will profit by it. Locating the vital center of a religious tradition prepares the .ground for a unified, structured, meaningful understanding of all religious phenomena. Obviously, this is no task that can be completed overnight. Rather, we are encouraged on the road we travel and we are surer of our direction. The time is past in which historians of religions might think themselves capable of writing complete histories of the religion of all mankind. The framework of ideas for such undertakings turned out to need more generous dimensions than even the most far-seeing minds could envision. Many historians of religions in the last couple of decades have reacted by addressing themselves to the safer studies of specific religions, ignoring the demands of a general history of religions. Ultimately, such modesty provides no solutions. It seems to me that the right

FOREWORD

ix

direction will be provided by essays, not in the sense of small, safe studies, but in the sense of endeavors at interpretation of specific phenomena, done with full awareness of the great task of the general history of religions. The perennial aim of the history of religions is the interpretation of man as a religious being. The awareness of this aim must be reflected in· the essays which in turn will inform that gigantic task. I feel honored to present Stephan Beyer's book as the first such essay in a series devoted to the interpretation of religious phenomena. Kees W. Bolle

Preface

T

paper represents a first attempt to formulate the processes and presuppositions of Tibetan Buddhist ritual, a field that has been left relatively untouched by Western scholars. One finds oneself almost immediately intimidated by the vast amount of material to be covered, even though there remains only a decimated literary debris carried from Tibet by refugees of the Chinese occupation. Here the problem of organization becomes acute. Ferdinand Lessing, in his often neglected classic Yung-hokung,1 attempted to deal with the unwieldy mass of material at his disposal by discussing the rituals that took place in the various halls of this large temple complex, but the promise of this projected multivolume series remained unfulfilled at his death. David Snellgrove, taking a similarly localized approach in his Buddhist Himalaya,2 discussed the ceremonies he had seen performed at Chiwang Monastery. Rene de Nebesky-Wojkowitz, on the other hand, in his brilliant compendium Oracles and Demons of Tibel, 3 organized his material around the cult and iconography of the Tibetan protective deities, approaching the problem through the rituals of a class of deities rather than of a particular place. These works together constitute a standard of presentation which is difficult to mee,t. All three authors clearly felt deep bonds of affection for and sympathy with the Tibetans, and their works are important in their attempt to capture the spirit of a living tradition and to describe a practice of Buddhism which is still a vital force among an entire people. The present work is an extension of their approach, for Snellgrove's concern for the history of Buddhism, and Lessing's and Nebesky-Wojkowitz's concern for its iconography, limited the space they had available in their books for detailed analyses of the complexities of Tibetan ritual. As Lessing himself said, "A book could well be written describing in detail these rites alone, with the ritual books translated, annotated and illustrated by sketches, drawHIS

PREFACE

xii

ings and photographs." 4 This is, in essence, what I have tried to do, and I have further attempted to throw light on the basic ritual structures that underlie the relatively few rituals with which I deal, hoping that these patterns may be extended and used, as formulas in the interpretation of other Tibetan rituals. The problem of organization remains. This paper began originally as a history of the goddess Tara, but once in the field I found myself growing more and more engrossed in the actual practice of Buddhist ritual as a study in itself; a scholai,' from our secular society, I discovered, may too easily ignore the fact that Buddhism is basically a performing art. Still, the cult that centers on this goddess provided an organizational nucleus around which my paper could be written, limiting my choice of ritual material to a bulk none the less intimidating but at least yielding a hope of manageability. Thus, too, the primarily Indian historical problems with which I had originally intended to d.eal seemed, finally, irrelevant to the main point of the paper, and these researches I plan to cover in a separate article. For the historical problems involved, the reader may refer to the works by Tucci5 and Shastri, 6 to the textual studies published sporadically since the late nineteenth century, 7 and to the articles collected under the aegis of a seminar on Tara held at the University of Calcutta in 1965, these last being of the most dizzyingly varied quality.8 Further, there are many iconographic questions I studiously ignore: the various Sanskrit anthologies of "evocations" contain numerous descriptions of deities who are almost totally unimportimt in Tibet, which the original editors and their Tibetan translators included for the sake of simple comprehensiveness; this indiscriminate approach was then copied by the Tibetans themselves, and it has been faithfully followed by many Western scholars in their iconographic handbooks. All these anthologies tend to sacrifice implicit information as to relative importance rather than quit their quest for all-inclusiveness, reminding us of our own overstuffed anthologies of English poetry; we might paraphrase a piece of doggerel from e. e. cummings: mr u will not be missed who as an anthologist sold the many to the few not excluding mr u

PREFACE

xiii

The Indian anthologies, like our own, doggedly persevere in setting down the limited and personal revelations of minor masters alongside the great lineages that exercised much more influence both in India and in Tibet, a practice not culpable in itself were it but accompanied by some indication of which lineages were, indeed, the important ones. For example, the various minor goddesses, occasionally ;issimilated to forms of T~ra, who may be grouped together as one or another type of snake goddess (e.g., Jaxiguli, Pal'l).asabari), evoked almost no response in the hearts of any but the most scrupulously studious Tibetans; all these "minor Taras" are so minor indeed that I could find no artist who knew offhand what any of them looked like, nor did any of the most learned monks at the great institutions of Sera or Jiito know where one could easily locate a text devoted to them, except, as has happened to me, by accident. The Tibetan artists with whom I worked could draw these deities only after I had provided them with the canonical Tibetan translation of the Garland of Evocations, which I had brought with me from America I Similarly, the anthologies give several evocations of a four-armed White Tara, a revelation granted to the master Cintamal}.iraja,9 which simply did not catch on to form a school, and which was completely overshadowed in Tibet by the two-armed form revealed to Vagisvarakirti and transmitted by Atisa.1o With these minor and idiosyncratic deities I do not deal. Many of the Indian iconographic lineages did take hold in Tibet, however, though there are iconographic fads and styles in that country as well as everywhere else in the world, and many of the~e lineages seem simply to be out of fashion at the moment and have been replaced by others. Very few artists nowadays, for example, depict the Twenty-one Taras according to the canonical school of Siiryagupta, but rather they follow the school attributed (without canonical warrant) to Nagarjuna, which is claimed, again, to have been transmitted by Atisa; and many artist:> follow a Nyingma or "ancient" tradition embodied in the "hidden text" Heart's Drop of the Great Long, which makes no claim at all to canonical authenticity.u As we shall })ave occasion to note, it seems a good idea not to be too engrossed in the iconographic externals of color, hand gesture, or emblem, for such typologies as have been attempted along these lines in the West appear, finally, to be castles built on the shifting sands of the personal revelations, the unique dreams and visions of the different masters and their disciples.

PREFACE

xiv

There seems to be little standardization in Tibetan bibliography. In this paper I cite sources from the canonical Kajur and Tenjur collections by their sequential numbers in the Catalogue and Index to the Tibetan Tripilika, Peking Edition (Tokyo: Suzuki Research Foundation, 1962), hereafter abbreviated as "P.," since the Japanese photographic reproduction of this edition is available in many libraries that could not ordinarily acquire an original Tibetan xylo.graph edition of the canon. The citation consists of the author; the ·Sanskrit title (where given); the catalogue number; the volume, page, folio, and line of the photographic edition; and the section, volume, folio, and side of the original block print (e.g., Dipaipkara~rijitiina; A.rya-liirii-stolra, P. 4511, vol. 81, 94.5.5-95.2.1, Rgyud'grel DU 425a-425b). The citation of noncanonical works should be self-explanatory; and, with the expansion of the P.L. 480 program to include Tibetan texts, even those works not published in Western-style editions are becoming increasingly available iJ;J. libraries. Many of the noncanonical works were lent me by my Tibetan friends or come from my own collection; but many Gelug sources were obtained from the magnificent collection of Tohoku University in Sendai, and I would like here to thank the members of the Department of Buddhist Studies for helping me gain access to the library. There has as yet been very little agreement upon t)le phonemic transcription of Tibetan, owing in part to the intransigency of scholars and in part to the innate profligacy of the Tibetan language in pro. ducing dialects. Classical Tibetan texts, like those in Chinese or Mongolian, are read with considerable regional variation in pronunciation; but I use in the ·body of my text a much simplified transcription of the central Tibetan koine, based in large measure upon Roy Andrew Miller, "The Independent Status of the Lhasa Dialect within Central Tibetan" (Orbis, 4 [1955,] 49-55), modified for the maximum possible ease of pronunciation by non-Tibetologists. Scholars will find the literary Tibetan spellings of these words in the index; the footnotes use the standard classical orthography. The phonemic transcription is as follows: ii vowels: u e 0 0 a consonants:

k

tr

k' g ng h tr' dr r

PREFACE

XV

ch ch' j ts ts' dz t t' d p p' b

ny y

sh

zh

n m

s

z

w

The research on which this paper is based was carried out under a grant from the Foreign Area Fellowschip Program and was conducted in tQe hill station b'f Dalhousie, Himachal Pradesh, where the remnants of many of the great' Tibean monastic centers 'have gathered. Here my wife and I lived with a group that calls itself the Tibetan Craft Community for the Progress of the Dh~rma, earning its living mainly by the production of Tibetan handicrafts and centering upon the charismatic person of K'amtrii Rinpoch'e VIII Donjii nyima, the Precious Incarnation of K'am, Sun of the True Lineage. This community consists of about 50 monks and about 250 lay people, preserving -among themselves-perhaps better than any other refugee group I have encountered-their traditional practices and community relationships. I would like to express my deep gratitude to K'amtrii Rinpoch'e for his kindness to us, which sprang spontaneously and openly from a nature "precious" by more than title. I would like to thank the manager of the lay community, Geleg namje, and his brother, the gifted artist Ts'ewang tobje, for opening their house and their hearts to us, and all the monks and lay people who became our friends. My major informant in this group was the young ChOje jats'o, head of the monastery of Drugu and the eighth in his line of incarnations, whose natural graciousness, scholarship, and quick grasp of what I as a Western scholar was attempting to accomplish made him both an ideal informant and a good friend. My major informant for the various artistic traditions was Tendzin yongdii, a venerable and learned lay artist who has been depicting these deities on painted scrolls for all the Tibetan sects for more than fifty years. Some of his drawings are reproduced in this book. For infm:mation on the actual performance of ritual-hand gestures, chants, and offerings-! am grateful to Kajii drugje, the head monk of the monastery, who, I think, got as much delight from my singing as I got from his, though for different reasons. I would further like to express my indebtedness ~o Miss Diane Perry (Ani Tendzin Perno) for her advice and encouragement, .and especially for her Perfection of Forbearance in the face of infuriating

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PREFACE

scholarly nit-picking; to my late teacher Richard Robinson, of the Department of Indian Studies, University of Wisconsin, who constantly challenged me with his own fierce intellectual honesty; and to Roger Williams, who drew the frontispiece for this book. And especially I want to thank my wife Judy, who did not type up my manuscript, renew my library books or correct my spelling, but who rather performed the much more important function of constantly reminding me, in India and in America, that a Buddhologist does not deal with Buddhism so much as he deals with Buddhists.

Contents ILLUSTRATIONS

xix I

WORSHIP: OFFERINGS, PRAISES, AND PRAYER 1

II

APPLICATION: PROTECTION AND ATTACK

227 III

ACQUISITION: INITIATION AND RITUAL SERVICE 361

NOTES 469

BIBLIOGRAPHY 503 INDEX

521

xvii

Illustrations Figures 1 White Tara. From a wood-block print by Roger FrontisWilliams. piece 2 Songtsen gampo with Tr'itsiin (left) and Wen-ch'eng kung-chu (right); note the national costumes. From an ico11ographic sketch by Tendzin yongdii. 5 3 Green Tara. From an iconographic sketch by Tendzin yongdii. 9 4 Sketch map of K'am; according to Ch'oje jats'o. 16 5 The type of Heruka: Cakrasarp.vara and Vajravaruhi. 41 From an iconographic sketch by Tendzin yongdii. 6 The type of fierce patron: Yamantaka in the "ancient" form of Quicksilver, the black poison-faced. From an iconographic sketch by Tendzin yongdii. 44 7 The type of c;Ia.kiiJ.i: Vajravarahi, the diamond sow. From an iconographic sketch by Tendzin yongdii. 45 8 The "ancient"