Presence in Tibetan Landscapes: spirited agency and ritual healing in Rebgong

279 Pages·2016·8.89 MB·English

by  D Collins

Presence in Tibetan Landscapes:
spirited agency and ritual healing in Rebgong

Dawn Helen Collins

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
November 2014
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Along the timeline of the seven-year journey to completing this thesis, I have lost father
and then mother to cancer, lived spread across two continents, bought two properties
and given birth to a child. Throughout this voyage I could not have asked for a more
adept and supportive supervisor than the one I found in Professor Geoffrey Samuel. I
wish to thank him for his superb guidance in all things academic, and he and his
wonderful wife Dr Santi Rozario for their friendship and support - from the depths of
my heart. I am deeply grateful for the guidance provided by my examiners, Dr Mona
Schrempf and Dr Hildegard Diemberger, in the rich insights they gave me to help bring
this work to fruition. The project would not have been possible without the generous
funding and support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Frederick
Williamson Memorial Foundation. I wish to express my deep gratitude to other friends
from academic worlds who have given invaluable feedback on elements of this thesis,
in particular, Dr Gerald Roche and Dr Nicolas Shilé who accompanied me on my first
attempts at ethnography, providing guidance and generously sharing their insights. I
wish to thank the artists Jo Fong, Cassius Matthias, Abdul Hakim Onitolo, Jorge Crecis,
Alex Zapak and the dancers and musicians of Zil’oKA. Working with them enriched the
hearts of my thesis processes at various stages along its way and their friendships
nourished me in that. I wish to thank my dear sisters Claire Brown and Gail Collins-
Webb. They took charge of most all the practicalities attendant on the aftermaths of our
parents’ passing. During my write up period, Claire was my life coach and touchstone
and Gail gave invaluable advice and emotional support regarding parenting whilst
writing. I also owe an immense debt of gratitude to all those who cared for my daughter
for substantial periods of time so that I could write and without whom it would simply
not have been possible to complete this thesis… to Sofie Ahmed, Sǐan Peterson, Sam
Bezzina and all the staff of The Whitehouse Day Nursery; to Lee Boggess, Fiona Duff,
Denise Flower, Sally Fox and, sweetly, the Hermione Wiltshire, Pierre, Mei and Lola
Alozie clan: Thank you. Last, but certainly not least, I wish to thank all those numerous
friends and colleagues on the Tibetan Plateau without whom there would be nothing for
me to say here. I thank them for sharing their lives and times with me, for guiding me
with language learning, as interpreters and cultural translators, and for their friendship.
Due to the sensitivities in the regions concerned, I do not wish to risk compromising
them by mentioning them by name, but they know who they are and that I will always
hold them in my heart. Finally, I wish to dedicate this work to my late parents, Canon
Frederick Spencer Collins and Mrs Yvonne Elizabeth Collins. They instilled in me a
love of learning and came in the end to support me in pursuit of my dreams, however
strange to them these may at first have seemed. My father said of my endeavours
towards this thesis that he thought them important because there were cultural treasures
which could come to the attention of the world through them. I hope he would feel these
ramblings do in some measure offer that. Lastly, I wish to thank my dear daughter Tara,
who has had no small part to play in the understandings I have brought to all things in
this thesis and whose presence did much to inspire bringing it to completion.
SUMMARY

This thesis intends to add to the field a sense of how deities pervade ordinary life in
Tibetan cultural regions and what this means for those who live there. The study thus
aims to develop understandings of the types of ritual healing which take place in this
environment, one wherein landscapes are inhabited and experienced as embodiments of
spirited agencies. In the thesis I suggest that, for my fieldwork regions of the Rebgong
valley at least, ritual healing can best be understood a process by which beings are
brought into right relations, both mutually and in connection with other beings, human
and deity. I suggest here that all practices, whether ritual or medical, pertaining to health
and well-being in Rebgong are predicated upon this type of epistemology; a cultural
matrix of healing. This matrix is one in which healing is by definition is about humans
and deities maintaining right relationship. I explore what this sensibility means for those
who live in the Rebgong valleys primarily through ethnographic accounts of three
particular ritual practices in Rebgong villages: the renewal of the labtsé tributes to the
mountain gods, the Leru harvest ritual, and the performance of a tantric ritual cham
dance.

Forms of ritual healing I discuss in the thesis include circumambulation, medical and
tantric practices, those of the trance or spirit mediums, dance and divination. I argue that
all these rites and practices connected to health and well-being in a broad sense can be
understood under one cultural matrix of healing in which spirited agency is focal. I
argue that inherent to understanding this matrix is a focus on how deities, as embodied
landscapes, appear within it, and how they are understood to exist and interact with
human affairs, particularly those relating to health and well-being. In this regard, themes
that I explore throughout the thesis are those of luck, purification, empowerment,
embodiment and blessing. The study is intended, in a Bakhtinian sense, as a body of
words which do not bring closure but rather seek to engage in a dialogical conversation
that simultaneously responds to past scholarship and anticipates response.
AUTHOR’S DECLARATION

This work has not been submitted in substance for any other degree or award at this or
any other university or place of learning, nor is being submitted concurrently in
candidature for any degree or other award.

This thesis is being submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD. It
is the result of my own independent work, except where otherwise stated. Other sources
are acknowledged by explicit references. The views expressed are my own.

I hereby give consent for my thesis to be available online in the University’s Open
Access repository and for inter-library loan, and for the title and summary to be made
available to outside organisations.

Candidate: Dawn Helen Collins

Date: 30th November 2014
CONTENTS

Introduction 1-26
Opening into the Research 6-7
Research Ways and Means 7-13
Presences, Empowerments and Embodiments 13-16
A Cultural Matrix of Healing 16-22
Chapter Overview 23-26

Chapter One – Exploring Rebgong Grounds 27-56
Tibetan Grounds 27-29
Amdoan Narratives 29-34
The Valley of Rebgong 35-45
Mother Tongues and Father Mountains 45-47
Social Landscapes 47-53
Spirited Landscapes 53-55

Chapter Two - Healing Landscapes 56-93
The Science of Healing 55-60
Healing through the Power of Purwa 71-76
Deity Men of Rebgong 76-81
Blessing the Land 81-84
Divine Diagnostics 85-89
The Journey of a Homeless Wanderer 89-93
Towards a Cultural Matrix of Healing 93-93

Chapter Three – Embodied Landscapes 94-125
Meaningful Mountains 94-99
Mythohistories and Deity Landscapes 100-108
Jiangjia Origins and Structures 109-111
Placing the Labtsé 112-118
Renewing the Jiangjia Labtsé 118-121
Rites and Elemental Processes 122-126
Empowered Agency 127-129
Chapter Four – Sacred Spheres 130-166
Powerful Peaks and Valley Voices 130-134
Delighted Deities – Songs and Dances of Leru 135-141
Heights and Households 141-147
Jiangjia Leru 148-151
Fractal Dances 151-157
Contested Presences 158-166

Chapter Five – The Art of Dancing the Gods 166-192
Invoking Divine Agency 167-172
A Rebgong Village Cham 172-181
Trance Dancing to the Heart of Things 181-183
The Descent of Dancing Gods 183-187
Performing Presence 187-193

Chapter Six – The Blessing in Breath 193-219
Ritual Spectrums 194-196
Palden Lhamo – Goddess of Divination 197-101
The Three Donkeys and Chötsen Donchen 201-207
Touch of Subtle Winds 208-214
Processes of Opening and Blessing 214-216
Embodiment, Power and Presence 216-219

Concluding Comments 220-226

Appendix I 227-228
Appendix II 229-237
Appendix III 238-242

References 243-271

INTRODUCTION

The language of the body expresses a discourse which reaches far beyond conscious
categories of understanding – which is why it is so powerful.

- Hildegard Diemberger 1993: 121

_____________________________________________________

Dance is my first language; the language of the body. That could be said of us all, but
for those with special affinity for movement it is particularly so. During my years of
formal dance training, in both classical ballet and contemporary dance, I became
increasingly curious about the health of my body as instrument. Health is something
dance artists are constantly seeking to optimise for their enhanced expression in the
studio and on stage, and yet full health seems elusive and much of any professional
career is generally spent working with or through a variety of psychophysical issues.
Such issues encompass combined aspects of being, which could be broadly termed
mental and physical, which experientially are intrinsically combined in its complex
process on a spectrum between good and ill health. Alongside formal dance training I
began exploring ways in which my own body could be used to engender a greater sense
of health and well-being in others, by taking courses in oriental forms of massage. This
curiosity about health and healing1 was the initial impulse which eventually gave rise to
this research. In this introductory section I aim to set forth the impulses and rationale
underlying my research, to position myself in regard to it and describe its
methodological concerns, to indicate some theoretical frames for this thesis and to
outline its structure.

The search for increased health and longevity is inextricably intertwined with
one’s own cultural and personal situation and spirituality. Many factors come into play

1 When using the term ‘healing’ throughout, I am intending a wide scope of reference, indicating a broad
range of practices which are therapeutic, and are experienced by the bodies of individuals who are
considered as embedded in their communities (cf. Connor 2001).
1
during an individual’s journey from illness towards health and, in the Rebgong region,
site of the fieldwork underpinning this research, there are a wide spectrum of cultural,
linguistic and spiritual spheres which intersect at any individual juncture along that path
towards health. A prime starting place for exploring this intersection in any particular
case is the site of the body, and my interest in what makes us well, and what to do when
wellness fails, began with the body. I have worked with the body in an intense way for
many years, as professional performer and as therapist of both Thai massage and
Shiatsu. This, and my continuing practice, has brought me an experiential knowledge of
the body’s psychophysical nature; the physical form as a non-discrete entity. The
common denominator between feeling an energy line or point of access2 along it and the
depth of what is moving for someone through touch, knowing when or where to rest or
be in movement with another’s body, requires the same kind of openness to subtle
forces as it does to be in the timing of a dance and instinctively be in a state of fully
aware sensory response with the music(ians) and the other dancers. As I became more
familiar with notions of subtle bodily manifesting in the oriental healing arts I practice,
this led to a wish for deeper understandings beyond conceptual frames for the processes
I saw unfolding. The boundaries between performance, healing, philosophy and
transformative states of being started becoming more fluid for me. My explorations of
Buddhist thought and practice only deepened a sense of the interconnectedness of being
that unfolds in moments of openness.

It was when I was studying oriental forms of massage that I first became
acquainted with medical systems within which abide the notion of subtle bodily
channels and the energies they carry. The first form of massage I studied, which was
from Thailand, is said to have its roots in an ancient Indian system known as Āyurveda.
There was no hugely theoretical component to the courses I took in Thai massage,
which was the traditional way it was taught to foreigners in the early nineties. Instead, I
learnt several sequences of massage hand, foot, knee and elbow techniques which,
combined with assisted stretches based on Indian yoga postures (S. āsana),3 formed a

2 In Shiatsu practice these are known as meridian and tsubo respectively.
3 Throughout this thesis Tibetan terms will be given phonetically according to my understanding of the
Amdo dialect spoken in the region where I undertook fieldwork. Where bracketed transliterations are
provided, these will be given according to T. Wylie’s system. Proper names will not use italics and their
root letters will be capitalised. The diacritics of Sanskrit terms in devānagri will be given according to the
2