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.