Tibetan Shamanism: Ecstasy and Healing

Praise for Tibetan Shamanism

A very interesting and important book by a major authority on contemporary Tibetan shamanism and on shamanism in general. He makes a contribution not just to shamanic studies, but to the preservation of the threatened spiritual heritage of the Tibetans themselves.

—Michael Harner, PhD, author of The Way of the Shaman and Cave and Cosmos: Shamanic Encounters with Another Reality

Larry Peters has devoted his life to studying Nepalese shamanism as both an anthropologist and as a practitioner, and so writes with a rare combination of deep personal experience and professional expertise.

—Roger Walsh MD, PhD, University of California, author of The World of Shamanism

"Larry Peters has spent decades researching the healing practices in Tibetan shamanism. Tibetan Shamanism: Ecstasy and Healing is an ethnography of shamanic healing and the transmutation of soul in a Buddhist culture that ostensibly does not recognize the concept of soul."

—Sandra Ingerman, MA, author of Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self and Walking in Light

"Larry Peters has an intimate knowledge of ecstatic healing methods among Tibetans and Nepalese, and his book shows how close he is to the shamans, and that he has an understanding of their reality made possible by extended field stays. I met many of the people Peters writes about during my stay in Nepal in 1970-’71 and meeting them again in Tibetan Shamanism is a most welcome experience."

—Per-Arne Berglie, PhD, professor emeritus, History of Religions, Stockholm University

I’ve known Dr. Larry Peters’s deep work on the shamanic healing practices of the Tibetan peoples for two decades. Professor Peters’s experiential knowledge of this healing tradition makes this book a must read for anyone interested in Tibetan shamanism or shamanism in general.

—Bhola Banstola, Nepalese Shaman, president and founder of Nepal Shaman

TIBETAN

SHAMANISM

ECSTASY and HEALING

LARRY PETERS, PhD

North Atlantic Books

Berkeley, California

Copyright © 2016 by Larry Peters. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

Published by

North Atlantic Books

Berkeley, California

Cover photo by Larry Peters, PhD

Cover design by Daniel Tesser

Tradition, Practice, and Trance was originally published as Tradition, Practice and Trance of the Foundation’s Tibetan Living Treasures, in Shamanism Annual, Issue 22, December 2009. Soul in Contemporary Tibetan Shamanism was originally published in Shamanism Annual, Issue 23, December 2012. Shaman as Psychopomp was originally published in Shamanism Annual, Issue 23, December 2010. The Tibetan Healing Rituals of Dorje Yüdronma was originally published in Shaman’s Drum, Number 45, 1997. "The Yeti: Spirit of Himalayan Forest Shamans" was originally published in Shamanism, Vol. 18, 2005. "The Ghe-wa (Tibetan Death Rite) for Pau Karma Wangchuk Namgyal" was originally published in Shamanism Annual, Issue 21, December 2008. All used by permission.

Tibetan Shamanism: Ecstasy and Healing is sponsored and published by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences (dba North Atlantic Books), an educational nonprofit based in Berkeley, California, that collaborates with partners to develop cross-cultural perspectives, nurture holistic views of art, science, the humanities, and healing, and seed personal and global transformation by publishing work on the relationship of body, spirit, and nature.

North Atlantic Books’ publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Peters, Larry, author.

Title: Tibetan Shamanism : ecstasy and healing / Larry Peters.

Description: Berkeley, California : North Atlantic Books, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015038279 | ISBN 9781623170301 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781623170318 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Shamanism—Tibet Region. | Shamanism—Nepal.

Classification: LCC BL2370.S5 P48 2016 | DDC 299.5/4—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015038279

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

1

Tradition, Practice, and Trance

2

Soul in Contemporary Tibetan Shamanism

3

Shaman as Psychopomp

4

The Tibetan Healing Rituals of Dorje Yüdronma

5

The Yeti: Spirit of Himalayan Forest Shamans

6

The Ghe-wa (Tibetan Death Rite) for Pau Karma Wangchuk Namgyal

Endnotes

Index

About the Author

Image Gallery

Great Stupa. Photo by Larry Peters.

INTRODUCTION

Soul (la)¹ fulfills an important role in Tibetan shamanism. Tibetan beliefs regarding the individual’s soul (or souls) have changed over the millennia. Before Buddhism, in indigenous shamanism (Bön), there was a belief in an immortal soul. When Buddhism came to Tibet in the mid-eighth century CE, it arrived with very different ideas regarding the soul. Buddhism rejects the existence of a soul. Still, in the folk religion of lay culture and in shamanism, the belief in soul persists, albeit how it is viewed has changed due to Buddhism and, a millennium later, due to exile and subsequent acculturation in Nepal.

This book is the result of ethnographic fieldwork that began in 1996 and continued until 2012 when the last of the four Tibetan shamans who are the subjects of this study passed away. I visited the shamans regularly during this sixteen-year period. We became friends and I was privileged to know their families, to observe their healing practices, daily life, and community events, and to be taught their belief system.

As part of my touring business, I would routinely bring students and colleagues to Nepal to study shamanism, and spend two weeks to a month doing field research prior to their arrival and after they left Nepal. These trips averaged three per year. Thus this book is more than a philosophical study of soul. It is a study of soul in the context of shamanic healing, trance states, and the interactive relationship with spirits. In other words, a map of the shamanic spiritual world is described, as are the states of consciousness and the techniques of ecstasy necessary to access it.

Research was conducted at two field sites. One is in the town of Boudhanath (Nepali for Lord of Wisdom), about 6 km from Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, and the location of the Tibetan Buddhist Great Stupa (see Figure 0-1), an ancient place of pilgrimage, a large reliquary structure for the Buddhist saint Mahakasyapa, and a Nepal heritage site. Boudhanath has a population of about 100,000 and is the home of a dozen or so Buddhist monasteries. The second is the Tibetan refugee camp known as Tashi Palkhiel with a population of about 1,200, located outside Pokhara, Nepal’s second-largest city, and about 200 km from Kathmandu. At the first site I studied the healing system of Lhamo Dolkar (in this context, lhamo means shaman goddess), and at the second, the three male shamans (lhapa or pau) who lived with their families at Tashi Palkhiel and worked as shamans.

Lhamo Dolkar and Wangchuk, the elder of the three Pokhara shamans, as discussed in this book, were both certified as authentic shaman healers by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. This is of interest in its own right as, prior to exile and the Chinese invasion of Tibet in the 1950s, shamanism was viewed as an apostate religion and its practice suppressed. The enmity toward and violent treatment of shamans by Buddhist lama has a long history in Tibet and neighboring Mongolia. At one point, shamans were burned at the stake (Kingsley 2010).

Prior to exile, shamanism was tenacious in the Himalayan mountainous terrain, especially in difficult-to-reach areas geographically distant from the Buddhist monastic urban centers (Samuel 1993). Despite the current domination of Communist China, shamanism still exists, albeit limited to isolated communities in far northern Tibet (Bellezza 2005). What I discovered was that Tibetan shamanism in exile was not a religion. All the shamans identified themselves as lay Buddhists. The deities the shamans invoke in their healings are indigenous Bön deities converted to Buddhism. Further, there is no community or affiliation between the individual shamans. Each has his or her own practice and can be very critical of the work of other shamans. Shamanism in exile is a spiritual profession, but it is not competitive with Buddhism. In the refugee camp, shamanism was socially tolerated by the lama, but seen as superstition and therefore falling short of ultimate truth. Worse yet, some camp members fear shamanic practice and believe it to be heretical to Buddhism.

At Tashi Palkhiel, shamanism was a central element in cultural life when the camp was new in the 1960s and ’70s (Berglie 1976, 1992). But, as Buddhism became more present, a monastery was constructed, and lama and monks were imported, shamanism lost status and quietly folded into the background of camp life. One of the camp shamans, Nyima, the youngest of them, early in his career, was apprenticed to one or the other two elder shamans at the camp at different times. Aspects of his training were evidence of what was once a robust shamanic practice at the camp. He was one of three disciples, but recently there have been no disciples, and consequently no one receiving training. Tibetan shamanism ceased to exist in the exile community in Pokhara when Nyima died in 2013. Even the children of the shamans, who spent much of their youth witnessing shamanic rituals, follow Buddhism and express little interest in shamanism, something none of them has been called to. It seems to me that the cultural diminution of shamanism at Tashi Palkhiel is in many ways analogous to the history of shamanism in Tibet after Buddhism.

The ending is similar in Boudhanath with Lhamo. Here, too, Tibetan shamanism passed when Lhamo died, as she had no disciples. Like the three male shamans in Pokhara at the time of research, Lhamo, too, was dependent upon Western tourism to sustain her practice as a shaman. In other words, Tibetan shamanic practice in exile involved mostly Western clients, some Nepalese, but few Tibetans. Lhamo had a large practice and, most days of the week, she would treat as many as twenty-five clients. Boudhanath and its stupa are tourist destinations, and Lhamo had achieved some notoriety. At the camp, the three male shamans had very small practices and often would treat just one or two clients in an entire week, if any at all, unless I (or another group leader) brought students to them for shamanic healing.

Generally speaking, shamanism among the Nepalese is accepted culturally and has a strong foundational belief system. Thus there are numerous Nepalese shamans and a few who are popular. For example, in Boudhanath, there were, during the period in which I studied with Lhamo, at least two other shamans with reasonably large practices. Both of these shamans were Tamang, one of the many Tibetan ethnic groups that have resided in Nepal for centuries, and are citizens, not refugees. Tibetan groups like the Tamang are called Bhotiya (Tibetan) and are distinguished culturally and shamanically from the recent immigrants who fled Tibet in the last sixty years. The latter group is the focus of this book. However, it is worth noting that there are rituals, symbols, and myths that seem to come from a common source. For example, before exile, Wangchuk pilgrimaged many times to one of the sacred Bön mountains, Targo, a place only accomplished Tibetan shamans go to for initiation. It requires entering a cave, ritually invoking the deity of the mountain, and finally climbing a nine-step ladder in order to exit the cave (Bellezza 2005). The final initiation for Tamang shamans in Nepal is called gufa (Nepali for cave) and it likewise involves ascending a nine-rung ladder, each rung a symbol of one of the levels of the heavenly upper world, and a place to which the shaman’s soul journeys (Harner 2013) in trance (Peters 1982, 1998).

Furthermore, there is a major pan-Himalayan, pre-Buddhist mythos that is well known in almost all the Himalayan cultures (Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, etc.), among Buddhist and Hindu alike, and that is the stories about the yeti. In a pivotal chapter, different sizes and types of yeti are identified, one of which is a child abductor and, at the same time, master shaman teacher and initiator of future shamans. That is to say, some of the tales of the yeti have a role in the shamanic ecstatic experience.

REFERENCES

Bellezza, J. V. Spirit Mediums, Sacred Mountains and Related Bön Textual Traditions in Upper Tibet. Boston: Brill, 2005.

Berglie, P. A. Preliminary Remarks on Some Tibetan ‘Spirit Mediums’ in Nepal. Kailash 4, no. 1 (1976): 85–108.

———. Tibetan Spirit-Mediumship: Change and Continuity. In Tibetan Studies: Proceedings of the 5th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Vol. 2, edited by S. Ihara and Z. Yamaguchi, 361–368. Tokyo: Narita, 1992.

Harner, M. Cave and Cosmos: Shamanic Encounters with Another Reality. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2013.

Kingsley, P. A Story Waiting to Pierce You: Mongolia, Tibet and the Destiny of the Western World. Point Reyes, CA: Golden Sufi Center, 2010.

Peters, L. Trance, Initiation, and Psychotherapy in Tamang Shamanism. American Ethnologist 9, no. 1 (1982): 21–46.

———. Tamang Shamans. New Delhi: Nirala Books, 1998.

Samuel, G. Civilized Shamans. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.

1

TRADITION, PRACTICE, and TRANCE

²

This chapter is the result of ethnographic research on Tibetan shamanism as practiced at Tashi Palkhiel, a refugee camp established for Tibetans who fled Tibet after the Chinese invasion of 1959, a few miles from Pokhara, Nepal. Its focus is the two shamans currently residing there, and a third who recently died, their healing practices, their trance, their beliefs about the soul, as well as their status and role as shamans in the culture of a refugee camp. The research presented here has yielded new data that demands a reassessment of the well-documented soul calling—life calling ritual, as well as of the distinctive type of journeying and possession-trance of the so-called Tibetan spirit medium.

Tashi Palkhiel is the largest of three refugee camps in the area, and has a population of about 1,400. Currently there are no shamans practicing at the other two camps. I have known the late Pau (shaman)³ Karma Wangchuk and Pau Nyima Dhondup (sixty-eight years old) since 1996, and met Pau Rhichoe⁴ (seventy-one years old) in 1998. Pau Wangchuk was the first FSS (Foundation for Shamanic Studies) Living Treasure and Pau Nyima and Pau Rhichoe two of its most recent. Each year, I have spent about two weeks with the pau with members of my educational groups, observing their rituals and conducting interviews. In 2008, ethnographic fieldwork covered a period of three months. Wangchuk died prior to this latest research effort. Over the years I’ve witnessed more than a hundred of the pau’s healing rituals.

The shamanism of the three camp pau has been the subject of ethnographic research for nearly thirty-five years. Per-Arne Berglie’s (1976, 1978, 1982, 1983, 1992) landmark studies described the séances, trances, and cultural context of the camp pau. Years later, Sarah Sifers (2005), a field associate for FSS, describes, and in her 2008 film depicts, the practice of the pau, including elements of the soul calling—life calling ritual (la kuk tshé kuk [bla hgugs tshe hgugs]) commonly called la kuk. There has been greater focus on Wangchuk, who achieved some notoriety. Bellezza (2005, 66ff.), based on his interviews in 1998 with Wangchuk, identifies him as a knowledgeable representative of the Tibetan spirit-medium tradition. A short narrative appeared in Dunham and Baker (1993), a text with a foreword by H. H. the Dalai Lama. Wangchuk became a Living Treasure after being nominated by Ian Baker, a longtime FSS Nepal field associate (Baker 1991), and a few short status reports appeared in FSS journals (Peters 1997a, 2008; Sifers 2007; Sifers and Peters 2001). Having research spanning many years on the same shamans at the same location makes it possible to discern the effects of cultural change and deepen understanding.

SHAMAN, LAMA, AND BÖN

The pau are Buddhist but their shamanic practice and beliefs originated in the Tibetan indigenous tradition known as Bön.⁵ Tibetologists distinguish an old form of Bön that has an oral tradition, and a later form that has a literary tradition and is monastic like Buddhism and arose after Buddhism came to Tibet. These two forms are sometimes referred to as revealed Bön and the newer systematized development textual Bön. The latter is a religious order but, in the earlier tradition, Bön or Bön po (practitioners of Bön) refers to an independent indigenous priest, invoker, sorcerer, or, more to the point, shaman, and does not refer to a church or organized religion (Hoffmann 1961, 13ff., 98–99; Li 1948, 33–36; Snellgrove and Richardson 1968, 59, 96–103; Stein 1972, 232–235). The earlier Bön is the indigenous shamanic tradition prior to the arrival from India of Padma Sambhava, the Buddhist cultural hero who is credited with bringing Buddhism to Tibet in 749 CE, subduing the local Bön deities, converting them to Buddhism, and binding them by oath to be defenders of the Buddhist faith (dharmapala in Sanskrit, sung mo [srung mo]) (Nebesky-Wojkowitz 1993, 3ff.). It is these converted Bön deities, the dharmapala, and not the heavenly high-ranking Buddhist deities (lha), who have the significant role in the Tibetan shamanism practiced at the camp.

The camp pau do not affirm affiliation to Bön, as Bön is heresy to Buddhism. They trace their origin as shamans to Padma Sambhava in the eighth century, and not to Bön. Nevertheless, the practice of shamanism is not part of the Buddhist structure and reflects beliefs and an indigenous tradition (revealed Bön) prior to Buddhist cultural patrimony (Bellezza 2005, 2). It is part of what Tucci (1988, 163ff.) calls the prehistoric Tibetan folk religion. In other words, shamanism is an extant traditional sacred profession in a culture dominated by Buddhism for more than a millennium.

Buddhist preeminence and the hierarchy of lama⁶ and shaman are formally validated in a myth that, in one version or another, is omnipresent in Tibetan culture. Moreover, this key story is represented on the shaman’s altar (see Figure 1-1). To the far left and far right of the pau’s altar sit two cone-shaped piles of tsampa [rtsam pa]