Professor CHARLES RAMBLE: Towards a Holistic Representation of Tibetan Ritual: Three Case Studies from a Himalayan Bonpo Community

Department of South and Central Asia cordially invites you to attend a talk by CHARLES RAMBLE, Director of Studies (Director d’études) at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris Member of CRCAO (Centre for Research on East Asian Civilisations), Paris Lecturer at the Oriental Institute, Oxford University.

Towards a Holistic Representation of Tibetan Ritual: Three Case Studies from a Himalayan Bonpo Community

Monday, November 16, Celetná 20, room No. 427, 5:30 pm 

Attending a Tibetan ritual can be a confusing experience. Behind the noise, the chaotic activity and the seemingly interminable chanting it is often far from clear what is going on. While Tibetan ritual has attracted the attention of a number of very able researchers, their focus has, understandably, been on textual analysis. To the extent that analysis entails – literally – the “breaking up” of a complex entity, focusing on one aspect of ritual to the exclusion of the others is clearly not an ideal approach to the subject. In many cases, of course, the text is the only thing that is available to us, but when we are dealing with a living tradition, there is no reason to make a virtue out of a necessity, and innovative approaches may enable us to do justice to the multi-stranded nature of a ritual. This presentation will introduce three little-studied Bonpo rituals: Soul-retrieval (bla-’gugs), the “Three-Headed Man of the Black Rites” (gTo nag mgo gsum) and Vampire-crushing (Sri mnan), and will suggest how innovative methods of presentation might make it possible to convey the complexity of a given ritual performance while enabling a close study of its textual and performative aspects.