The Taming of the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism by Jacob P. Dalton

nitive theories for the understanding of religious modes of viewing statues, but never really pushes the limits of the potential of such a theory. Richer semiotic analysis might likewise better illumine her points about the polyvalence of symbols, while her discussions of the differing contexts of religious acts would benefit from the applica¬tion of theories of performance that consider the interactions of performers and audi¬ences in these different arenas.

Such explorations might well have their place in a more extended study than the present one, but it is important to remember the principal aims of the work. Kindt's book does not provide a full outline of the system or systems of Greek religion or even of the symbolic universe of Greek religion; it merely serves as a call for scholars to turn their attentions to the symbolic universe as a whole rather than the social systems or practices that are a part of it. Some might complain that this idea is not new, but Kindt does not claim it is a radical innovation; indeed, she carefully shows the theoret¬ical predecessors of the model she articulates, as well as other scholars who work in similar

ways. Nevertheless, Kindt's book clearly articulates the theoretical shift at issue and provides a model for the kind of work that such a Geertzian, New Historicist, semi¬otic theoretical approach can underpin. I might wish that she had taken many of her points further, both her discussions of the history of the scholarship and her analyses of primary evidence, but she is surely moving in the right direction. Kindt's rethinking of Greek religion points the way forward to more studies of the same kind, and I think that the scholarly understanding of Greek religion will be the richer for it.

This book reviews Tibetan history with a focus on the important theme of ritual vio¬lence in Tibetan Buddhism, along with the related persistent cultural preoccupation with demonic influence and attempts to curb and control it. It rightly reaffirms the apparently disordered post-Imperial period (mid-ninth to late tenth centuries) as a cre¬ative and formative time for Buddhist culture in Tibet and draws attention to important sources from this period, some of which are presented in translation in the appendixes. Jacob Dalton also presents a thought-provoking and engaging account of the develop¬ment of the symbolic landscape over time, such as a movement from a mythological interest in subduing the demons within—as Tibet emerged from the Age of Fragmen¬tation into a more ordered Buddhist environment during the eleventh century—to a concern about the demons beyond the borders, from the period of Mongol intervention in Tibet.

Chapter 1 introduces Buddhist doctrines on violence and ethical justifications for it in mainstream Buddhism and looks in more detail at tantric Buddhist approaches, especially focusing on the myth of the taming of the demonic Rudra, which underpins many of the Tibetan tantric destructive rituals. Rudra is the personification of evil and ignorance and must be brought under control, although the Buddhist tantric deities who compassionately oppose him come to resemble him in appearance. The second chapter then considers the place of violent tantric rituals in the post-Imperial period, when tantric Buddhism was becoming established through all layers of society and localized Tibetan versions of

tantric myths and rituals concerned with controlling trou-blesome gods and spirits were taking root. Chapter 3 discusses one particular tantric ritual manual recovered from Dunhuang, possibly dated to the tenth century, while the fourth chapter moves on to the development of political controls over tantric rites, par¬ticularly dealing with the ordinance of the tenth-to-eleventh-century king of Western Tibet, Ye-shes-'od. Chapter 5 considers the construction of Tibet as a Buddhist land from the eleventh century

onward, with indigenous spirit and demonic forces forcibly subdued, providing the continuing foundation for the Buddhist mandala. The sixth chapter, entitled “Buddhist Warfare,” is of particular interest. Less on engagement in war,thechapterdiscusses the application ofrituals of violence in various troubled his-torical periods, with lamas at once central figures of social and political power yet often profoundly ambiguous about their involvement in such rites. This discussion is likelytobeofinteresttoscholars of such ethical dilemmas within other religious tradi¬tions.

However, as a textual scholar with a particular specialism in rNying-ma tantric rit¬ual and Dunhuang tantric manuscripts, I have examined carefully the primary sources in Tibetan that Dalton uses, and I have found that his treatment of them is often prob¬lematic. Here, I consider only three instances that are crucial for the central arguments inthe book. The firstis a speculation thatone ofthe two (perhaps tenth-century) Dun- huang texts that Dalton features in the book (including translation, commentary, and analysis) may be a manual for a human sacrifice. Now, if this speculation had been confined to a footnote, it would not have been worth refuting, but it is prominently

highlighted throughout the book (from p. 4 of the introduction onward), while chapter 3 (as well as a photograph of one folio of the text) is entitled “A Buddhist Manual for Human Sacrifice?” And the work of a previous scholar of one ofthe text's two sections is dismissed (and her published translation is not even mentioned when Dalton pre¬sents his own) for failing to discuss “whether it represents a example of direct ritual killing” (220 n. 7). However, Dalton does not present a single convincing piece of evi-dence to back up his claim. He suggests (77) that a human sacrifice may be intended since no explicit mention is made of an effigy and no summoning consciousness rite is described.

Yet Mahayoga sgrol-ba rites (for liberating or releasing evil beings into Buddha fields) often make no explicit mention of the effigy. Even the rDo rje phur pa rtsa ba'i rgyud kyi dum bu, which was edited by the Sakya Pandita, included in the official Buddhist canons, and featured prominently in the Sa-skya Phur-pa tradition, does not explicitly specify the effigy to be used. Moreover, sets of notes on rituals found in Dunhuang documents such as this one are just that, not necessarily complete manuals with all details

of the rite included. Even many later liturgical texts containing sgrol-ba rituals, such as those performed during tantric feast rituals, often do not include explicit reference to the effigy or summoning rites. Sometimes, a summoning mantra (or verses invoking the force of the truth) may in practice be added. For exam¬ple, the sgrol-ba rite within Dudjom Rinpoche's Lake-Born Heart Essence ritual man¬ual (bDud 'joms 'jigs bral ye shes rdo rje'i gsung 'bum [Kalimpong: Dupjung Lama, 1979-85]; Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center [TBRC] W20869, vol. Ma: 559) gives

See also Sam van Schaik, early Tibet blog, Monks and Mahayoga (11th Sept 2012), who claims that the later part of this same text describes it as written by Mulasarvastvadin monks, and discusses their vinaya. no summoning words within the text, but a separate set of notes on the practice men¬tions that the ritual assistant should place the final portion tshogs (which serves as the effigy) before the Vajra Master, and it adds the summoning mantra and mudra that should be done (vol. Za: 519). The fact that these details

are not in the main text does not mean that we should assume we are dealing with a different type of rite, let alone a human sacrifice. The only other evidence Dalton offers is a claim that the ritual ends with the throwing of the victim's head onto the mandala. Here, he refers to a procedure to determine whether the rite has succeeded; if not, it seems that a further suppression will need to be performed during the subsequent tshogs feast rite (tshogs phyi mas kyang brnan te bya'o). Dalton claims that this is suggestive of a human sacrifice, since an effigy would need to be three-dimensional and fragile, which he implies is unlikely— yet the most commonly used effigies in sgrol-ba rites are

made from dough, and an effigy described in the Dunhuang text IOL Tib J 331/3 (India Office Library Tibetan manuscripts held at the British Library, London; see Cathy Cantwell and Robert Mayer, Early Tibetan Documents on Phur pa from Dunhuang [Vienna: Osterreichischen Aka- demie der Wissenschaften, 2008], 110-11) gives a list of substances, including crema¬tion ash and earth from an anthill, none of which would be too difficult to cut and throw. An even more serious objection to Dalton's claim that the head described is quite likely to be human is that no head is specified anywhere in the text. The text itself is unclear about what exactly is cast into the mandala to determine the success of the rite. Since the consciousness is mentioned in the previous line, it might refer to part of the effigy thought to embody the consciousness, such as the heart section.

Alternatively, the sub¬ject might again be implied—if readers are assumed to know what is to be used in such a ritual test of the rite's success. In his translation, Dalton (84) adds the word “head” in square brackets. This is a reasonable guess (assuming that it applies to the effigy) of what might be intended here. Yet when he discusses the passage elsewhere, the cautious suggestion in square brackets has become a definite identification to be used as evidence that the rite concerns human sacrifice, and this identification is repeated without qualifi¬cation at least twelve times in the book (4, 77-78, 89, 90, 142, 149, 154, 236 n. 4).

Along with the lack of any specific evidence to support the claim that the rite is likely to be a human sacrifice, the circumstantial evidence would seem to make the suggestion untenable. Dalton acknowledges the rite's close connection with other Dunhuang sgrol-ba rites and to Mahayoga tantras—he specifies the Guhyasamaja (79, 237 n. 14). None of these describe human sacrifice, although all use sacrificial imagery; the point of Mahayoga sgrol-ba is precisely to replace what Buddhism con¬sidered sinful rites such as animal sacrifice, in the process conjuring up violent imag¬ery to overcome violent impulses. But above all, since many texts imply but do not mention an effigy, if one were writing about an actual human sacrifice, the presence of a human victim would need to be spelled out. Moreover, it seems astonishing that a “manual for a human sacrifice” should fail to say anything about how the victim is per¬suaded or coerced into cooperating: there would surely need to be drugs or gags and bonds used tosubdue the victim, guards to hold him orherdown, and soon—none of which are referred to in the text.

On the basis that the ritual perhaps describes a human sacrifice, Dalton portrays it as an “extreme” form of the sgrol-ba rite (4), which becomes toned down or subli¬mated, moving “increasingly from the real to the symbolic,” following the ordinance of King Ye-shes-'od of Western Tibet in the tenth to eleventh century (108-9; see Samten Karmay, The Arrow and the Spindle [Kathmandu: Mandala Book Point, 1998], 3-16; Sog bzlog pa blo gros rgyal mtshan gyi gsung 'bum [New Delhi: Sanje Dorje, 1975]; TBRC W8870, vol.

438ff.). Ye-shes-'od was an instrumental figure in initiating the New Translation period, which revived Buddhist practice on the basis of new translations of Indian tantric texts. Dalton represents the ordinance as showing that some Tibetans in the tenth century were “purported to have read liberation rites” like the Dunhuang rite as relating to “a ritualized killing of an actual person” (78), and this was a principal object of Ye-shes-'od's attack. Yet Dalton is wrong ontwo counts here. First, the imagery in this

Dunhuang ritual, and in other Dunhuang and early sgrol-ba rites, is perfectly in line with later sgrol-ba rites, and far more detailed violent imagery is included in some later manuals (to mention two: the Subsidiary Rites inthe contemporary Dudjom tradition, bDud 'joms 'jigs bral ye shes rdo rje'i gsung 'bum, vol. Tha: 419-521; and in the Sa-skya Phur-pa tradition, 'Jam-mgon A-myes-zhabs, The Vajraklla Rites as Practiced by the ’Khon Lineage ofSa-Skya [New Delhi: Nga- wang Sopa, 1973]; TBRC W29307, 623-838). Dalton's

idea of a stark contrast between rites from the Age of Fragmentation and those following Ye-shes-'od is not evidenced in the rNying-ma ritual record. The rNying-ma-pa continued unrepentantly to follow the Old Translations of the early period. In fact, the twelfth-century forefa¬ther of the rNying-ma-pa, Nyang-ral rNyi-ma 'od-zer, includes a version of the Dun- huang text IOL Tib J 331/3 (which includes a sgrol-ba rite) within his revelations, along with two commentaries (bDe gshegs 'dus pa'i chos skor, mTshams brag edition;

Second, Ye-shes-'od does not propose a reformation ofthe sgrol-ba rite; inhisordi- nance, he simply criticizes it and relates it to animal sacrifice. Dalton misrepresents the content of Ye-shes-'od's ordinance to suggest that Ye-shes-'od distinguishes be¬tween a literal form of the sgrol-ba rite and an acceptable form using an effigy (14: “Yeshe OO... maintained” that when “True Buddhists” performed “a violent rite, they always use an effigy”; 15, 106: “the use of an effigy was central to Yeshe OO's ... conservative conception of ritual violence”; 107), concluding that Ye-shes-'od“drove a wedge between the liberation rite and ‘sacrifice,' further effacing the historical and ritual

connections between them” (106). Here, Dalton has failed to distinguish between Ye-shes-'od's wording and the critique of the sixteenth-to-seventeenth-cen- tury rNying-ma-pa polemicist Sog-bzlog-pa, who defends the rNying-ma tantras and their Mahayoga traditions from Ye-shes-'od's criticism. Dalton refers to Sog-bzlog-pa as “the edict's . . . commentator” (106) and cites Sog-bzlog-pa's insistence that the sgrol-ba rite uses only an effigy embodying the evil forces, as though this clarifies Ye- shes-'od's position. In fact, Ye-shes-'od does not support any form of sgrol-ba, and Sog-bzlog-pa's response is to undermine Ye-shes-'od's criticism by pointing out that the later tantras favored

in Ye-shes-'od's tradition also contain sgrol-ba rites, and in any case, Ye-shes-'od is mistaken in suggesting that sgrol-ba rites involve animal sac¬rifice (only an effigy is used). Dalton misses the line in which Ye-shes-'od seeks to equate sgrol-ba with animal sacrifice and claims that Ye-shes-'od was particularly censuring a sacrificial rite called mchod sgrub (106), which involved “people ... being ‘liberated' alive” (97, 106). Yet the line referring to mchod sgrub rites (which generally relate to protective

deities) in the ordinance is not entirely clear; it may merely mean that humans become the object of these rites as an unintended conse¬quence, due to the propitiation of wrathful deities. In his response to the mchod sgrub line, Sog-bzlog-pa seems to interpret it as continuing the theme of the previous line that speaks of rites connected with corpses. He contends that in both the old and new tantras, sgrol-ba is to be practiced on the living and not the deceased, although he admits the possibility that in Ye-shes-'od's time, some might have mislabeled their evil conduct as tantric. In any case, it is not at all clear that Ye-shes-'od is referring to human sacrifice here, and he is

certainly not contrasting these rituals with a more posi¬tive form of sgrol-ba using effigies. In his enthusiasm to see human sacrifice every¬where, Dalton fails to identify the more pertinent issue—which he does nonetheless address in the chapter called “Buddhist Warfare”—that is, the controversy surround¬ing the use of tantric rituals directed against human enemies. In premodern Tibet, there is no doubt that most people assumed that such rituals enacted with specific targets in mind—such as invading forces—would affect and might even result in the deaths of the enemies.

A third example of Dalton's misinterpretation of his primary sources relates to an interesting work of a nineteenth-to-twentieth-century lama, Rig-'dzin Gar-dbang (Thar med dmyal ba'i gting rdo srog gcod mchod sbyin gyi nyes dmigs, n.p., n.d; TBRC W19895). I am delighted that Dalton has drawn my attention to this source, and I look forward to studying it more carefully later. However, Dalton interprets this text in an extraordinary manner. He presents Rig-'dzin Gar-dbang as a “moralizing missionary” (151), railing against non-Buddhist sacrificial rites practiced in the frontier area he was seeking to convert. This portrayal is not confined to a single section of the book; Dalton develops

throughout a comparison between Gar-dbang and an early Western scholar of Tibet, Austin Waddell, both apparently thinking that Tibetans needed to be freed of their backward superstitions. The first page of the introduction speaks of Gar-dbang as criticizing Tibetans “for their involvements in sorcery and blood sacrifice, rituals that he ...branded ‘ignorant' and barbaric,” while the book's conclusion presses home that both Waddell and Gar-dbang saw “benighted realms tormented by devils and barbaric sacrifice ... in need of... civilizing missions” (155; see also 17-18, 107: “Waddell and Rigdzin Garwang ... both saw demonolatry and barbarities all around them in their respective border regions”;

144-55). Examples of such civilizing missions to the borderlands do of course exist, but this is not one of them. Here, the supposed obsession with sacrificial rites appears rather to be a projection of Dalton's. There is no doubting the main topic of Rig-'dzin Gar-dbang's text: itis the inclusion of meat in tantric offer¬ings, especially in tantric feast rituals and in protector deity rites. Feast offerings offood and drink are fundamental to rNying-ma ritual life, and discussions of whether they should include meat have long interested me. Rig-'dzin Gar-dbang's use of the term dmar chog, red or blood rituals, does deploy a rhetorical overtone of animal sacrifice, but he is in fact

referring not to animal sacrifices practiced in some marginal Buddhist area he is seeking to convert but to the common practice of including meat among offerings used in tantric rites. This continues to be a controversial issue in Tibetan Bud-dhism, and increasingly in the modern context, with the rise of modern Buddhist vege¬tarianism and influences such as Indian Hindu approaches on lamas living in exile, the debate seems to have become even more central and heated. The “horror at the ‘deep- rooted devil-worship and sorcery,'” which Dalton (144) attributes to Rig-'dzin Gar- dbang, seems merely a rather typical poetic flourish of praise for the Buddhist teach¬ings, clearing away

the darkness of non-Dharma (Rig-'dzin Gar-dbang, Thar med dmyal ba'i gting rdo srog gcod mchod sbyin gyi nyes dmigs, 15b.1), and where Dalton sees complaints of “demon worship” (147), Rig-'dzin Gar-dbang seems to be speaking of unwanted demonic influences: when the wisdom deities flee from the meat offerings, spirits and ghosts take their place (Rig-'dzin Gar-dbang, Thar med dmyal ba'i gting rdo srog gcod mchod sbyin gyi nyes dmigs, 6b.1-2). Thus, a “Dharma tradition of ghosts” (ibid., 7a: 'dre'i chos lugs: Dalton 148 translates this as “demonic cult”), which will bring no long-term benefits, inadvertently replaces the Buddha Dharma. Dalton reads the colophon as though it is addressed

specifically to the people of Nyarong and a par¬ticular sponsor who “had a history of involvements with blood sacrifice and violent sor¬cery” (145-46). I find none of this in the text, which seems to be more generally addressed: any generous benefactor may bring harm if they sponsor evil rites, so repen¬tance of past misdeeds and good aspirations for the future are needed. Dalton claims that Rig-'dzin Gar-dbang “raises the unsettling similarities between blood sacrifice and the liberation rite” (149), but rather than

discussing different versions of a liberation rite, in the passage concerned (Thar med dmyal ba'i gting rdo srog gcod mchod sbyin gyi nyes dmigs, 13b), Rig-'dzin Gar-dbang is refuting the claim that offering meat in tantric rites will benefit the killed animals, like in the sgrol-ba rite: this would only be possible in the case of an accomplished adept capable of reviving the dead and remov¬ing the consciousness into a Buddha field. Moreover, rather than a modernizing puri¬tanical figure, Rig-'dzin Gar-dbang rehearses and develops the arguments found within the religious tradition of which he is part and makes several of the same points as one of his famous mentors, rDza dPal-sprul (Patrul Rinpoche, The Words of My Perfect Teacher, trans. Padmakara Translation Group [San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994], 207-9), including the citation of sGam-po-pa that Dalton

(106, 149) refers to twice (that the wisdom deities will faint when offered dead bodies, just as if a mother were to be offered the flesh of her child). Dalton (146) points to titles from Gar-dbang's col¬lected works as illustrating his overwhelming preoccupation with Buddhist morality. True, Rig-'dzin Gar-dbang's works are not ritual liturgical texts; his renowned teachers had themselves produced many ritual texts, and he confines his writings to general teachings. Yet there is no sign that he rejects ritual: among

these works is a tract on the benefits of performing the tantric tshogs feast rite (tshogs mchod kyi phan yon, in rig 'dzin gar gyi dbang phyug gi gsung 'bum [Nyag a 'dzin rong]; TBRC W19884, vol. 2:553-81). The tshogs feast ritual includes a sgrol-ba rite in its basic structure, and Rig-'dzin Gar-dbang's eulogies of the rite's merits include copious quotations of Pad- masambhava from the rNying-ma revelations and of famous rNying-ma teachers of the past. There is not much here to conform to “the surprisingly Protestant note” that Dal¬ton sees (146).

Apart from the problematic treatment of the sources in the areas discussed here, which are central to the book, there are numerous other mistaken translations and interpretations of primary sources throughout. That said, Dalton is a creative thinker who raises crucial questions for Tibetan studies. There is no doubt that concern with demonic forces as well as interest in tantric rituals of control and destruction, together with support for the religious specialists proficient inthese rituals,havebeencentralto Tibetan Buddhist culture. Daltonseekstomakeconsiderationoftheserites and associ¬ated mythology central to academic understandings of Tibet, an approach that is to be welcomed. He also constructs a lively narrative tracing a history of Tibetan tantric vio¬lence and its relationships to differing political and social contexts. The book is worth reading but with caution in relation to Dalton's presentation of the primary sources in Tibetan and the consequent misinterpretations of Tibetan cultural history.

CATHY CANTWELL University of Oxford

The Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience. BY GANANATH OBEYE- SEKERE.

This book is at once an intellectual metastatement, a spiritual testament, and an uncanny “meditation on death” from a major anthropologist of religion with a long and distinguished career behind him and the inevitabilities of human mortality before him, which he writes about poignantly and with which he ends. Toward all of this, Gananath Obeyesekere takes up a series of rich case studies of religious prodigies to reflect on a set of related questions, including and especially how we might understand the shared phenomenology of visionary experience across cultures and times and what this phenomenology in turn suggests about the psychology of vision, the mediating role of the religious imagination, and the fundamental and nonrelative duality of human knowing. The author's cultural and historical range is as impressive as his epis¬temological thesis is focused and tight. A word on each is in order before I offer my own personal reflections.

1. Comparative sweep.

The book is organized into eight “Books.” These books in turn are arranged in rough, but not strict, chronological order—they begin with the Buddha and end with the New Age and the modern era. Each book treats a different historical figure or, in some cases, a set of figures related either by culture or by the¬matic concern. Obeyesekere employs two basic criteria to choose his case studies. One—in response to the questions from friends and colleagues about why he does not write more about the Hindu and Sufi materials—boils down to the simple confession that he has written about what he knows best and has not written about what he does not know well. Our time here is

limited, he notes, and so each of us must be content to focus on a few slivers of the historical and anthropological record. The second crite¬rion is a contested but fruitful method in the comparative study of religion, which we might refer to as the instructiveness of the extreme. Accordingly, Obeyesekere does not turn to the ordinary or to the banal to understand and theorize religious visions. That would be odd, since religious visions are relatively rare and exceptional by nature; that is, they are experienced as

extraordinary by both the visionaries them¬selves and by those who record and pass on textual, artistic, and architectural revision- ings of them. Rather, he turns to the extreme and the excessive or, in his own expres¬sion, to the virtuosos. This is an approach that goes back at least as far as William James's The Varieties of Religious

Experience, a foundational text to which Obeyese- kere is consciously and appreciatively indebted in The Awakened Ones. Obeyesekere's first and privileged hyper-case here is the meditative trances of the Buddha, with which he begins in Book 1 and whose mythology acts as a kind of guide