By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
Notwithstanding some earlier controversy, the child medium/Kumari cult in Nepal is alive and
well. Simply stated most of the lay population believes that one or another of
the Kumaris can bestow "blessings" and
receiving tika (the red paste mark on the forehead of a devotee) from one of
them is important to many.In that context she
is seen as the personification of several of the valley goddess including Taleju, Vajrayogini Guhyeshvari and others. All three cities in Nepal,
Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur have Kumari institutions dating from the Malla period and possibly before.
There are other Kumaries
as well, depending on who is counting somewhere between thirteen and fifteen
all of them from the Shakya families of the Newar Buddhist communities. The
Kathmandu Kumari furthermore, has been giving tika to the kings of the valley
as a mark of her (i.e., the goddesses' acceptance of the monarch) as a sign of
legitimacy for centuries.
It is generally accepted that the
ceremonies in their present form were inaugurated in mid-eighteenth century by
Jaya Prakash Malla, the last of the 'Newar' kings.
Child possession or Svasthavesa
(literally "possession of one who is in a good state of [mental and
physical] health) is considered “positive" versus opportunistic possession
of one who is ill, the ayurvedic category of agantuka
considered a pathology induced from without by demonic grahas
‘seizers’.
The Himalayan Saiva and Buddhist Tantras
that mention svasthavesa are primarily dedicated to
descriptions of the worship of Siva and various goddesses. The Saiva
texts fall within a class called Siddhanta, rather
than under the better-known but highly suspect designation "Kashmir
Saivism." Thus, the texts are not the commonly cited ones , but for
example Ja'adratha'amala National Archives, Kathmandu
(NAK) 5-4650; Nifvasaguh'a, NAK 1-277; Tantrasadbhava, NAK 5-1985, and the Nepal-German Manuscript
Preservation Project (N GMPP) AI 88/22; Brhatkalottara,
NAK 1-273, plus the Buddhist Cakrasamvavarapindartha
and the Sekoddefa from eastern India.
What is striking about svasthavesa, is the remarkable continuity of these texts
with certain early Chinese Buddhist tantric texts cited by Edward L. Davis in
his volume Society and the Supernatural in Song China (2001), and Michel Strickmann in Chinese Magical Medicine both published
(2002).
In fact the phenomenon of child possession
receives much more attention in Chinese religious texts than in South Asian or
Tibetan ones. Some compilations of Tang dynasty stories tell of children
possessed by the spirits (shen) of learned men. Glen Dudbridge explicates several such accounts from a genre
called zhiguai (tales of the marvelous), of at least
the eight century if not before.
In the first story, a girl named Wang Fazhi from the town of Tonglu
serves the spirit of a young man called Teng Quanyin,
with whom she had an affinity in a previous birth; she begins to experience
regular possession of his spirit before the age of five. In frequent meetings
with the county magistrate, writers and poets, and Buddhist monks, Quanyin, speaking through Fazhi,
demonstrates his literary, scholarly, and religious erudition, composing poetry
extemporaneously.
If the story is to gain any credibility,
it must be assumed that the girl was subjected to ritually induced possession.
Even if the story is to be treated as a member of another genre-for example, didactic
tales, fiction, folklore, or an intermediate genre-we must still ask how, even
in the imagination, a five-year-old girl is able to "serve the spirit of a
young man." My sense is that this "service" must have been
ritual, and ritually induced, under the supervision of a learned master in this
art. Even if the story is regarded as pure fiction, this element of cultural
background must be assumed. This inference is based on the presence of frequent
descriptions (and tales) of oracular possession weighted toward either their
narrative or ritual components, when, in fact, in any "real" or
"imagined" event, both are assumed to be equally present. In the case
at hand, the description of the ritual must have been suppressed in favor of
the narrative. As in the Mantramahodadhi, this story
does not state or imply that the erudition revealed during possession was
maintained by the girl outside the mediumistic act. This too argues for
ritually induced possession. Oracular possession is rarely reported as a spontaneous
experience; it nearly always adheres to known, effective, and ritually
adumbrated models, as mentioned several times earlier. It is, as noted
elsewhere, publicly performed, even if that public is very small. In general,
it requires an expectant and knowing audience.
Sporadic examples of such oracular or
divinatory possession are quite ancient, as for example, tales from the Brhadarayaka Upanishad that exhibit important resonances
with the material discussed here. It appears however, that the Chinese ritual
texts address therapeutic or exorcistic practice to a greater degree, and with
more subtle distinctions and nuances, than does the Indic material. The Indic
texts domesticate and Sanskritize practices that
appear to be derived from village spirit-mediums, women, or others of lower
social rank. The problem with the Indian material, is that the textuality, in
Sanskrit, reflects the interests of the literate brahmanical
and ruling classes, whereas in China , at least during the Song (960-1279) and
Ming (1368-1644) dynasties, the textuality was more likely to include direct
accounts and interests of a greater range of social classes.
Since there is no evidence that the
Chinese practice early on, at present they appear to be wholly independent
developments. Although answers to certain questions might be sought by anyone
in a crystal ball as it were, for example, in water, or a mirror (called catoptromancy in Greece), a person in an inferior social and intellectual
position was preferred because he or she could articulate divinatory or
oracular answers under the watchful and practiced eye of the mantrin, who would, according to the conventions of
hierarchy, retain the right to censor or reinterpret the words of the oracle if
they were to appear immature, wild, or irresponsible.
During our field research an elderly
Tibetan woman (Oct.2006) was seen using an "oracular mirror." Central
to her practice is a shiny brass surface with an abstract pattern lightly
etched on it into which she stares, which serves as the backdrop of her puja
altar. The client sits on a chair in front of her and off to her right as she
sits cross-legged on an elevated cushion before her altar. After she hears and
acknowledges the question, she makes a few offerings with rice, water, and
other items, stares into the brass plating, and answers the questions. Her
answers describes images/visions she perceives, and of course does not in imply
possession, something that can be a matter of interpretation or/and belief.
See also the images in our earlier case
study about 'Shamanism':
During earlier observations Hildegard Diemberger describes how Tibetan oracles undergo an
initiation or empowerment in which certain "energy-channels" (rtsa) are opened. “The popular perception is that
impurities in the energy-channel are responsible for aberrant behavior. Once
these are ritually purified, possession is considered to be under control and
confers upon the oracle an extraordinary competence in helping the other living
beings. ”(Diemberger, "Female Oracles in Modern
Tibet." In Women in Tibet. Ed. Janet Gyatso and Hanna Havnevik,
2005, pp. II3-168).
With the deity or spirit in control, the
oracle then resorts to mirror divination, which "allows the gods to
express themselves.” Some diaspora Tibetan monks have seen performing similar
divinations.
In India there is even a Mughal-era
painting a late sixteenth-century projection of the use of an oracular mirror
by Alexander the Great. The painting, dating to the year 1597 and ascribed to a
Hindu artist named Dharmadasa in the court of Akbar, was a visual
interpretation of part of a long Persian poem by AmIr
Khusraw of Delhi, called ".A'Inah-i
Sikandarl" (Mirror of Alexander), composed in
the year 1299. (See John Seyller, Pearls of the
Parrot of India, 2001, p.19-20). The painting reproduced in John Seyller’s book, by a Hindu at the late sixteenth-century
Muslim court, portrays the use of an oracular mirror by a Greek conqueror of fifteen
centuries earlier.
Another variant of the practice of
childhood possession, is the divinatory process employed to discover a tulku or
reincarnation of certain recently deceased lamas. Hereination
again is, the art used to forest place where the Dalai Lamas would be born.
See Case Study P.1:
In Taiwan, child mediums who are
required to be illiterate, may still be found. They are called. (divination
lad), a term that implies that they are both male and y' However, some jitong are older, and others are girls. A practice that af to have evolved from this is still observed. Certain
adult mediums in T wear bibs designed for children in their oracular practice.
This appears commemorial, a relic from earlier times
when children acted as medium.
It appears to have originated in
northern India among tantrikas affiliated with
Buddhist, Hindu, or even Jain lineages, who textualized this practice that
predated them. And this way it spread into Tibet and China at the beginning of
the seventh century. What first surfaced in north India in the fifth to
centuries was a variety of prafna that became prasenti farther east, and an assortment of prayogas in South India. The description of the ritual, is
a use of children in oracular posture.
This broad conformity sparks several
questions. Were specific possession cults transnational? Was Asian, especially
Indian, religion organized along more microscopic definitions of lineage than I
had hitherto believed? And if so, what sorts of identifiable historical forces
could account for this organization?
It is likely, that a fair amount of
material on possession, and probably svasthavefa,
remains buried in collections of unexamined tantric manuscripts housed in
personal and institutional libraries in south India.
For example in Tamilnadu,
Karnataka, and much of southern and coastal Andhra Pradesh the Sailkaracaryas authorized the domestication and
transformation of "left-handed" practices involving Tripura and other
goddesses, assigning them an advaitic and, therefore,
"right-handed" trajectory. In fact also the above cited Kumari
tradition in Nepal, kumArI-pUjA or virgin-worship is
already mentioned in the Tamil work Cilappatik Aram w.r.t. the cult of goddess Aiyai.
Yet possession ritual is documented in
China from the mid-first millennium B.C.E. onward, and scholars point to
artistic and epigraphical evidence that might push that date back another
millennium. Most of this speculation revolves around the issue of shamanism,
which, because of cultural variation and lack of perspicacious definitions,
falls prey to the same sort of amorphous characterization (and caricature) as
befalls Tantra.
But Strickmann
and Davis also cite several texts that contain material strongly reminiscent of
Indic and Tibetan avesa and svasthavesa.
Indeed, the Chinese employ the word aweishe, a direct
transcription of avesa, "to designate possession
rites in which a spirit was invoked into the living body of a medium. The term
might also apply to procedures in which the spirit of a living person was
co-opted, so to speak, into the pantheon." (Strickmann
2002, p.208).
According to Strickmann,
the Amoghapafasutra, which was translated from
Sanskrit into Chinese around the end of the seventh century, was the first
Chinese Buddhist text to give instructions for inducing deity possession. It
was at this point, says Strickmann, that a "new
Tantric synthesis was about to become known in China " (Strickmann 2002, p.204).
The purpose of this aweishe
ritual, which invokes Guanyin (= Avalokitesvara), was
therapeutic, to heal an individual suffering from spirit-induced illness.
Some of the cited texts cite children ‘o gaze into a
mirror.’
Davis excerpts part of a Buddhist tantra
that records the possession of a boy by (daozhe) the
monk who wrote the text he stared at. The boy is said to have jumped and flung
about, grabbed a sword, run out of the temple gate until he reach of cow dung,
struck the pile three times with his sword, leads Davis to conclude that in
this episode: we are far from the highly controlled, rarefied, atmosphere of
the Buddhist avesa rites, in which two or more
purified children stood passively before the master amidst incense and
strewn flowers; in which the descent of the divinity a onset of trance were
distinguishable only by the most subtle of signs like cessation of breathing,
unblinking eyes, and a slight reddish tint the pupils; and in which the
children had in essence become living as luminescent, but also as confined, as
the pearl or crystal for which were substitutes. (Davis 2001, p. 128).
The "basic structure of the Tang
rituals of avesa," says Davis, is "the
controlled possession of a boy by a cultic divinity and his subsequent
clairvoyance." (Davis 2001, p. 140)
However this is a feature not only of
Himalayan Saiva ta practice, but of subcontinental Indian devotionalism
(bhakti), as evident in both mid-first-millennium Tamil devotional poetry and
contemporaneous Sanskrit counterparts. It is replicated in the devotional
fervor characteristic of Esoteric Buddhism. The devotional impulse ( bhiiva) expressed most decisively in the Vaisnava literature of the subcontinent (example the
Bhagavata Purana) is heavily implicated in the development of Esoteric
Buddhism.
The procedures for employing children
for divinatory purposes in India thus were not limited to a shadowy presence in
a few obscure, regionally specific texts. This is similar to the situation in
China, where it was relatively widespread, as Davis 's extensive documentation
shows. However, even if the practice was not as widespread in India as in
China, corroborative evidence from other Tantras shows that it spread beyond
the confines of a few local cults. At any rate, knowledge of it appears to have
entered into more mainstream, prescribing three tantric rituals to be performed
on children.
The first states that after cutting the
umbilical cord, the sadhaka (the father?, a hired tantrika?) should inscribe a mantra for Vacaspati,
the Lord of Speech, on the tongue of the newborn child with a sharp blade of diirva grass that had been dipped in gorocana,
an extrusion from the biliary tract of a cow (either a large gallstone or a
bezoar), which is used for tantric and alchemical purposes in India. Upon
reaching the age of eight, the child will then become proficient in all sastras
(sarvasastrajfiata). Purpose of these offerings,
certainly, was to attract spirits or minor deity enter the child, either
permanently or temporarily.
But children may have been used because they were regarded as pure, as em bodiments of moral neutrality,
and because youtl1 itself was regarded as a natural restorative. The single
scrap of supporting evidence for this is found in Kalkin
Pundarika's Vimalaprabha on
me Laghukalacakratantra, which specifies that a
virgin's (kumarika) success in this ritual, which
enables her to predict events of the past, present, and future based on visions
seen in an oracular mirror (pratisenadarse), is due
only in part to the grace of the guru or presiding acarya.
Equally important is the fact that she has not yet experienced sexual union. Pundarika rejects the view that it is the acarya's grace (acaryaprasadah)
alone that causes the virgin to be empowered by the deity of the mantra. He
suggests, instead, that if the acarya has the ability
to empower the girl, he ought to be able to empower himself as well, thus
gaining the ability to answer questions as an oracle. But this does not occur,
notes Pundarlka: The acarya
is not able to generate the visions that produce in himself oracular skill.
However since the democratization in
Nepal also more and more adult women, started to establish themselves as
mediums. This has become a new and viable wage-earning opportunity for women in
certain oppressively patriarchal rural areas of Nepal-not a trivial factor in
the general empowerment offered by possession. Nevertheless, in spite of
similar dynamics of cultural legitimization, the personal empowerment
experienced by New Age trance channelers displays a considerably different
texture from that experienced by women and others of lower social rank in
developing societies whose possession is a temporary expression of social or
political dominance in a general climate of oppression.
Further comparison can be made between
New Age trance channeling and spirit mediumship in developing countries. A
strong difference however in the case of Nepal for example, lie in the
imperatives of need, the synchronicities of oppression, or long-term religious
or spiritual commitment, while the former, New Age channeling workshops and
even correspondence courses, are a "product" arising from media-based
culture (the ready availability of books and videotapes by trance channelers)
and widespread prosperity.
This is rapidly changing however, in
Taiwan, Oceania, and probably South Asia as well the attendance at oracular and
festival possession events today (Dec.2006) are much more a matter of choice
than of local tradition. Thus the fact that possession and its incumbent
empowerment are the rather "natural" property of the oppressed can
now be said to already be disproved, not only in the West that is.
Searching for Ancient Spirits in Asia: Research Report P.2.
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