Tibetan Buddhist Divination

Master Thesis in Tibetology

Solvej Hyveled Nielsen

Tibetan Buddhist Divination

The Genre and its Concepts of Fortune and Causality

UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN

Supervisor: Trine Brox Submitted on: 31st of July 2018

Acknowledgements

I wish to extend my heartfelt thanks to my supervisor Trine Brox, who helped me turn all this material into a paper, and to my secondary supervisor Jan-Ulrich Sobisch, who introduced me to the topic of Tibetan divination and always inspires me.

Many thanks go to my husband, Boyce Teoh, for the patient help and support, and to my friends, Søren Buskov Poulsen and Sonam Spitz, who helped clarify some of my many questions.

Many thanks also to Jane Caple, who suggested that I focus on the Tibetan term rten ’brel and other concepts about fortune in Tibetan societies.

Deep gratitude is due to all my Tibetan teachers (my informants for this M.A. thesis), who compassionately and patiently shared their knowledge, wisdom and experience with me. All remaining faults in my writing are entirely my own.

Note on language

When foreign words are in Sanskrit, they are marked with “Skt.” on the first occurrence; otherwise foreign words in italics are Tibetan in the Wylie transliteration system. I give the Tibetan terms in brackets after translated words and phrases when it is informative for readers of Tibetan language to know the original. For translated quotes, I provide the Tibetan in the footnotes in Wylie transliteration.

The translations are my own (but trans-lations from the P manual, see the list of sources, are inspired by Jan-Ulrich Sobisch, forth-coming). Tibetan names are not transliterated in the Wylie system but are transcribed as they are pronounced, and here I employ the “umlauts” from the German language, ö=oe, ü=ue, ä=ae.

Introduction

Divination, using various means to decide or predict what cannot be judged by ordinary means, has long been a part of the Tibetan way of life. With the introduction of Buddhism into Tibet in the seventh century these procedures came to be used within a Buddhist framework, functioning in accordance with Buddhist principles such as interdependence 1 and karma or cause and effect. (…)

In Tibet, major decisions concerning everyday life – such as marriages agreements or business agreements – are often only made after consulting some form of divination. – His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama (in Dorje 2001: 8).

Practices of divination have probably been widespread in all traditional cultures around the world since ancient times, and H.H. the Dalai Lama’s words here express the importance that divination still has for Tibetans. One of my interlocutors for this thesis (see the methodology section), Dorzin Dhondrup Rinpoche, also told me: “Tibet is a nation of divination.”

2 What H.H. the Dalai Lama’s quote further tells us is that Tibetan divination existed long before the country was made Buddhist in the seventh century, and that the pre-Buddhist divination systems were then incorporated into a Buddhist setting and explained in terms of Buddhist philosophical principles.

The quote also indicates, however, that divination is most frequently used for the worldlier issues of daily life. The purpose of this M.A. thesis is to shed some light on the understudied field of Tibetan Buddhist divination, and I do that with three main arguments:

In Part One, I argue that the manuals of Tibetan Buddhist divination comprise a substantial genre of Tibetan literature.

In Part Two, I argue that divination is an important method for Tibetan management of “economies of fortune” (Giovanni da Col’s term, 2007), and I moreover argue that Tibetan concepts of fortune and misfortune are interwoven with beliefs in

causality. I outline the two parts of the thesis in more detail in the next section of this introduction, and here, I would like to further introduce Tibetan Buddhist divination and give some brief remarks on its history and tradition.

Tibetan lore and literature is replete with various systems for interpreting natural omens of all sorts,3 and these are all “divinations” according to the Merriam-Webster4 definition: “1: the art or practice that seeks to foresee or foretell future events or discover hidden knowledge usually by the interpretation of omens or by the aid of supernatural powers.

2: unusual insight, intuitive perception.” Tibetan lore and literature is thus rich in the field of divination. In this M.A. thesis, however, I am only concerned with the specific type of Tibetan divination called mo, with a focus on the Buddhist versions, rather than the pre-Buddhist versions of the Tibetan “Bön” (bon) tradition that are also called mo.

Although there are some exceptions, mo divinations are mostly cleromantic, i.e., they make use of mobile objects as randomizing tools (such as dice, stones, barley grains, beads on a mālā, etc.). Among these, I focus on manuals of divination with dice and mālā (a Buddhist rosary of 108 beads), as these are the most common tools; but from what I have seen, the manuals for other types seem similar in structure and style.

The lore of mo divination is written down in manuals (called mo dpe or mo yig) that describe the required preparations and ways to perform the particular divination as well as all the possible outcomes with ritual remedies to ward off the negative answers.

As is usually the case with Tibetan Buddhist texts, these manuals require oral explanations from an experienced teacher to learn the details that are not described; and there are, moreover, also some unwritten systems of mo divination that are only transmitted orally.

Two of my interlocutors for this thesis (Khenchen Nyima Gyaltsen and Dorzin Dhondrup Rinpoche, see the methodology section) told me about two such orally transmitted mo divination systems that they personally use, and Dorzin Dhondrup Rinpoche even declared that he had never read a divination manual.

Tibetan Buddhist diviners (mo pa) can be lay persons or ordained, and the art of divination is not a topic that is studied in the monastic universities, but it is taught privately when one wishes to learn it from a diviner (source: Khentrul Khorchak Rinpoche). A few of my interlocutors told me that if one has supernatural knowledge (mngon shes), one does not need divinations.

Khentrul Khorchak Rinpoche said that for persons without super-natural knowledge, divination is the only way to gain insight into “the hidden phenomena” (lkog gyur gyi chos).

Many divination manuals also state this purpose at the beginning, as we will see below in section 1.2.2.1. The documentary about the Tibetan master Garchen Rinpoche’s life (Lundberg 2012: 14 min. into the movie), tells stories of how he as a child used to directly give predictions to people before he was taught how to make divinations.

His student, Dorzin Dhondrup Rinpoche, told me that nowadays Garchen Rinpoche makes divinations because a Buddhist practitioner is not supposed to show his supernatural abilities. In any case, divination is generally, as Lama Yönten told me: “defined as that which makes the unknown known.”

5 The historical transmission of Tibetan Buddhist divination is complicated, but the terminology and structure, as we will see below, seem to show a solid basis in pre-Buddhist Tibetan divination (Bön). These divination systems have then been incorporated into a Buddhist frame, which was probably adopted equally much from India and China.

India is the obvious authority for Buddhist texts and practices, and we see this in the manuals analyzed in this thesis, yet China is a great homeland of divination, and it should be noted that Tibet also greatly adopted the methods for divination and astrology from China (Strickmann 2005: 1, 98, Lama Chime 1981: 6f).

The Chinese origins would be seen in our divination manuals through a deeper analysis of the prescribed rituals than what has been possible in this thesis, for instance in the class of rituals called gto (see Shen-Yu 2005: 115ff).

Research on Buddhist divination is generally scarce, and this is partly due to the discourse of Buddhism’s compatibility with Western science, which has led scholars to put divination aside as “superstition,” “magic,” and “not true Buddhism” (McMahan 2009: 65f, Fiordalis 2014: 79f, Lackner 2017: 2, 5). With the present thesis, I hope to contribute a bit to filling this gap in the studies of Buddhist divination in Tibet.

Outline of the thesis

In Part One of this M.A. thesis, I analyze the literary genre of mo divination manuals as well as a couple of orally transmitted methods of the same genre. I will quote John Frow’s (2005) longer definition of genre below at the beginning of Part One, but here, the Merriam-Webster definition suffices: “a category of artistic, musical, or literary composition characterized by a particular style, form, or content.”6

The purpose of my genre analysis is twofold with inspiration from Frow’s (2005) definitions and theories of genre. First, the purpose is to describe the genre’s “structural dimensions,” (as Frow calls it), that is, the typical literary structure, style, features, and content of the manuals to provide an overview of this genre, which is lacking in the publications on Tibetan literary genres (see Part One).

The second purpose of my genre analysis stretches into Part Two of this thesis, and it is based in Frow’s (2005: 18) definition that the genre’s “structures project generically specific ‘worlds’: more or less coherent structures of meaning built up out of presupposed knowledges which genres at once invoke and reinforce.” This means that a genre analysis of the manuals facilitates diving into the world of inherent meanings in mo divination.

We will see how the genre of mo divination manuals especially expresses a world of fortune and misfortune, causality, and how to deal with it through communication with non-human beings, such as Buddhist deities, benevolent local gods and harmful spirits,

as well as the diviners’ meditation practices on Buddhist deities, who are invoked to help making accurate divinations. The analysis of our genre’s world continues in Part Two, facilitated by a discussion of some terminology of the mo divination lore.

I here focus on the many Tibetan concepts about fortune or luck (inspired by Reinhart Koselleck’s theory of basic concepts) because this seems to be one of the most central topics in mo divination, as well as the “economies” of managing this fortune (inspired by Giovanni da Col 2007, 2012). Furthermore, I discuss the beliefs in causality that seem to be interwoven in Tibetan concepts of fortune (inspired by Epstein 1977).

By causality, I mean that fortune and misfortune are generally believed to occur with a reason, such as influence from harmful spirits due to having offended them in some way, or due to assistance from protector gods, etc., and the mo divination is consulted to reveal some of these causes and prescribe practices and rituals to improve one’s situation.

By causality I also mean how the divinations are believed to work, i.e., what causes accurate divinations, as well as how the divination lore talks about Buddhist philosophical principles versus more popular beliefs of fortune and misfortune. We will see that Buddhist masters often explain divinatory causality in terms of the Buddhist philosophy of karma, but the divination terminology itself mostly expresses concern with a more short-term, malleable type of causality of luck or fortune.

My focus among the divination terms is partly on rten ’brel, a recurrent term in some of the manuals, which in the context of divination can be translated generally as “sign” or “omen,” but which I chose to translate more elaborately as “dependently arisen signs.”

The term (which is short for rten cing ’brel bar ’byung ba) comes from Buddhist philosophy, where it means “dependent arising,” referring to the principle of phenomenal causality that something only can occur based on something else, that is, basically the principle of karma, cause and result.

I include this meaning in my translation of the term in the divination context because Tibetan beliefs in causality seem to be implied by the term even when it is used for “sign” or “omen.” I back up this claim with an analysis and discussion

of Tibetan beliefs in causality in section 2.2. Sometimes, the term also occurs with its Buddhist philosophical meaning in the mo divination manuals, as we will see in my analysis and translated examples in Part One, and in these cases, I translate it merely as “depend-ent arising.”

As I describe in section 1.1 on the classification of the mo divination genre, it can be said to be part of a broader divinatory genre called “analyzing dependently arisen signs” (rten ’brel brtag pa), and the term rten ’brel is sometimes even added to the term mo, so that in these cases, it could be translated as “divining dependently arisen signs” (rten ’brel mo). Before turning to Part One, I will give some more words to my methodology and sources.

Methodology

Due to the practical and semi-oral nature of the literary genre of mo divination manuals, it seems suitable to approach an analysis of this genre with a few different methods. For the present thesis, I employ interviews with Tibetan practitioners of divination as well as a textual study of the divination manuals.

In this section, I just briefly mention the theories that I draw on, and I describe and define these further while applying them within the two parts of this thesis. Intermittently throughout this thesis, I draw on the words of my Tibetan interlocutors, whose personal details are given below in section 2.1.2 with their consent.

In contrast to cases of interviews with Tibetans about political topics, where pseudonyms are required to protect their personal situation in exile (Trine Brox 2016: xi), the topic of divi-nation does not invite such threats (as also seen in Barbara Gerke’s 2012 work on Tibetan longevity practices), and all my interlocutors readily agreed that I use their real names in my M.A. thesis.

What they shared is their knowledge, understanding, and personal experience with divination, and although divination is a fundamental aspect of Tibetan society, my inquiries about mo divination do not touch on political topics, the social situa-tions inside Tibet or in exile, or other sensitive issues requiring anonymity. Although

Gerke (2012: 100) points out that female lay diviners are common among Tibetans, I have only encountered male, ordained ones, and my interviews are thus limited in this sense.

My interlocutors are not professional diviners (mo pa), but all of them have experience performing divinations either for their own purpose or for others, and one is an astrologer (rtsis pa), who also performs some divination. They are all respected teachers, either in textual studies or meditational practices, or both. I have met them personally either in Nepal or Europe, and they all agreed to answer my questions for this thesis via the inter-net, always in Tibetan language.7

In Part One, I employ a method of genre analysis inspired by Frow (2005) to characterize the genre of mo divination. Frow (ibid.) analyzes genres in terms of three “structural dimensions” that are present in every genre, although in varying measures and with overlaps (Frow 2005: 122).

Frow (ibid. 118-122, also 24-25) calls the first of these structural dimensions “the formal organization” of a genre, and this includes the literary styles of syntax and grammar, prose or verse, vocabulary, typical text length, physical layout, and also the setting of space and time, etc.

The second he calls “rhetorical structure,” which is about the situation of address between the speakers in the text, which shows us their relation and thus helps to understand “the projected world” (as Frow calls it) of the genre.

The third of Frow’s structural dimensions is called “thematic content,” and this is about the recurrent themes or topics, the actors and actions in the genre. As Frow (ibid. 122) says that these three dimensions are overlapping, I also do not separate them completely in my analysis, but I start out describing the features of the first one, which are further exemplified in my translated text examples throughout the analysis.

The rest of my anal-ysis is thus mainly concerned with the second and third of Frow’s structural dimensions, in that I describe the recurrent themes in the divination manuals and the rhetorical communication with Buddhist deities and other non-human beings in the world of mo divination.

The mo divination manuals have, to my knowledge, not before been described as a literary genre neither by Tibetans nor by Western academics (see Part One). However, I argue that these manuals do represent an important genre of Tibetan literature in terms of all the above listed features of a genre.

I support this claim with a comparative analysis of fourteen manuals of dice and mālā divination. These fourteen are basically all the manuals that were available to me through searching the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (www.tbrc.org) and through the kind assistance of Professor Jan-Ulrich Sobisch.

Finally, in Part Two, I discuss the world and vocabulary of mo divination based on Reinhart Koselleck’s (1985, 1996, Andersen 2003) analytical concept Grundbegriffe, which has been translated as “basic concepts.”

These are more than merely words in that they not only contain and express meanings and experiences but are saturated with ideas about the world that we live in, our past, present and future.

From the “semantic field” (Koselleck’s term for a set of words that describe an aspect of reality) of mo divination, I focus on the basic concept of fortune, because it is one of the most important themes or main concerns in mo divination.

Fortune is an English word that translates a range of Ti-betan terms, and to analyze the relations between the “fortune terms” that appear in our fourteen manuals, I draw upon Giovanni da Col’s (2007, 2012) theory of an “economy of fortune.”

In contrast to the Western concept of fortune, a belief in karmic causality seems to be underlying the Tibetan one. However, most Tibetans do not seem to be familiar with the deeper Buddhist philosophy of karma, and I find Lawrence Epstein’s (1977) analytical framework of two parallel Tibetan belief systems about causality useful for analyzing how the economies of fortune play out in the world of mo divination.

Sources

Tibetan divination manuals Here follows a list with abbreviations and brief descriptions of the fourteen mo divination manuals that I analyze in this thesis, in chronological order (further publication details are given in the bibliography):

S Śāntideva (late seventh to mid-eighth century CE). mo rtsis 'jam dpa'i dbyangs. Dice div-ination connected with an unspecified Mantra deity (yi dam), however, the title suggests a connection with the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī.

A1 Atiśa Dīpaṃkara Śrījñāna (982–1054 CE). rje bstun sgrol mas jo bo rje dpal ldan a ti sha la lung bstan pa’i ’phreng mo. This text is translated in Appendix One of this paper.

A2 Atiśa, ’phreng mo mngon shes gtod ma. This manuscript has many spelling mistakes, it is not so systematic and seems unfinished, because a second part of the divination, which is found A1 and A3, is missing, and it ends with a few empty lines indicating that the scribe was not finished.

A3 Atiśa, rje btsun sgrol ma’i mo ’di sgrol mas jo bo ral gcig la dngos su gnang ba’i sgrol ma’i mo yig. This text is written in the cursive Tibetan script called dbu med, and the introduc-tory and ending lines, as well as the instructions in how many times to recite the mantras are written in the ’khyug yig script.

The vowels I and E are sometimes written with a non-consistent orthography.

These three divination manuals ascribed to Atiśa are mālā divinations connected with the deity Tārā, and there is actually another version of the A1 called jo bo dhī pam ka ras mdzad pa’i ’phreng mo, available at https://eap.bl.uk/archive file/EAP105-1-3-145.

How-ever, this old Bhutanese manuscript has a difficult orthography and non-standard spell-ings, and I do not include it in my analysis. Moreover, there is also a manual of the twenty-one Tārās by Atiśa that is not for mālā but to be performed with white and black barley grains.8 The contents of the manuals A1, A2, and A3 are very different, although they follow the same divination method (described in section 1.2.3 below).

The fact that the supposedly same divination manual (at least they all claim to be spoken to Atiśa by the female bodhisattva Tārā once he arrived in Tibet) can take so substantially different forms shows us the great mobility and “plasticity” (to use Jan-Ulrich Sobisch’s term, forthcoming, p. 19) among Tibetan divination manuals. The manuals travel (they are mo-bile), and in the new settings and contexts, their contents are changed (they have adapt-ability or plasticity).

K Karma Chagmé (1613-1678). bcu gsum tshugs kyi mo yig mngon shes ’phrul gyi me long nam mkha’ gsal ba. Mālā divination, claiming to stem from the Buddha in India.

MD Mingyur Dorje (1646-1667). gu ru mtshan brgyad kyi phreng mo. Nyingma school, mālā divination connected with Guru Rinpoche and the Mantra deity Trowo Roza (khro bo ro za).

P Könchog Trinlé Zangpo (1656-1718). A phyi chos kyi sgrol ma’i sho mo snang srid gsal ba’i me long. Drikung Kagyu school, dice divination connected with the protectress Achi Chökyi Drölma. This text is translated by Jan-Ulrich Sobisch (forthcoming), and I have retained his abbreviation for this text as well as for the C and B manuals below.

C Ngawang Trinlé Palzangpo (1730–1794). dpal ldan dmag zor rgyal mo’i sgo nas rno mthong sgrub tshul. Unclear block print; a clearer, but newer, hand-written version of this text is available in the collection of divination texts entitled ’phrul mo sna tshogs phan bde’i ’byung gnas (W23716), pp. 113-194. Gelug school, dice divination connected with the protectress Palden Magzor Gyalmo, a form of Palden Lhamo. 9

T Tuken Lobzang Chökyi Nyima (1737-1802). rta mgrin gsang sgrub kyi chos skor las/ ’phreng mo ’debs tshul lkog gyur gsal ba’i me long. Gelug school, mālā divination connected with the Mantra deity Hayagrīva and the five classes of ḍākinīs (Buddhist protectress de- ities).

L Lobzang Jamyang Gyatso (1768-1816). ye shes mgon po’i sgo nas sho mo ‘debs tshul. Gelug school, dice divination connected with the protector Mahākāla, who is the famous divi-nation protectress Palden Lhamo’s consort. B Yangchen Drubpé Dorjé (1809–1887). dpal ldan lha mo la brten nas sho mo ’debs tshul nor bu’i me long. Gelug school, dice divination connected with the protectress Palden Magzor Gyalmo.

Mi Mipam Rinpoche (1846-1912). rig sngags kyi rgyal po a ra pa tsa la brten nas blang dor brtag pa ’jam dpal dgyes pa'i zhal lung. Nyingma school or non-sectarian. Dice divination connected with the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī. This text is translated in Goldberg and Dakpa (1990), however, see the critique of this translation by Sobisch (forthcoming p. 5, ftn. 7).

J Jigdral Yeshé Dorjé, aka Dudjom Rinpoche (1904-1987), Nyingma school, treasure-text revealer. bkra shis tshe ring ma’i ’phrul mo snang gsal me long. Dice divination connected with the Tibetan protectress Tseringma and her four sisters.

N Ngawang Yönten Zangpo (1928-2002). rje btsun sgrol ma’i mo yig rno mthong g.yu yi me long g.ya’ bral dang rgya mtsho’i nang gi chu thigs nyag tsam mthong ba’i gdon rdzas ngos ‘dzin zung. Jonang school, dice or mālā (both are possible), connected with Tārā.

Jan-Ulrich Sobisch (forthcoming p. 18f) has discovered that the extensive manuals P, C, and B contain a largely identical main part, although they have different beginning and ending sections adapted to their authors’ different traditions.

Sobisch (ibid.) points out that this main body of the P, C, and B manuals might be even older than the oldest of these three, i.e., the P manual from the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries, but other versions have not yet been located. This fact again shows the mobility of Tibetan divination manuals as mentioned above.

Tibetan interlocutors

Starting from the summer 2017 and throughout the period of writing this thesis, I have interviewed and communicated with the following Tibetan Buddhist scholars and prac-titioners of divination (listed in alphabetical order). Except for Lho Ontrul Rinpoche, I have met them all personally in Nepal or Europe, and a large part of the interviews were conducted over the internet.

Astrologer Nyichö Zangpo: born in Central Tibet, about fifty years-old and a scholar of the Sakya tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. He goes by the name rtsis pa lags (“astrologer,” for a description of this term see Gerke 2012: 96), and he studied astrology and astrolog-ical divination at the Lhasa Mentsikhang in Tibet. Currently, he teaches various topics to the monks at a monastery in Kalimpong, India.

Dorzin Dhondrup Rinpoche: born in 1969 in Nangchen, Eastern Tibet. He came to India in 1994 and studied at the Drikung Kagyu Institute in Dehra Dun. Since 2006, he has been the resident Lama in Garchen Rinpoche’s center in Singapore.

Drubpon Tsering Rinpoche: born in 1974 in Nangchen, Eastern Tibet, he trained and stud-ied there under Garchen Rinpoche. Since 2009, he has been the resident Lama in Garchen Rinpoche’s center in Munich, Germany.

Khenchen Nyima Gyaltsen: born in Tibet in 1976, he came to India in 1994 to complete his monastic studies. He obtained his Khenpo degree (professor) in 2004 in Dehra Dun, India, and since 2013, he has been the head of all the monasteries of the Drikung Kagyu tradition in exile.

Khentrul Khorchak Rinpoche: born in Humla, Nepal, in 1987, he is a recognized reincar-nation (tulku) of the Sakya tradition. He obtained his Khenpo degree from the Sakya Col-lege in Dehra Dun, India, and he has also trained extensively in the other schools of Ti-betan Buddhism. He lives and teaches in India and Nepal.

Lama Yönten: from Nangchen, Eastern Tibet, and about fifty years old. He has studied and trained in Tibetan Buddhism, mainly of the Karma Kagyu tradition in Tibet and Ne-pal, and he currently lives, works and teaches in Copenhagen, Denmark. Lho Ontrul Rinpoche: born in Eastern Tibet in 1950, he arrived in India at the age of nine.

He trained with many Tibetan Buddhist masters of the Nyingma and Kagyu traditions and is a renowned diviner of our P manual. Since 1971, he has settled at his monastery in Rewalsar, India, while also travelling the world to teach. I have not met him directly, but I asked my friend, Sonam Spitz, to ask him some questions for me and record the answers.

Orally transmitted divination systems

Two interlocutors, Khenchen Nyima Gyaltsen and Dorzin Dhondrup Rinpoche, ex-plained each their complete divination system that are only orally transmitted and not written down in manuals. This fact shows us the semi-oral nature of the divination lore, and I will describe these two “oral manuals” together with the written ones in Part One.

Part One: The genre of Tibetan Buddhist mo divination manuals

In Part One, I show that the manuals of mo divination comprise a considerable genre of Tibetan literature, and I do this through a genre analysis inspired by John Frow (2005: 117). His definition of a genre has two parts, and I will base my analyses in Part One and Part Two on these, respectively:

I understand genre to be a historically specific pattern of organisation of semiotic material along a number of dimensions in a specific medium and in relation to particular types of situational constraints which help shape this pattern. Genre in turn acts as a constraint upon – that is, a structuring and shaping of – meaning and value at the level of text for certain strategic ends; it produces effects of truth and authority that are specific to it, and projects a ‘world’ that is generically specific.

The second sentence of Frow’s definition here concerns the universe and worldview of genres, and we will focus more on that world of the mo divination lore in Part Two. The first sentence is the basis for my analysis in the present chapter, and as described in the section on methodology above, Frow (2005: 118-122) summarizes the “number of dimensions” mentioned in the above quote into three: “the formal organization,” “the rhetorical structure,” and “the thematic content.”

The genre, which I will analyze along these three structural dimensions here in Part One, is thus the typical “pattern of organization of semiotic material,” i.e., the general pattern or features that characterize a type of text.

But I do not see this as particularly “historically specific,” as Frow puts it; instead, the genre itself is rather ahistorical, as only the specific instances of a genre are products of their specific historical setting.

Although historical background and authorial intent are important topics for philological studies, the scope of my analysis in this thesis is a more general overview through a comparative reading and study of mo divination manuals and practices.

To my knowledge, the divination texts have not been compared in general as a liter-ary genre, but a few scholars have described some specific cases of Tibetan divination manuals and orally transmitted divination systems.

Brandon Dotson (2007, 2015) has studied old Tibetan dice divination manuals discovered in the Dunhuang caves (dating to the eighth to mid-ninth century), and Dotson (2015 and 2018) also briefly compares these with dice divination manuals of other cultures (India, Turkey, Middle East).

Recently (2018), he has also made some comparisons with a few of the newer Tibetan Buddhist manuals that are the subject of my analysis here, but his main field is the old Ti-betan, mostly pre-Buddhist manuals. He describes some of their features and structure but does not provide an overall genre analysis.

Dotson (2007) describes one of these manuals that was used at old Tibetan courts for deciding legal practices. Barbara Gerke (2012: 215-221) analyzes the topic of longevity in a Tibetan dice divination manual of the same tradition as our B and C manuals, and she also compares this with an illiterate female diviner’s mo divination system still with the focus on longevity practices (ibid. 208-13).

Furthermore, Alexander Smith (2016) offers a description of a particular type of pre-Buddhist Tibetan (Bön) divination based on both textual and ethnographic studies. Lama Chime (1981: 8-24) describes the overall features of six types of traditional Tibetan divi-nation, including a brief mention of the structure of mo divination manuals and orally transmitted methods.

Moreover, Jan-Ulrich Sobisch (forthcoming p. 13) provides a table showing the structure of our P manual, and he also describes the three topics of dice, poetry, and ritual remedies to negative outcomes of the divinations in a comparative study of Chinese, Indian, Turkish, and newer Tibetan divination manuals.

Thus, these studies treat parts of the genre of Tibetan divination manuals, but the manuals are not mentioned in the publications on Tibetan literary genres: Cabezón and Jackson, eds., (1996), Almogi, ed., (2008), Rheingans, ed., (2015), the recent Tibetan works on genre classification analyzed by Roesler (2015), or the list of genres of classical Tibetan knowledge

in the “General Editor’s Preface” to the volumes of “The Library of Tibetan Classics” (e.g., Kilty 2004). One reason why the genre of mo divination manuals has been left out of genre descriptions could be its obscure status as only semi-spiritual and semi-worldly, or superstitious and shamanistic; because Tibetologists have been mostly interested in religious texts (Cabezón and Jackson 1996: 12f). We will look into the classification of the genre in the next section, and with classification, I mean the status that is traditionally given to the genre in Tibet, and how it is grouped with other types of practical knowledge, as well as how western academics understand it.

Despite the lack of scholarly treatment of the genre, Tibetan Buddhist divination manuals (and orally transmitted practices) share a similar textual structure – besides the fact that they have a common subject matter and function as practical manuals and refer-ence works for the performance of cleromantic divination.

Following the section on the classification of the genre (1.1), in section 1.2, I first describe some general features of the genre along the lines of Frow’s (2005) first structural dimension, i.e., the “formal organization.” From my comparison of the manuals, I have found it suitable to divide them into three typical parts, which I analyze in three separate sections following the section on the general features.

Firstly, the manuals usually have an introductory part, which I call “front matter,” and this part is mostly concerned with Buddhist prayers and invocations of deities, practical and meditational preparations that are necessary to perform before making the divination. A central aspect is the meditation practice on specific Buddhist deities, who are invoked to aid the divination.

Thus, in terms of Frow’s “rhetorical structure,” the front matter is mostly concerned with communication with Buddhist deities in the form of prayers.

The second part, which I call “the main body” of the manuals, partly concerns interaction with local gods and harmful spirits, who are often explained as the causes for misfortune or helpers to ward it off and generate better fortune; however, this communication is not in the form of a direct “rhetorical structure” but is merely stated or Solvej Hyveled Nielsen Copenhagen University, Summer 2018 M.A. thesis 23

prescribed by the author or, rarely, ascribed to the words of deities. The main body of the mo divination manuals is usually a reference work with entries for the various possible outcomes of the divination, as well as various remedies to change negative situations or further improve positive ones.

Finally, I call the ending part of the manuals “back mat-ter,” and this section is often very short, but sometimes it contains extra explanations for the preparatory practices of the front matter. As is customary in Tibetan texts, the information about the author and composition of the manual is also to be found at the back (the colophon).

In terms of Frow’s third structural dimension of a genre, the “thematic content,” I further divide the front matter into three overall themes: statements that express the pur-pose of the divination, required preparatory practices and, as a further elaboration of that, the required meditations with visualizations and prayers to Buddhist deities.

The thematic content of the main body is usually first some brief practical instructions in the performance of the divination with dice or mālā and then the list of answers to the various possible outcomes, which are arranged into standard topics that the clients might ask for divination about.

As for the back matter, its thematic content is as described just above. I will analyze the genre in terms of these structures and features together with translations of excerpts from the manuals. As an example, I provide a translation of an entire manual (the A1 ascribed to Atiśa) in Appendix One.

1.1. Classification of the genre

To describe how the genre of mo divination manuals is traditionally classified, i.e., grouped with other genres, I will first mention some issues of how the Tibetan terms for divination have been translated into English and then look at the genre’s lack of canonical status. Related to both these topics, I will look at how Tibetans understand the genre to fit into the traditional Tibetan Buddhist genre classification scheme of “the five major and five minor sciences” or “fields of knowledge” (rig gnas) as well as how it is part of a broader genre of divination called “analyzing dependently arisen signs” (rten ’brel brtags pa).

To start with some translation issues, it can be hard to tell if the terms “divination” or “prognostication” in English writings and translations from Tibetan actually refer to the Tibetan term mo or to other divinatory practices from the field of astrology.

For ex-ample, in His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s foreword to the book Tibetan Elemental Divination Paintings (Dorje 2001: 8), he states: “although many references to divi-nation are to be found in the tantras, there is none in the collection of sutras.” H.H. the Dalai Lama could here be referring to the term mo, but he might not be, because the book is not about mo, although the author, the Scottish translator Gyurme Dorje, uses the word “divination” frequently.

Tibetans adopted and further elaborated on five major and five minor sciences or fields of knowledge (rig gnas) from India, and among these, Gyurme Dorje translates “the science of astrology” (rtsis kyi rig ngas) as “astrology-cum-divination,” and the “elemental divination,” which the book describes, is a translation of ’byung rtsis, literally “elemental astrology.”

Although I think he is right in his translation, Astrologer Nyichö Zangpo and Khentrul Khorchak Rinpoche assured me that ’byung rtsis is not a type of mo.

Dorje (ibid. 19) states that a text which he partly translates in the book (The White Beryl by the fifths Dalai Lama’s regent Desi Sangye Gyatso (1653-1705)): “concerns all aspects of astrology and divination, as presented by the Phug-pa school.” How-ever, in the table of contents for this text (W3CN5026, 2 vols.), mo is not mentioned, only various types of astrology and analyses of natural phenomena.

In Dorje’s (2012) translation of a nineteenth century volume about the classical sciences, he translates the chapter on astrology as “Astrology and Divination” and adds the headline “Prognostication” to the chapter’s final section (p. 356), which concerns the Kālacakra and Svarodaya tantras, as well as the Chinese elemental divination. However, the Tibetan original does not contain the term mo (W5488, vol. 2, pp. 158a3-161b3).

Let us now turn to the question of canonical status. As in the quote by H.H. Dalai Lama cited above, it is sometimes stated that divination originates from the Buddhist tantras (this is also said in our Mi manual p. 189,13).

However, this does not generally seem to refer to cleromantic mo divination,10 although these do contain numerous refer-ences to ritual remedies (to change negative predicted outcomes), which include recita-tions of sutras and rituals connected with the tantras,11 much like the genre of Tibetan ritual texts called gto, described by Shen-Yu (2005: 112).

These references link the divina-tion manuals to the Buddhist canon. Nevertheless, the Buddhist mo divination texts are not usually granted a canonical status, since our S manual (ascribed to Śāntideva) seems to be the only mo divination manual in the Tibetan Buddhist canon (and it is not present in the canon from Derge, which is one of the most accessible canons we have, but only in the Narthang and Peking editions of the canon).12

Chinese Buddhist divination texts were, however, composed as apocryphal sūtras in China and included in their canon (Strickmann 2005: 58, 81). Divination is also included in the canon of the pre-Buddhist Tibetan religious tradition called Bön. The first of nine vehicles or levels of practice in this canon is called “the vehicle of prediction” (phya gshen theg pa), and this consists of the four practices: 1) divination (mo), 2) astrology (rtsis), 3) a class of rituals (gto), and 4) diagnosis (dpyad), (see Smith 2016: 158, 168ff, Karmay 1998:

112, 141). But when adopting Buddhism from India and Indian schemes of genre classi-fication, Tibetans left the genre of divination aside, except for astrological divinations.

Tibet adopted a classification system from India called “the five major sciences,” which comprise Buddhism, arts, medicine, grammar, and logic, as well as the “five minor sci-ences,” (which also originate in India but were probably standardized by Sakya Pandita), comprising poetics, synonymics, prosody, drama, and astrology (Roesler 2015: 36ff, Sobkovyak 2015: 60-61).

Although these categories were adopted for genre classification in Tibet, at least according to the subject matter of texts, they are not indigenous Tibetan categories and thus do not reflect and encompass all the aspects of Tibetan culture, as discussed by Cabezón and Jackson (1996: 19) and Roesler (2015: 37).

The fact that mo div-ination did not really gain a canonical status in Tibetan Buddhism might be the reason why it is not described in sources on the ten sciences, such as Jamgön Kongtrul’s Treasury of Knowledge (Dorje 2012).

In the contemporary Tibetan researcher of old Tibetan divination texts from the Dunhuang caves, Wangchen Dorje’s (2012: 1) Tibetan-language book, he does not attempt to classify divination among other fields of knowledge but writes, “The Tibetan science of mo is the essence of the ancient Tibetan people’s areas of knowledge.”13

The ten sciences are nevertheless an important part of Tibetan thought on classification of practical knowledge, and Lama Yönten told me that mo divination belongs to the science of astrol-ogy, and that among the major sciences, it can be grouped with the science of medicine.

Gerke (2012: 92) also notes that astrology and medicine are traditionally taught together.

Khenchen Nyima Gyaltsen told me that in general, mo divination can be grouped with the science of astrology due to the similarity of these two, but “from the perspective of the essence of mo divination” (ngo bo’i cha nas), it should be grouped with the major “sci-ence of Buddhism” (nang don rig pa). He said that it is similar to the case of the science of

epistemology (tshad ma, which is another name for the science of logic mentioned above), as this can be categorized either as a non-Buddhist science or as a Buddhist practice in aid of wisdom (see van der Kuijp 1987 and Sobisch 2015).

The blurry boundaries between the categories of astrology and divination in the Ti-betan world is also illustrated by the title of our S manual (ascribed to Śāntideva), which is mo rtsis, i.e., literally “divination-astrology,” since in this case, it just seems to be an alternative name for mo. The manual is similar to the other cleromantic, Buddhist divina-tion manuals, as we will see in the analysis of the genre below, and it does not contain any particularly astrological elements.

The same is true for a manual by Bodong Panchen (1969-81), which also bears the title mo rtsis (this manual is not included in my analysis below, because it uses coins or barley grains instead of dice or mālā). The overlap between Tibetan astrology and divination is reflected in their similar purpose and function.

Alex-ander Smith writes (2016: 131): “divination and astrology provide a mechanism through which individuals are able to gain insight into the nature and disposition of the various elemental or supernatural forces that could potentially affect their lives.” To illustrate this similar purpose, I will quote two Tibetan texts dealing with both topics, (and we will look at more “purpose statements” from our mo divination manuals below in section 1.2.2.1).

The fourteenth century Tibetan treasure-text revealer (gter ston) Sangye Lingpa (2006: 520) writes at the beginning of his text about astrology and divination entitled Jewel Chest:

I shall express this eloquent Jewel Chest for analyzing good and bad situations, for the children – the living beings, through divination and astrology of omens and dependently arisen signs.14

Thus, both divination and astrology analyze dependently arisen signs to determine good and bad. As mentioned above, the Tibetan author Jamgön Kongtrul (1997: 158a3) de-scribes only astrology in his Treasury of Knowledge, but his definition is very similar to the purpose statements mentioned in the mo divination manuals, as we will see below: Astrology shows what is to be adopted and what is to be abandoned.

The basis for astrological calculations is empty in itself but appears in gross forms.

The technique of astrological calculations is the knowledge of computing dependently arisen signs.15

Lama Yönten gave me the same definition for divination (mo), oracles possessed by deities (lha bab), astrology (rtsis), mirror divination (pra), and prophecy (lung bstan): “that which makes the unknown known.” Also, astrologer Nyichö Zangpo told me that both astrology and divination are “methods to ward off conventional worries” (kun rdzob rnam rtog bzlog byed kyi thabs), but he said that the difference between them is that divination is done based on deity practice and astrology is based on calculations.

The importance of meditation practice of deities in mo divination also backs up why many western scholars of divination generally talk about it as a genre of ritual.

Many Buddhist mo divination manuals are short and concise, reflecting the necessity of oral instructions to do the practice, but they usually include some instructions in the practice on Buddhist deities, and some even have a complete manual for this, which is called a sādhana in Sanskrit (Tib. sgrub thabs).16

Some western scholars (e.g., Strickmann 2005: xxvi.f and Smith 2016: 128), however, point out that they classify divination as ritual not due to religious aspects, but because it comprises patterned, repeatable rules of action.

As I briefly mentioned in the introduction, and which will be of interest for our discussion in Part Two, the genre of mo divination manuals is also understood to belong to a broader divinatory genre called “analyzing dependently arisen signs” (rten ’brel brtag pa). The Tibetan-language encyclopedia (Nordrang 2008: 621-23) lists four types of “analyzing dependently arisen signs,” where the first one consists in analyses of outer phenomena, such as how colors and shapes appear in the five elements, how sounds appear, etc.

The second is an analysis of inner dependently arisen signs, which refers to how the breath flows in meditation, or prophesies from deities, either actually or in dreams. The third is an analysis of secret dependently arisen signs, which is based on experiences in deep meditation, and the fourth one is mo divination.

Lama Yönten and Drubpon Tsering Rinpoche explained the analysis of dependently arisen signs as an extra, or perhaps more simplified, divination practice that can be done independently of or in addition to mo divination to enhance or verify its results. They both mentioned various signs that can be analyzed, such as signs in dreams, people’s talk or actions, animals’ actions or sounds, how one’s breath flows, personal intuition, etc.

There are manuals for these analyses (such as Karma Chagmé W1KG8321, vol. 42, pp. 301-11), but this genre seems to be largely oral. Khentrul Khorchak Rinpoche also explained that some divinatory practices during Buddhist empowerment ceremonies belong to the genre of “analyzing dependently arisen signs,” such as looking for visions of colors after having covered the eyes or throwing of a stick to determine one’s personal deity.

I will discuss the topic of dependent arising further in Part Two; let us now turn to the analysis of the genre of mo divination manuals.

1.2. Structure and literary styles

1.2.1 General features

To analyze and describe the characteristic elements of the literary genre of mo divination manuals, let us first look at some general features, what Frow (2005) calls “the formal

organization.” Frow (ibid. 118) splits “the formal organization” into two, the material medium and the immaterial setting of time, space, and actors. The latter will be covered in the later sections of Part One and Part Two, and now, we will just be concerned with the “material” features, i.e., the literary style of syntax and grammar, prose or verse, vocabulary, the typical text length, and additionally, we will also briefly look at how the texts are being read and used.

The mo divination manuals are composite of different elements with different literary styles. Being suitable for the label “manual,” the texts are generally practical instructions in how to perform divination, and the main body of the manuals is generally a reference work with various possible prognoses and prescribed solutions.

The sentences are usu-ally very short and condensed, even grammatically, and often metaphors and poetical expressions are used, so that a lot of information is left to oral explanations from a teacher and afterwards also to the individual diviner’s intuition in relation to the client’s situation.17

Some Tibetan Buddhist divination manuals are written entirely in verse, whereas others are in prose, but almost all of them contain verses of homage and prayers in a Buddhist fashion at the beginning, and some also at the end.

As noted by Sobisch (forth-coming, p. 5ff), it is a common feature for divination texts of all cultures to employ poetic expressions. Among the fourteen manuals for dice and mālā divination to be analyzed, only T from the eighteenth century and the main body of the N manual from the twentieth century are written entirely in meter. The other manuals stick to the mentioned style of mostly very short and concise sentences with some prayers and elements of prognoses in verse form.

Dotson (2015: 1) writes about the old Tibetan divination manuals from the Dunhuang caves: “these often cryptic prognoses partake of a heightened register of language involving archaisms, metered song, and impressionistic images.” Many of these features seem

to have carried over into the newer, Buddhist divination manuals that are our subject of analysis here. Interestingly, some old Tibetan terms such as phywa18 are not found in our S manual, which was composed in India and translated into Tibetan. Thus, Buddhist div-ination manuals contain a mixture of indigenous, pre-Buddhist Tibetan and Buddhist (transmitted from India and China) vocabulary and literary styles.

The length of the manuals is usually relatively short and concise. The most extensive ones among our fourteen are the three P, C, and B that share an identical main body as mentioned above. These three manuals are also the only ones among our fourteen that include a complete sādhana section for the required meditation practice on deities (see the next section).

The different paging of the manuscripts makes it difficult to compare the length, but these three range between 180-50 pages. Among our other manuals, the A1, A2, A3, MD, T, and L are all less than ten pages long, and the S manual has thirteen pages.

Looking to other kinds of divinatory texts also, it seems to be a more common feature that they are short and concise, leaving a lot of practical explanations to orally transmitted instructions.

Concerning the usage of the manuals, the P manual (p. 10,3) instructs diviners to keep the dice and the text close to his body and not let others touch them. In a documentary on the form of Tibetan Bön divination called “Jutig,” (Rossi 2014, 36,46 min. into the video) it is shown that the diviner reads aloud the poetic prognoses from his manual to the client before interpreting their meaning.

However, according to Khentrul Khorchak Rinpoche and Drubpon Tsering Rinpoche, there is no custom of loud reading in the Ti-betan Buddhist tradition of divination, although our texts do have nice poetic verses that look like they could be recited or sung, such as the concluding verses (smras pa, see section 1.2.4 on the back matter below). Drubpon Tsering Rinpoche said that some diviners might

recite their prayers loudly, but not because the client should hear them, and both Rinpoches mentioned that some visualization instructions and mantras should be kept secret.

Drubpon Tsering Rinpoche also mentioned that the manuals’ answers might sometimes be too harsh for the clients to hear, if they for example predict a serious disease or death, and when it would cause the clients to lose hope, the diviner should not read out the answers right away but needs to interpret them for the clients’ best benefit.

1.2.2 Front matter: engaging the Buddhist divinities

As mentioned above, the first part of the manuals, which I call the front matter, contains a few different themes (in terms of Frow’s 2005 analytical term “thematic content”) and we will look at three overall themes in this section. First, let us look at what I call the “purpose statements” of the manuals.

These are expressions of the intended function or purpose of making the divination, and they are either mentioned explicitly at the begin-ning or in the colophon at the end of the manuals, or they are more implicit within the prayers to the deities invoked to aid the divination, or in concluding poems (smras pa) and prayers at the end.

Although these purpose statements are of a similar nature, I will in this section only mention those that occur in the front matter of the manuals and save those from the back matter for section 1.2.4 below.

That will then serve as a bridge to Part Two, because a recurrent term in the purpose statements (at least in the later manuals) is “dependent arising” (rten ’brel), which we will discuss in the context of causality and for-tune in Part Two.

The second theme in the front matter is the preparatory practices that are prescribed for diviners, which include practical preparations, prayers and invocations of Buddhist authorities, such as the “Three Jewels,” (i.e., Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha) and lineage masters, human and divine.

These are similar in the orally transmitted divi-nation methods explained by Khenchen Nyima Gyaltsen and Dorzin Dhondrup Rinpoche, which I will also mention. Finally, the third theme that we will look at in the front matter is the meditation practice on the Buddhist deities.

1.2.2.1 Purpose statements

To analyze the expressions of the purpose and function of the manuals and also to get a feeling of the cooperation with deities, let us first have a look at the titles of our fourteen manuals. The Buddhist mo divinations are usually connected with the meditation practice on a specific Buddhist deity, whose name is usually mentioned in the titles, either with a genitive, i.e., “divination of (-’i) Tārā,” etc., or with the instrumental words “based on (la brten nas) Palden Lhamo,” etc., or “through (sgo nas) Mahākāla,” etc. We will see below how this cooperation with the deities work.

Most of the titles also contain a poetic ele-ment, which gives us a first hint at the purpose of the divinations.

I will here just translate these purposeful elements of the titles of our manuals in chronological order (four of our manuals do not have these):

A2: Mālā Divination that Provides Supernatural Knowledge;
K: Miraculous Mirror of Supernatural Knowledge, the Clear Sky;
P: Clear Mirror of Phenomenal Existence; C: The Way to Accomplish Sharp Vision;
T: Mirror that Clarifies the Hidden Phenom-ena;
B: Precious Mirror;
Mi: Analysis of What is to be Adopted and What is to be Abandoned;
J: Clear Mirror;
N: Sharp Vision, Unstained Turquoise Mirror and the Identification of Objects Influenced by Harmful Spirits, the Tiny Seeing, Like a Drop in the Ocean (the second part of this title refers to a very brief, supplementary text on how to check if there are harmful influences in objects).

As we can see already from the titles, these mo divination manuals express the purpose of providing answers about the unknown through supernatural knowledge or vision with the help of Buddhist deities.

To get a further impression of these expressed purposes of the divinations, I will translate some of the purpose statements in the front matter of our manuals. The S manual (ascribed to Śāntideva) states: “To provide knowledge for worldly people, I will ex-plain this treatise for those who wonder about the past, present, and future.”19 The K

manual (by Karma Chagmé) states as part of its prayers: “Distinguish between true and false! Resolve the thousand [doubts about] right and wrong!”20 Likewise, our MD manual also has its purpose statement within the prayers to the Buddhist authorities and different divinities (see below):

Since this lack of knowledge is powerful, what I do not know I ask you. Tell me quickly, without keeping it secret! Clarify and open my water-bubble eyes! Kindle the lamp of clear, sharp vision!21

The P manual also has a purpose statement within prayers: “Reveal clearly [the answers to] my inquiries! Quickly dispel all cloudiness, concealment, and unclarity!”22 Moreover, the C manual says in the opening praise to the protectress Palden Magzor Gyalmo: Glorious Lady, who, in accordance with the teachings, brings forth [the answers] to the limitless hidden phenomena into direct perception, [through] the causal method of sharp vision…23

Besides the purpose of providing supernatural knowledge, we also find the purpose statements expressing a moral, or at least a practical guiding function of telling people what is best to do. The C manual further prays: “Reveal clearly what I wish to know regarding what is to be adopted and what to be abandoned, what is right and what is wrong!”24 Likewise, the L manual prays: “Reveal without error what is right and wrong,

what to be adopted and what to be abandoned!”25 The Mi manual states very simply the purpose “to analyze what is to be adopted and what to be abandoned.”26 In a chronological order, from the eigteenth century T manual onward, we also start to see the term “dependently arisen signs” (rten ’brel) occur in the purpose statements.

The T manual’s author states: “I shall write this method for analyzing dependently arisen signs with a mālā.”27 It should be remembered, of course, that our analysis is only based on fourteen manuals, so we can only guess historical tendencies and not make exhaustive conclusions.

The J manual states that it is a “divination that analyzes what is to be adopted and what is to be abandoned regarding the common dependently arisen signs;”28 and it further prays: “Today clearly reveal phenomenal existence!

Please directly reveal the dependently arisen signs of whatever I wish to know!”29 Finally, our N manual states as part of its prayers, “Show right now the clear dependently arisen signs of whatever is right, wrong, or in between!”30 We will discuss the meaning of “dependent arising” fur-ther in Part Two, now let us look at the practices that prepare a diviner to fulfill these stated purposes.

1.2.2.2 Preparatory practices

Usually at the front, but sometimes elaborated further at the back, the mo divination man-uals give some instructions in how a person should prepare himself to become a diviner of the manual. The most important part is to meditate on the deity related to the divina-tion, and we will investigate that more in the next section.

Besides this, the manuals P, B, and C describe how one should prepare a shrine for the deity, and many of our manuals mention offerings made to the deities. Some describe how one should produce the dice

from specific types of wood and carve the pips or syllables on their sides, and then how one should consecrate the dice or mālā with various mantras and blow on them.

Some of the mantras for consecrating the dice are quite special, so I will just mention the one from the P manual (p. 9-10), Oṃ Oṃ Nur Nur/ Sring Sring Shag Shag/ Pra Sha Ni sTon sTon/ rDar Sha Ma Ni sTon sTon/ Pra Mun sTon sTon/ Shā Mun sTon sTon Svā Hā/ Phob Ho Dun Bhyo Trag Rak Pra Ma Ra Shi La Svā Hā/ Sa Ma Ya sTvam Svā Hā/.

Many of the manuals prescribe consecrating the dice with the “mantra of dependent arising” (called the ye dharma, and in N p. 172,6 called rten snying), whose meaning is:

All phenomena arise from causes.

The Tathāgata [i.e., Buddha] taught those causes.

The Great Śramaṇa [Buddha] [also] taught what brings cessation to the causes.”31 According to Yael Bentor (1989: 3f), there is evidence of Buddhist stūpas32 in India that have been consecrated with the mantra of dependent arising (in a written form kept in-side the monuments) at least back to the seventh century CE.

In our fourteen divination manuals, the mantra of dependent arising only starts to appear from the P manual (late seventeenth century) onward, but Bentor (ibid. 5) describes a text by Atiśa where the mantra is used for consecration purposes. Thus, although Atiśa did not mention the man-tra in his concise mālā divination manuals available to us, this does not exclude that he might have employed it.

When the dice or mālā have been consecrated, a recurrent instruction in the manuals is to think of one’s topic of inquiry, pray to the deities with strong faith and be without expectations about the result; for example, the B manual says:

Recite [this prayer]33 three times with a strong aspiration, think of your inquiry with-out expectations of hope and fear, think that it is certain that the revelation will be accurate and undeceiving, gaze into space and throw the dice on the white dice cloth that you have laid out.”34

Prayers to deities to help bringing about accurate divinations is an important feature in the front matter of the manuals, even when the meditation practices on the deities are not always elaborated with a sādhana section. A type of prayers that are recurrent in the man-uals are “honing prayers” (bdar or brdar), which occur in two types.

One is “honing of the truth,” which is also sometimes called “strength of the truth” (bden stobs, see Shen-Yu 2005: 114, who mentions that this type of prayers originates in India).

These are prayers of invocation, or bringing as witness, the Buddhist authorities, i.e., the guru, the Three Jewels, deities and protectors, or Buddhist philosophical principles, such as in our T manual, “By the truth of the unchanging basic space (Skt. dharmadhātu) and the infallible dependent arising, may this divination turn out faultlessly and directly!”35 And in our B manual, “Through the power of the truth of the infallible causes and results, dependent arising, reveal without error [the answer] to my inquiry, good if it is good, bad if it is bad!”36

The other typical “honing prayer” in the manuals is a “honing of the divination” (mo bdar/brdar), which consist of prayers to the deities to aid the divination, typically addressing several deities in a hierarchical order from the main deities of the divination, bodhisattvas and protectors, down to local gods, asking them to help reveal clear and accurate

answers to one’s inquiries. To give an example, our K manual first invokes all the buddhas, śravakas and pratyekabuddhas37 to cast the divination (mo phob, p. 276), and fol-lowing that, it prays (by “honing the divination,” mo bdar) to a long list of Buddhist au-thorities from all three traditions (usually referred to as “vehicles”) of Buddhism from India, i.e., the Śravakayāna practitioners, the Mahāyāna bodhisattvas, and the great masters (Skt. mahāsiddha) and deities of the Vajrayāna.

Following this, the diviner prays to a long list of worldly gods, also pre-Buddhist ones, such as gods of the area (gzhi bdag), the personal protective “enemy gods” (dgra lha),38 different gods of divination (mo lha),39 etc.

Likewise, our MD manual (by Mingyur Dorjé) says toward the end of its invocation prayers, “All gods and spirits of phenomenal existence, who like divination and delight in mirror divination, and all twelve protectresses, cast [this divination]!”40

The importance of praying to a deity is also present in the orally transmitted divination that Dorzin Dhondrup Rinpoche is practicing. He said that before making a divination, he first prays to his preferred deity to reveal the accurate and clear answers to his inquiry.

But he emphasized the necessity of first getting a very close relation with the deity by receiving empowerment rituals, oral transmission and instructions in the practice, and then practice the visualization and mantras of the deity in retreat. He said that if one just prays to the deity and does the divination without proper preparatory practice, the deity’s blessings will not enter one, and one’s divinations “will not be accurate” (don dag thig gi ma red).

As for the required amount of preparatory practices, the manuals P (p. 10,3), C (p. 6,2), and B (p. 86,4) state that one must do them “until the best signs occur” (rab rtags thon gyi bar), but the C and B manuals add that if not, then one must practice as many days as possible, for example seven days. All my Tibetan interlocutors said that it is very im-portant to do the meditation practices and mantras of the chosen deity properly, and Khenchen Nyima Gyaltsen emphasized that once one has done the required preparatory practices of the deity (in his case, at least 100.000 mantras of the protectress Achi and the mantras of the dice), then one should feel confident that one has obtained Achi’s blessings to make accurate divinations, and one should let one’s intuition interpret the answers given by the dice or mālā.

1.2.2.3 Meditation on deities

Let us now investigate some details of the meditation practice on the Buddhist deities in mo divination. Our S manual (ascribed to Śāntideva) only prescribes visualizing an unspecified Mantra deity,41 but the text starts with an homage to the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī, and this deity is also mentioned in the title, thus suggesting that this is anyways the preferred deity.

In the same open fashion, Dorzin Dhondrup Rinpoche told me that for the orally transmitted divination system that he knows and practices, one can relate it with meditation on whichever Mantra deity (yi dam) one is practicing and feels closest to at the given time (he mentioned that he does the divination with Tārā, Avalokisteśvara, Guru Rinpoche, Achi Chökyi Drölma, or others).

The deities related to the divination manuals are usually chosen in accordance with the author’s tradition and personal preferences; but they are commonly either protectors (mostly female, like Palden Lhamo (Skt. Srī Devī), or the Tibetan Achi Chökyi Drölma and Tseringma) or bodhisattvas like Mañjuśrī, Tārā, or Avalokisteśvara.

Lama Yönten explained to me that among the bodhisattvas, two are especially favored for divination: the bodhisattva of wisdom, Mañjuśrī, because div-ination provides knowledge about the unknown, and the bodhisattva of awakened activ-ities (phrin las), Tārā, because divination gives answers regarding our activities.

As for the protector deities, Khentrul Khorchak Rinpoche explained to me that the practitioner usually visualizes himself as another powerful, and usually wrathful, Mantra deity, who has a higher rank than the protectors and has the power to make them work more effectively.

It will not be as effective if the diviner himself just asks the protector deities to help him make accurate divinations, but if he first practices visualizing himself as a powerful deity, then the respective protectors related with this deity will be easily and quickly invoked.

Below we will see examples of this type of deity practice from our manuals. Among the Mantra deities that Dorzin Dhondrup Rinpoche mentioned above is also the protectress Achi Chökyi Drölma (Achi for short), the main protector in the Drikung Kagyu school, which Dorzin Dhondrup Rinpoche belongs to.

He explained that although she is generally a protectress, she can also sometimes be a Mantra deity, and thus, one can meditate on her directly, without the intervention of another deity. But in the P manual for the divination with Achi, another Mantra deity is involved, as we will see below.

Among our fourteen manuals, K stands out in that it does not prescribe a meditation practice on a specific deity, but instead invokes all the Buddhist authorities, deities, and gods as mentioned above. Further research into the backgrounds of the author, Karma Chagmé is needed to guess why this is the case, but his personal meditation deity was the bodhisattva Avalokisteśvara (Chagmé 2000: 8), and the manual does in fact emphasize a prayer to this deity among the list of Buddhist authorities, saying, “Noble Lord

Avalokisteśvara, please thoroughly reveal the divination for the sake of sentient beings!”42

As mentioned, only three of our fourteen manuals contain a complete sādhana section with elaborate descriptions of the the required preparations of shrine and offerings and various visualizations of the deities with mantras and invocation prayers. Cozort (1996: 336, 332) describes that in the typical structure of a sādhana, one visualizes that the deity dissolves into oneself as a means to realize one’s own mind as the deity.

In the divination manuals, the purpose of the deity practice is to invoke the deity to cast accurate divina-tions through the diviner as mentioned regarding the prayers above. The three sādhanas that we have in the P, B, and C manuals are all the protector deity type described above, where another Mantra deity is also visualized to invoke the protectors.

The P manual of the protectress Achi stands out in that the practitioner is not told to visualize himself as any of the deities, but instead, both Achi and the powerful, female Mantra deity Vajravārāhī are visualized in front of the practitioner (mdun du, p. 4,1ff).43 The manual (p. 3,1) starts by instructing the diviner to perform the visualization practice, etc., of Vajravārāhī and Achi.

Later (p. 8,2), it tells the diviner to visualize that the deity Vajravārāhī sends light out to Achi to invoke her and bestows effortless accomplishments of supernatural knowledge on her. Thus, the diviner gets the powerful deity Vajravārāhī to help invoke and empower the protectress Achi to become ready to assist in performing accurate divinations.

In the other two sādhanas in the manuals B and C, the diviner is instructed to visualize himself as the male Mantra deity Vajrabhairava (rdo rje ‘jigs byed, a form of Yamāntaka), who then invokes the protectress Palden Magzor Gyalmo to aid the divination. In

contrast to the P manual, the B and C clearly distinguish between a sādhana for the pre-paratory practices to be done before the diviner is ready to start performing the divina-tion, and a sādhana for the deity practice that should be done each time the divination is made.44

The B manual is systematically divided into three subsections:

1) The way to ac-complish [the abilities to perform] the dice divination (sho mo bsgrub tshul),

2) The way to perform the dice divination (sho mo ’debs tshul), and

3) The results of the performed [div-ination] (btab pa’i ’bras bu), (p. 84,4).

The first section contains the sādhana for the prepar-atory practice (which runs from p. 86,1-86,5), and the second section contains the sādhana for the actual performance of the divination (which runs from p. 86,5-88,3).

First, it says that the diviner should obtain the empowerment (dbang) for the practice of Vajrabhairava, and after practicing this deity, the diviner should get the permission empowerment (rjes gnang) to practice Palden Magzor Gyalmo as well.

Then, the diviner builds up a visualization of himself (bdag bskyed) as Vajrabhairava and afterwards visualizes the protectress Palden Magzor Gyalmo and recites her mantra. While seeing himself as Vajrabhairava, the diviner then visualizes that light shines forth from his heart center and enters the hearts of Palden Magzor Gyalmo and her retinue.

Then it says: Visualize that [Palden Magzor Gyalmo and her retinue] have no choice but to be invoked, and they are bestowed the accomplishment of clear and unobstructed perception of all the activities – the general four and the specific ones – that should be adopted or abandoned in the three times [i.e., the past, present, and future].”45 In the sādhana for the actual divination, the diviner visualizes that he instantly turns into Vajrabhairava, from whose heart light shines out to invite Palden Magzor Gyalmo. She

arrives instantly and melts inseparably into Vajrabhairava. This is the only manual among our fourteen that explicitly states that the diviner himself becomes the deity who performs the divination, but here still, the diviner is in a state of inseparable unity of both Vajrabhairava and Palden Magzor Gyalmo. Moreover, most of our manuals do not con-tain exact instructions in the deity practice, so it is left to oral instructions to say whether the diviner visualizes himself as the deity or not.

Being of the same tradition (the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism), the C manual is very similar to the B just described. The preparatory sādhana practice (which runs from p. 4,4-6,3) has the same steps as in B, except that the light from Vajrabhairava’s heart shines out not only to Palden Magzor Gyalmo (here called with her epithet re ma ti), but also to the five Tibetan protectresses Tseringma and her sisters, (who are the divination deities of our J manual, see below) and other protectors of the Buddhist teachings (bstan skyongs).

The sādhana for the actual divination is very short in C (p. 6,3-6,5) and only states that the diviner visualizes himself as Vajrabhairava who invites Palden Magzor Gyalmo, fol-lowed by some offerings and recitations of the mantra of dependent arising and the pu-rifying mantra of the bodhisattva Vajrasattva, and he should then blow on the dice to bless them.

Then (p. 6,5-7,5) comes the “honing the truth” prayers mentioned above, where “the truth of” the Buddhist gurus, Three Jewels, Mantra deities, protectors, and especially Palden Magzor Gyalmo and her retinue are invoked, and the diviner prays that the answers to his inquiries will be given accurately, due to the blessings of the truth.

Having now described the elaborate sādhanas in three of our manuals, let us continue to analyze the practice or communication with Buddhist deities who aid the divination in the rest of our manuals.

The manuals T, L, and J also involve protectors like the P, B, and C just described, but only with brief descriptions of the practice. The deity visualization in the T manual is like our B and C, despite the fact that the title of the T manual mentions the Mantra deity Hayagrīva (who functions like Vajrabhairava in B and C) instead of the protectresses (in

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