Ваджраяна и борьба за власт в Тибете

[Пламен]

The Field of Knowledge in Tibet
by Geoffrey Samuel

Some underlying assumptions of this field, it seems to me, changed only slowly over the entire Buddhist period. These are assumptions about the nature of magical power, and I have suggested elsewhere (Samuel 1992) that they are similar to those found in other societies of the mid-Himalayas (Tamang, Gurung, Magar) and the South-East Asian highlands. Power is thought of as implicit in the landscape, particularly in certain places such as mountain-peaks and lakes, or sites sacralized through the activity of culture-heroes such as Padmasambhava. It should ideally be channelled and directed to bring about the welfare and prosperity of local communities and to protect them from harm. In this, magical power is no different from any other kind of power. Its channeling and directing involves the maintenance of harmonious relationships with the local deities or spirit-forms who inhabit the landscape, and the proper exploitation of the blessing-power (byin rlabs) inherent in sacred sites such as those associated with holy men of the past.

The stress on the unsatisfactoriness and ultimate unreality of everyday life in Mahayana Buddhist thought relativizes these concerns somewhat and lends them a certain prevailing sense of irony (Lichter and Epstein 1983), as well as providing trans-worldly goals for a minority. Concerns for the proper use of magical power for this-worldly ends nevertheless remained at the basis of the Tibetan approach to reality, constantly reiterated in domestic ritual, communal village ritul and monastic ritual on behalf of local communities, and Vajrayana Buddhism provided the primary technology for dealing with them.

Certain people have special access to power, through family connections or innate ability, and it is necessary to form relationships with them. These may be straightforward exchange relationships, as when one pays a village shaman to find the cause of an illness, or a group of monks to recite auspicious texts on the occasion of a wedding, but more interesting for our purposes are ongoing hierarchical relationships, which in Tibet usually have something of a contractual and patron-client character. (Even local deities swear vows and are bound to observe the terms they have agreed to.) If a lama or monastery fail to provide effective magical services, one can always turn elsewhere. I hvae suggested elsewhere that elements of Tibetan Buddhism even in modern times can be understood quite well in terms of centres of quasi-shamanic power competing for custom (Samuel 1993).

A significant question then becomes: on what grounds can one claim to be an effective supplier of magical power? Here I will list some of the possible bases for such claims:

• being the possessor of important Tantric ritual teaching lineages, particularly where handed down by heredity (e.g. the 'Khon family of Sa-skya) or reincarnation (e.g. the 'Bri-gung hierarchs);
• being the descendant or recognized reincarnation of a past lama known for magical power and ability; power is thought of as inhering in the lineage (gdung rabs);
• being head of a large and disciplined monastic community (this does not necessarily mean that one is oneself an ordained monk);
• having established a personal reputation for spiritual development (and thus magical power);
• having access to direct revelation from Padmasambhava, the tantric deities, etc. (this is likely to become the basis of a body of personal ritual);
• having access to important holy sites or relics containing power (byin rlabs).
The role of myths and quasi-historical narratives in supporting such claims is probably already clear. Such material was - and still is - propagated in all sorts of ways, ranging from ritual performance (such as the famous Black Hat ceremony by which the rGyal-ba Karma-pa lamas indicate their identity to the founder of their reincarnation series, Dus-gsum mkhyen-pa), hagiographies of lamas (rnam thar), histories of monasteries and their teachers (lo rgyus, gdan rabs, etc) and pilgrimage guides (gnas yig) as well as through all kinds of oral transmission in formal and informal contexts. In these ways lamas and monasteries in Tibet established claims as channels for magical power on behalf of th wider community. These claims historically formed the basis of their political role; secular landowners and local aristocratic lineages reached accommodations with them (including networks of marriage alliance over several generations); foreign powers from the Mongols in the 13th century to the Manchus in the 17th to 19th centuries accepted their claims and set up alliances with them. Such stability as Tibetan politics maintained until the 20th century depended on these networks of alliance between monastic and lay power and the willingness of local populations to give adherence to them. [6]

In terms of hegemony, this is a rather weak situation. [7] The alliances tended to be fragile, their power (in secular terms) was limited, and their control over the everyday lives of the Tibetan population, even in the more centralized areas, was limited to taxation and control of labour power rather than encompassing the ideological mechanisms we generally associate with hegemony. At the same time, an established idiom for claims to power did gradually develop, and it is in this sense that we can speak of the partial hegemonization of Vajrayana Buddhism in Tibet. This idiom was made up of elements such as the recognition of reincarnate status or of hereditary descent from significant historical lamas; of the ceremonies of initiation into and transmission of valued Vajrayana teachings; and the monastic ritual dances and life-empowerment rituals, in which monastic power is explicitly trasferred to the lay population. These elements, along with the oral narratives and textual material mentioned before, outlined a discursive space within which claims to magical power (and hence religious status) could validly be made. As I have suggested, this discourse incorporated and extended earlier Tibetan understandings of the nature and functions of magical power, and formed the basis for the widespread acceptance of Tibetan Buddhism by the Tibetan population. It seems that this discourse had considerable ability to reshape and absorb dissenting elements. Here I briefly give two examples:

• In Civilized Shamans , I discuss the late 15th century "yogic reaction" to the increasing formalization and monasticisation of Tibetan religion (Samuel 1993: 518-22). This reaction was rapidly absorbed and incorporated within parts of the monastic tradition. Within a couple of generations, the "dissenting" and anti-structural songs of the radical yogins, with their inbuilt critique of monastic practices, were being recited as part of monastic liturgy (1993: 522).

• More recently, David Germano has sketched the developmentof the non-Tantric meditation tradition of rDzogs-chen Sems-sde ("Mind Series"). In its earlier stages in Tibet (10th-11th centuries) this seems to have been the basis of a series of non-Tantric contemplative exercises, based on a textual discourse with a "constant antinomian tendency... a rhetorical lawlessness asserting a primordial dimension that is neither accessed by, nor governed by, law-abiding patterns" (Germano 1994: 240). It did not include deity visualization nor traditional initiation and transmission rituals. The gradual incorporation of rDzogs-chen into Mahayana discourse can be traced through the works of a series of important Tibetan lamas, including kLong-chen rab-'byams-pa (1308-63) and 'Jigs-med gling-pa (1730-98). By the early 19th century, rDzogs-chen had become fully incorporated into a characteristically Vajrayana series of preliminary Tantric practices ad initiations (Germano 1994: 275-6). 'Jigs-med gling-pa himself became the origin of a series of reincarnate lineages, particularly those deriving from 'Jam-dbyangs mkhyen-rtse'i dbang-po (1820-92), who dominated the monasteries of Eastern Tibet by the late 19th and early 20th century, forming an effective counter to the dGe-lugs-pa monasticism prevailing in Central Tibet and the Chinese borderlands (A-mdo, Tre-hor). It is interesting for our purposes here both that rDzogs-chen retained a heterodox edge as a higher-level "reframing" of conventional Vajrayana, and that it only became the basis of monastic traditions competitive with the established Vajrayana orders by adopting their basic ritual paraphernalia and conceptual structure.

Source: http://users.hunterlink.net.au/~mbbgbs/Geoffrey/saag95.html