Academic literature on the topic 'Rituals of Newar Buddhism'

The burial of a nomad woman with the northern orientation on a Moslem burial ground of the second half of the 14th and early 15th centuries was found in Bulgar (burial 4, excavation CXXXIV). The findings from this burial are analyzed in the paper. Four beads of multicolored pasta, a knife, a bronze mirror and eight iron hollow cones were found in the grave. 37 burials with cones are taken into account as belonged to the Golden Horde population. Most of them were buried according to the Mongolian burial tradition with the northern orientation. These objects were found in burials with orientations of the northern direction (65%), as well as western (22%) and eastern ones (13%). Usually, the cones have been revealed within the vessels, flats or near them. The cones are associated with Buddhist religion and are used for making tsatsa. Tsatsa was made in rituals during funeral rites. The vessels might contain sacred ingredients in order to add them into the clay. The flats and fragments of metal vessels were used for aromatic smoking scars or as stands in the manufacture of tsatsa. On the author’s opinion, appearance of the iron cones in the Golden Horde burial complexes may be associated with the spread of Buddhism among the Mongols.

This paper examines the Buddhist ritual Wesak---commemoration of the birth, enlightenment, and death (or parinibbana) of the Buddha---and its social function in creating Buddhist identity. A socio-historical survey of early Wesak rituals and case studies of Sri Lanka and North America provide examples of the development of Wesak as a ritual. This socio-political interpretation of Wesak reflects the consolidating nature of ritual through its interactions with other political and religious systems, and offers a glimpse into the emerging ecumenical form of Buddhism in North America.

Every four years, in the middle of a cold winter night, devotees bearing images of 126 Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and other important deities assemble in the Nepalese city of Patan for an elaborate gift giving festival known as Samyak Mahādāna (“The Perfect Great Gift”). Celebrated by Nepal’s Newar Buddhist community, Samyak honors one of the Buddhas of the historical past called Dīpaṅkara. Dīpaṅkara’s importance in Buddhism is rooted in ancient textual and visual narratives that promote the cultivation of generosity through religious acts of giving (Skt. dāna). During Samyak, large images of Dīpaṅkara Buddha ceremoniously walk in procession to the event site, aided by a man who climbs inside the wooden body to assume the legs of the Buddha. Once arranged at the event, Dīpaṅkara is honored with an array of offerings until dusk the following day. This dissertation investigates how Newar Buddhists utilize art and ritual at Samyak to reenact and reinforce ancient Buddhist narratives in their contemporary lives. The study combines art historical methods of iconographic analysis with a contextual study of the ritual components of the Samyak Mahādāna to analyze the ways religious spectacle embeds core Buddhist values within in the multilayered components of art, ritual, and communal performance. Principally, Samyak reaffirms the foundational Buddhist belief in the cultivation of generosity (Skt. dāna pāramitā) through meritorious acts of giving (Skt. dāna). However, the synergy of image and ritual performance at Samyak provides a critical framework to examine the artistic, religious, and ritual continuities of past and present in the Newar Buddhist community of the Kathmandu Valley. An analysis of the underlying meta-narrative and conceptualization of Samyak suggests the construction of a dynamic visual narrative associated with sacred space, ritual cosmology, and religious authority. Moreover, this dissertation demonstrates the role of Samyak Mahādāna in constructing Buddhist identity in Nepal, as the festival provides an opportunity to examine how Newar Buddhists utilize art, ritual, and performance to reaffirm their ancient Buddhist heritage.

La population autochtone de la vallée de Kathmandu, les Néwar, a vu sa langue, le néwari ou népalbhasa, et l’une de ses religions, le bouddhisme, se trouver minorées par l’annexion militaire de leur territoire au Népal de la dynastie Shah, hindoue et népaliphone, en 1769. Un siècle plus tard, la politique de discrimination de la langue et de la religion bouddhiste lancée par l’Etat à l’encontre des Néwar a provoqué l’émergence d’une conscience identitaire et d’actes de résistance culturelle. Or, depuis ses débuts, la revendication de l’appartenance au groupe linguistique néwar et, souvent, de sa défense, se double chez ses acteurs d’un rattachement personnel à la religion bouddhiste, sans que cette double appartenance soit pour autant mise en avant dans les discours.La mise en regard de la situation actuelle de la vitalité de la langue et de celle du bouddhisme dans cette population vise d’une part à documenter l’étude des relations entre langue et religion, et d’autre part à proposer l’application d’outils d’évaluation de la vitalité linguistique à celle de la vitalité religieuse. C’est également une confirmation de la nécessité qu’il y a à mettre au jour et à conceptualiser les relations entre la langue et les autres dynamismes sociaux dont elle semble être, si souvent, à la fois le vecteur et l’enjeu
In 1769, the Shah dynasty from Western Nepal, promoting Hinduism and speaking Nepali, had conquered the Kathmandu Valley and integrated it into a much wider Nepal. As a consequence, the language, as well as the Buddhist tradition of the local indigenous ethnic group, the Newars, became minority ones. A century later, the State launched a repressive policy towards both Newari language and Buddhism, and the result has been the development of identity awareness, both in the linguistic and in the religious fields, among the Newar intelligentsia, who entered cultural resistance. Therefore, since the beginning, both language and religion have been associated, although activists hardly acknowledge this double-sided feature of their commitments.This study of the current situation of both language and religion vitalities among the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley aims primarily at documenting the research on relations between language and religion, and at testing the application of evaluation tools of language vitality to the evaluation of religious vitality. Furthermore, it confirms the necessity we are facing to explore and conceptualize more the links between language and the social dynamics it often sustains but also depends on

The fieldwork on which this dissertation is based was done in Sri Lanka from 1984 to 1986 when the critique of the of the anthropologist as 'Knower of the Other' was surfacing in the literature (Fabian, 1983, Clifford and Marcus, 1986, Marcus and Fisher 1986). When I returned from the field most works of this genre were generally unknown in Adelaide. However, I began by writing with the insights of Bakhtin who himself had inspired central dimensions of the burgeoning critique of anthropological practice. Like Bakhtin's work, the debates about ethnographic authority continue to invite us to reflect upon the methods employed in the production of any text which claims to define the world of others. It therefore seems appropriate for me to preface this dissertation by highlighting relevant features of the processes which have culminated in this work, Cosmic Horizons and Social Voices. The nature of my fieldwork was distinctive. I did not work in a spatially constrained community. Rather my work was anchored by the work of specialist ritual practitioners, both deity priests and performers. Because the practitioners themselves not only live in dispersed locations but are also highly mobile in relation to the work that they do, my work entailed extensive travel in and between urban centres and rural areas across several provincial divisions. In the course of eighteen months of this kind of fieldwork, I attended in excess of fifty rituals of different types and scale. Over time, I developed personalized networks with more than fifty ritual practitioners privileging me to a broad span of rituals. I worked regularly, and often intimately, with a core of five priests and ten performers to give depth to my understandings. Many of these practitioners appropriated me to themselves at rituals where they publicly announced the purpose of my presence to ritual audiences as being to document Sinhala culture. I was claimed by them as 'our madam' ('ape noona') and as a university lecturer, which they knew very well I was not. This public acknowledgement legitimated my documentation of performances which were, after all, paid for by others. It also had the effect that the sponsors largely treated me as a member of the performing troupe. My growing familiarity with ritual practitioners had the further ramification that some of them insisted that I discuss the meanings of the rituals I documented with those people whom they considered specialists in their field. Soon, therefore, in addition to attending rituals, I spent a great deal of my time entertaining, and being entertained by, ritual specialists with whom I discussed deeper levels of their knowledge and work. In this way, and through my own unique constellation of relationships, I accumulated ritual knowledge, albeit at the theoretical, not practical, level. Some people shared esoteric and valued information with me that they would not disseminate to others with whom they were in competition. This field exercise provided a singular vantage point from which I have interpreted Sinhalese Buddhist ritual practices. While the final selection of rituals interpreted in the dissertation is mine, and represents only aspects of the larger body of knowledge carried collectively by Sri Lanka's ritual practitioners, the interpretations are based not simply on my observations, but on this body of knowledge which was shared with me even as it was constantly discussed, disputed, disseminated and transformed by ritual practitioners. My understandings of the meanings of ritual were consolidated in both quasi-formal and informal social settings, at my home and theirs, with people renowned as ritual experts by their peers. I collected ritual knowledge like ritual practitioners, in bits and pieces from different people. And, like practitioners who publicly acknowledge only one gurunnanse, I acknowledge mine formally, in the public arena of my own world, in the Introduction. There is another dimension of my field experience that I want to mention before discussing how it was metamorphosed by writing. My three children, Grant, Vanessa and Mark accompanied me to Sri Lanka at the ages of 9, 11 and 12 respectively. Their beautiful, inquisitive and effervescent youth attracted many people to us as a family which meant that they became wonderful sources of new friends and colloquial information. Both of the boys were fascinated with the unique rhythms of Sri Lanka's ritual music and dance and before long, they were keen to learn these for themselves. Grant was deeply disappointed that he could not because, like Vanessa, he was committed to his schooling and, even at 12, he was taller than many of the ritual practitioners. Mark was younger and, in any case, of a much smaller build so he became a pupil of Elaris Weerasingha, a ritual practitioner with international fame, who became my husband. Mark left school to work with Elaris and his sons, often at rituals other than those I attended. With Elaris as his gurunnanse, Mark made his ritual debut just as novice Sinhala performers do. The Sri Lankan press discovered this unique cross-cultural relationship in late December 1986 just as we were preparing to return to Australia. Memorable photographs appeared in both English language and Sinhala papers accompanied by full-page stories praising Elaris for his teaching and acclaiming Mark for proficiency in dance and fluency in Sinhala language and verse. We were delighted. Mark and Elaris continued to perform together in Adelaide at the Festival of Arts, on television and at multicultural art shows before Elaris returned to Sri Lanka to live for family reasons early in 1988. I remember Elaris for both the joy of our union and the pain of our parting. I want to thank him here for sharing his culture with us and especially for the way he supported me to believe in my understandings of the rituals he knew so well. I transcribed my field experience with the help of Bakhtinian insights. The rituals I studied are analysed for their performative value under the heading Cosmic Horizons with faithful reference to what their producers, including Elaris, consider to be one of their most important dimensions if they are to be efficacious; where and when they should occur. I call these facets of ritual their time-space co-ordinates and I employ Bakhtin's conception of the chronotype, in conjunction with practitioner's naming practices, to give them the analytical emphasis they deserve. Using elaborations of ritual meanings articulated to me by ritual specialists and colloquial understandings of words rather than their linguistic etymologies, I variously explore the chronotopic dimensions of the names of supernatural. beings, myths, ritual boundaries and segments to render explicit those unifying symbolic dimensions of a ritual corpus which would otherwise remain implicit to all except ritual practitioners. In particular, the Bakhtinian conceptions I use to analyse ritual serve to reveal and crystallize an integral relationship between the time-space co-ordinates inherent in ritual performance and the oscillations of the sun, moon and earth. Part 1 is my synthesis but it is based on the time-space co-ordinates of ritual; it is deliberately constructionist but it elaborates what I learned from ritual practitioners in the ways I have described. Part 2 is deconstructionist, it is an attempt to represent rituals as events with complex and indirect discursive reference to the elegant symbolic dimensions of the ritual performances themselves. As its title, Social Voices, suggests, Part 2 of the thesis privileges discourse about ritual - by ritual practitioners, ritual sponsors, Buddhist monks, the media and scholars - above the structural symmetry or chronotopic logic of the ritual corpus. It is in this domain, just to offer one example, that religion (agama) is distinguished from culture (sanskruthaiya) and exploited to make value judgements about people's participation in orthodox or unorthodox ritual practices, a judgement which is a possibility of the comic horizons constituted in ritual but which is not, as I argue, determined by them. This dissertation is ultimately an attempt to represent, in written form, fragments of an-Other world through a prosaic Bakhtinian focus on the way particular people named and talked about that world to me. Although I chose not to identify individuals in the text for personal reasons, my methodology is purposeful, giving value to Sinhalese performative ritual as the product of specialist knowledge. And, in keeping with the new imperatives for writing ethnography, this preface describing my field experience is intended to make explicit the way the dissertation explores its foundation in relationships between Self and Other, Observer and Observed, without abrogating the responsibility of authorship. Not pretending to be the voice of the Other, Cosmic Horizons and Social Voices is my voice, echoing the voice of Sri Lanka as it spoke to me.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--School of Social Sciences, 1990.

From the establishment of the Ming to the fall of the Qing (1368--1911), the social and cultural scene of the Chinese countryside was greatly transformed. Lineages became the dominant social organization in many areas. Local temples became a familiar part of the rural landscape. Local culture was increasingly exposed to the influence of regional culture and gentry culture with the proliferation of market towns, the development of the printing industry and the rise of literacy. By investigating the history of ritual specialists and their rituals in a sub-county area in southeast China, this thesis shows how these social and cultural transformations took place and how the local population experienced them. Lisheng or masters of ceremonies, the focus of this thesis, played and still play an important role in the local social and symbolic life. Either along with or in the absence of other ritual specialists, they guided the laity through ritual procedures to communicate with ancestors, gods, and the dead. These rituals, and also the related liturgical texts, were the outcome of social and cultural transformations in the late imperial period. Through a detailed discussion of the history of the three important local institutions that were closely related to lisheng and their rituals, namely, lineages, community compacts, and temple networks, the thesis shows the limitations of the elitist interpretation of late imperial cultural transformations. Cultural integration and gentrification were without doubt important aspects of these processes. However, both may have oversimplified the complexity of the processes and exaggerate the influence of high culture. Cultural hybridization, the process in which elements from different cultural traditions were synthesized into a new, constantly changing cultural mosaic, provides a multipolar, interactional, and thus more complex approach to our understanding of cultural processes in late imperial China.

Dans l’école des Tenants des anciennes traductions, les rNying ma pa-s, on trouve, en plus de la lignée de transmission orale dite longue (ring brgyud bka’ ma), une lignée de transmission courte des trésors (nye brgud gter ma). Par « trésors », on entend des textes qui auraient été cachés par Padmasambhava et ses disciples et qui, au moment où les circonstances l’exigent, sont redécouverts par des religieux prédestinés : les gter ston-s. Ceux-ci sont des milliers mais seuls certains d’entre eux, les cinq rois gter ston-s, font autorité pour authentifier un trésor et son découvreur. Le quatrième d’entre eux, Padma gling pa (1450-1521), naquit au Bhoutan où il œuvra et établit des centres religieux. Il étendit également sa sphère d’influence au Sud du Tibet où il fonda l’un de ses monastères principaux : Lha lung. Après sa mort, sa tradition spirituelle continua de se développer grâce à trois lignées d’incarnations. Bien loin de là, dans l’Ouest de l’Himalaya, la tradition rituelle de ce gter ston est encore aujourd’hui pratiquée dans la Vallée des nuages au Spiti. Jusqu’à présent, l’introduction de cette tradition, si éloignée de son lieu d’origine, reste mystérieuse. La présente étude vise, après avoir évoqué le cadre historique de la Vallée, à reconstituer dans un deuxième temps, grâce à des manuscrits que l’on croyait un temps perdus ainsi qu’à la tradition orale, l’histoire de cette tradition religieuse depuis son introduction jusqu’à nos jours. Dans un troisième temps, ce travail expose les pratiques et le calendrier rituel de la Vallée. Enfin, la dernière partie est consacrée au Rituel des vivants (gSon chog), rituel incontournable des habitants de la Vallée
In the school of the Followers of the old translations, the rNying ma pa-s, there is not only the Long lineage of the oral transmission (ring brgyud bka’ ma) but also the Short lineage of the treasures (nye brgyud gter ma). “Tresaures” are texts that were hidden by Padmasambhava and his disciples and discovered by predestined religious figures : the gter ston-s, when the circumstances so require. Those gter ston-s are thousands but only few of them, the five gter ston-s kings are recognized authority who can authentify a treasure and its discoverer. The fourth of them Padma gling pa (1450-1521), was born in Bhutan where he built several important religious complexes. During his life time, he extended his influence to the South of Tibet where he founded one of his main monasteries : Lha lung. After his death, his tradition continued to develop thanks to three incarnation lineages. On the western part of the Himalaya, in the Clouds Valley, in Spiti, the ritual tradition of this gter ston is nowadays still practiced. Until recently, the introduction of this ritual tradition far from its place of origin, remained quite a mystery. After an evocation of the historic context, the present study attempt, secondly, thanks to old manuscripts that were supposed to be lost and thanks to the oral tradition, to redraw the history of this religious tradition from its origin until now. Thirdly, this work exposes the practices and the religous agenda of the Valley. Finally, its last part focus on the Ritual of the living beings (gSon chog) which is a key ritual in the life of the inhabitants of the Valley

Gebši Luvsančültem (1740–1810), born in Čaqar of current Inner Mongolia, authored hundreds of texts on various subjects in Buddhism, and dedicated all his life to the development of Buddhism. In his texts, nomadic Mongolian lifestyle and culture were widely reflected and syncretized with Buddhist rituals. As he was not only a Buddhist scholar but also a famous medical practitioner, Luvsančültem documented smallpox inoculation and other newly spread infectious diseases among Mongols for the first time. Many of his works are also related to the nāga deity and devil’s wickedness, and to treatments for the unhappy spirits. One of the best examples of them is an offering ritual to the fire, which has two versions, written in Tibetan and Mongolian. Interestingly, the fire deity was described differently in these two versions. In the Mongolian version, the fire deity is appeared as a pleasant looking White Old Man whereas in the Tibetan version who is visualized as fierce imaged God with three faces and six armes. In addition, the fire offering ritual was recognized by traditional medical practitioners as one of the last, most effective, and fierce rituals for nāga spirits that are associated with diseases, when other rituals such as water rituals and sacrificial cake offerings do not show efficacy.

Frescoes representing melodic percussion orchestras have recently appeared in the central sanctuary of the Angkor Wat temple. They prefigure two orchestras existing today in Cambodia: the pin peat and the kantoam ming. These two ensembles are respectively related to Theravada Buddhism ceremonies and funerary rituals in the Siem Reap area. They represent a revolution in the field of music because of their acoustic richness and their sound power, supplanting the old Angkorian string orchestras. This project analyzes in detail the composition of the fresco sets and establishes a link with the structure of Khmer melodic percussion orchestras. The analysis of some graphic details, related to other frescoes and bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat, also makes it possible to propose a dating. The study embodies one of an anthropological ethnomusicology, while also incorporating a discourse analysis, so to frame the uncovering of new historiographers of music and instrumentation, so to re describe musical discourses, more so to shed new light on melodic percussion of Angkorian music.