 Our event today brings together a selection of perspectives on ways in which Buddhist cultures, communities, authors, and makers, and intellectual traditions, have engaged with the death of the body as an opportunity for the cultivation of merit, insight, or knowledge. Today's presentations focus on ways in which death, dying, and the treatment of corpses can be understood as an expression of the efficacy of Buddhist teaching, the performance of ritual skill, or as demonstrations of dynamic social relationships between communities of practitioners. As part of the Buddhism Inside Out series of events, which are generously funded by KFC Foundation, today's program assumes a general interest in its themes. And personally, I'm really hoping for an open discussion of everything that we're seeing and how it's being presented. There will be time for questions during each section, each of which is an hour, each speaker has an hour. And there will be a tea break midway, so half an hour to go out and have a conversation. The theme for today's program of Engaging the Dead in Buddhism was suggested to me by Ulrich Pagel of the Center for Buddhist Studies as an extension of my research here at SOAS on the use of human remains in Tibetan ritual objects. My dissertation covers the cultural history of these objects as a specific type of technology. And I've been looking closely at the material value of human remains in Tibetan traditions of making and ritual use. I've documented and examined many examples of these objects in museum collections here in the UK and abroad and conducted fieldwork across the Himalayas looking into current use, production, and circulation. My focus is the objects themselves. How are they used? How are they sourced, selected, and activated? How do the forms of these instruments express a continuity in Buddhist and tantric material knowledge? My goal is to collect material and not ritual knowledge, not the kinds of knowledge that are passed, for example, between teacher and student as religious instruction, but rather cultural history and illustrations of social value. I want to look at this as a technology, as a different kind of teaching lineage, as a different kind of knowledge that's passed through a tradition of object making. So here we go. There are four primary ritual instruments on which I write and the first of these has the greatest diversity of uses and that's the skoble. Some of these functions are relatively social. This is an example from a monastery in Ladakh which is decorated and redecorated periodically with colored dough and regularly used to collect offerings of alcohol, tea, or money at the New Year. The skull was donated by a member of the monastic community at his death and was stored with other liturgical objects in the gathering hall. This is a model for sourcing human remains which I've heard repeated, where a member of the Buddhist community will donate their remains at death. These are acquired with the permission of the family and evaluated as part of the preparation of the body for disposal, which might be by cremation or from dismemberment and exposure to birds, what we've called sky burial in the past, or dismemberment and disposal into rivers, for example. Skulls and other human remains can also be acquired as gifts, inherited, and often purchased. Some of the many applications for skulls in public and accessible to householders or lay Buddhists that is not monks or nuns. Some functions are specific to certain teachings or monastic traditions, so they're very site specific. Some are highly controlled ritual settings like initiations and some are all of the above. However, of the many diverse uses for skulls, they are more or less specialized and required skilled use to be effective. Offerings need to be made correctly and that is the contents need to suit the container. So alcohol, for example, is a particularly suitable offering made in a skull towards a volatile protector or a guardian deity. Offerings need to be made on the correct day of the lunar month in some cases. The selection of a skull often requires a skilled interpretation of its morphology, so the color, the shape of the capillary beds, if it has any holes, those kinds of technical issues. Skulls can moreover be altered to suit their specific ritual functions. So here you see, can you see this one? On the left you have a skull cup to which this cupris or copper type alloy metal liner has been added, it's obviously very well used. It could have been used for compounding medicines, mixing things, it could also be used to make offerings. And then on the right you have actually a substitute skull bowl, which is also increasingly common. It's filled with brandy and this is a plastic bowl which has been painted to look like a skull. You also find this as a common substitute since skulls are quite expensive and they sell very well on the black market. As a non-practitioner, I have focused on those objects and events to which I have been granted access by custodians or through historical documentation. The black hat dance, for example, has a long history in Tibetan religious life. They're paintings through show figures who are retired in the same way from the 13th to 14th century. And it is often performed by monastic or religious specialists for a general public. The skulls used here are as shallow platforms, which is different from their use in the previous slide, as bowls for holding or collecting offerings. Instead, they are an instrument for ritual performance, often used in conjunction with other ritual objects like the knife known as Purvoo. And here you can see the figure on the right, has the skull in his left hand here and another instrument opposite. And in the figure on the left, that's actually my hand holding an object that I found in the welcome collection and I was holding it according to the patterns of wear and polish that I had seen on it without actually knowing what the object was. And it was only when I found this archival photograph and really started to look into black hat that I could reunite the context with this museum object, which was pretty nice. Yeah, no, that's fine. Bone ornaments have an equally long history in Buddhist Tantra, that's what he's wearing up here. Having been associated with the figure of the Haruka since the eighth century at least, this figure represents a form of deity or practitioner empowered through the use of charnal implements that is through ritual objects made with human remains, including bone ornaments and the previously mentioned skull bowl. These ornaments are often worn as a set of six elements including a crown, apron, and or chest ornaments as well as ornaments on the legs and arms. Also earrings, occasionally, and which are intended to coordinate the body of the practitioner with the archetypal form of the Haruka. The effective use of these objects is considered an advanced form of practice and an expression of religious authority and ritual achievement. And here you can see them worn by Dougal Kenter Rinpoche. Interestingly, he seems to have them all on his chest even though they may actually be an apron which could be because he's performing or because he's officiating while sitting down in a public ritual. So he wants to keep them visible. Possibly. Here you have a historic image of a figure of religious authority. Again, wearing the bone ornaments and adopting and expressing the form of a Haruka with the apron, arm and leg ornaments, and here they've been painted gold. This is a 14th century illustration of one of the figures responsible for bringing Buddhist tantra to Tibet from India before the 12th century. This is a historical role illustrated through the form of his Indian teacher above his head. So you can see. Here are your bone ornaments. Sorry, it's a little tough to see that. And again, an image of these inner ornaments, the apron in particular, which is worn as a part of a masked ritual dance or chom, these ornaments are likely made from buffalo bone, however, which is a common substitute for human bone in sets made in recent decades, especially the past 100 years. Buffalo bone is much easier to acquire than human bone. These ornaments commonly include highly decorated plaques, often with images of the deities with which one engages richly while wearing them. And here we have the deity Chakrasambhara with his consort and other yogini figures, as well as general Buddhist iconographies like the eight auspicious symbols, the sun and the moon, you have the infinite, not face. Sorry, these ornate carvings are mostly made from human femur. They're also occasionally made from sections of human crania, especially on the crown. This image is taken from my previous graduate study in conservation and illustrates how these objects can be understood as technology and material knowledge transfer. That is not only how are they used, but also how are they made? In this image, for example, in the raking light, you can see where these holes have been cut out. There's a bit of ridge that's been raised around it. You can see that there is a deliberate evidence of choices being made about shaping the material, that they wanted it to be cut, not broken. They needed it to be plastic and not brittle. So there was a real control of the workability of the bone itself. There's a skill here in shaping these objects and where there's skill, there's definitely a knowledge transfer. Someone not only knew what it needed to look like, they knew how they needed to make it look that way. During my fieldwork, which was a year of interviews and documentation across the Himalayas, I found out that this plasticity can be controlled, for example, by soaking the bone in beer or for burying it in certain conditions. Also made from the human femur, thigh bone trumpets are most often associated with the Tibetan practice of cha or cutting in the tradition of Machig Ladran and her Indian teacher, Padampasange. Most of these teachers, excuse me, both of these teachers are represented with thigh bone trumpets in some of their earliest surviving images from the 13th and 14th centuries. And here you have on the right an image of Machig Ladran playing a thigh bone trumpet with a drum in her right hand. This is from Tautapuri in Ladakh, which is very near to the Alchi Chigur. Chig can be performed by lay Buddhists as well as specialists and it uses the thigh bone to call volatile entities and externalize demons to feast on one's own body, a ritualized process of liturgical performance, visualization and embodiment. From a Buddhist perspective, this is done in order to cut off one's attachments to obstacles like a sense of the bodily self, where the practitioner offers one's dismembered body to those entities assembled in response to the sound of the kongling trumpet, a sound which is unique to the shape and density of the human femur. Because it engages directly with demons and other forms of adversity, the practice of Chig became a specialization for the control of disease or adverse weather. And those who mastered this ritual practice were sometimes received as volatile figures in their own right, prone to isolation in remote hostile or dirty settings like cemeteries where they often practiced. In the 19th century, when British colonial functionaries, for example, encountered these ritual specialists, the thigh bone trumpet would be one of the many ways in which Tibetan Buddhism and its material religion was mythologized as shamanistic, demon worship or necromancy. And this is an historical display from the Pitt Rivers at Oxford. And here you can see a Chukar, a practitioner of Chukar, holding it in the same manner as Mati Lavdron with an example of the object just in front. And this is meant as an historical illustration of collection. I have to say this is from the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford, which has really wonderful people working on their Tibetan collections. Finally, there's the double-sided skull drum. While the hand drum known as the Dhammaru has an older history and tantra in ritual and civic use across South Asia, it's found in Tibet in the seventh century, for example, as the Chong Tu, that's a different name for it. It is only after the 11th century that we find this instrument being illustrated and specified as being made from skulls. Otherwise, you can find them in wood, you can find them in resin, and then you can also find them in resin that's made to look like either wood or skulls. I've had the chance to examine a number of these instruments, and sometimes when they're damaged, they can reveal interesting details about the ways in which the technique for making these drums may have been shaped historically. Many drums have had the tops of the crania removed to create a continuous chamber between the two halves. So it's two crania that are turned so that the crowns are touching, and a lot of times those crowns are removed so that it's making one continuous, resonant chamber. This example from the British Museum does not. I really should have a pointer up here, I apologize, but if you can see within that red circle, there's cloth that's been wound around, and the center of the skull has been abraded, but it hasn't been removed. Yes, saving, thank you, here we go. So the skull here is still there. You can see the suture from the top of the crown. It also has snake skin drum heads, which I hope you can see. In my experience, most of these drums are made with goat skin and not snake, which according to at least one senior teacher of Ch, snake skin has a particularly beautiful sound. These inconsistencies suggest that this object may have been made for creation, may have been made, sorry, for sale to a collector, even to a museum. It could also have been made as the innovation of a particular setting or teacher. It could also be a particular patron who asked for this. So there are many different reasons why this object doesn't look like maybe what we would expect from other forms of historical documentation. Here we have an example from the National Museum at Liverpool with the crown removed. So you can see it's open there. And one complete example with beautiful lighting, very well rendered from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. And this is one of the finest Damaroe I've ever seen. It has, excuse me, skull drums I've ever seen as these lovely painted drum heads. These objects are somewhat more rare than other forms of Damaroe or double-sided drum. They can be used for Ch that is the cutting practice that I've been speaking about. They can also be played to accompany the thighbone trumpet. They can also be used to make musical offerings where, like the thighbone trumpet, they produce a sound which is uniquely effective to human remains. Now throughout this research it's been necessary for me to be very specific in my vocabulary about describing these objects and how they're used. And the language of instrumentation of instrumentalizing human remains resonated most with their frequently ritualized or liturgical use in Tibetan material religion. As instruments, these objects are subject to standards of material and technical expertise. That is, they're expected to look and perform a certain way. And the material is part of that. They also represent an expression of skill and cultural knowledge unique to the communities in which they have been historically produced. Moreover, they exhibit longevity in their social and historical value which makes it possible to interpret them as cultural objects. I've been examining this cultural history through the iconography of Buddhist tantra as an illustration of the use and value of these objects. For example, there's a longevity and enduring popularity of teachers like Padmasambhava, also known as Guru Rinpoche, an eighth century tantric master accredited with the widespread installation of Buddhism in the Tibetan cultural region. And here you see him freshly faced just on the side of a rock in Timbu Valley not very long ago. Anyone who has traveled in the Himalayas would tell you that Guru Rinpoche is a very active and very visible figure. The skull cup is in his left hand here. And he has on his shoulder also the tantric staff which is topped with heads as well. These are both charnel implements. These objects are similarly found in representations and descriptions of the Shaiva aesthetics known as Kapalika or skull bearer whose charnel methods gained popularity across South Asia, especially after the seventh century. And here you have a 10th century illustration from Eastern India of a Kapalika teacher addressing or possibly initiating a student with charnel implements. You have the skull cup, again the tantric staff with the head on top. And he did have, there's other figures that also have the little skull ornament just in the crown. Like the non-Buddhist Kapalika, Guru Rinpoche holds the skull as an instrument of his authority in the most specialized of ritual practices. Moreover, he embodies the enduring legacy of charnel implements in the iconography of Tantra. These images are at least a thousand years apart and there's a very complex history that connects them. And that's just one of the things that I've been investigating through these objects. Okay, one of the reasons why I'm so emphatic about using this word instrument is to distinguish these four ritual objects that I've been looking at from other ways in which human remains or even the death of the body have been engaged through Buddhist material culture which is a massive technological category. Relics, for example, have had a long and rich history in Buddhist practice and discourse and they have inspired material culture through the construction of stupa and other monuments for over 2,000 years. As a feature of pilgrimage destinations, relics have also had influence on the circulation of ideas, objects and people throughout the Buddhist world. And here you have an accumulation of stone stupa, possibly secondary burial, so they may contain human remains at a monastic and pilgrimage site in Eastern India, again, active from the 5th to 13th centuries. Or again, for example, the modern clay tzatzah, especially known in Himalayas in Tibetan cultural region and these are little clay votive tablets that are often pressed using funerary remains or human remains ashes and then left in auspicious locations. Relics and reliquaries have defined a fundamental category for Buddhist material culture and the value of human remains in Buddhist communities. They are not, however, constructed and shaped into ritual instruments with a repeatable function in the same manner as thighbone trumpets and skull bulls. These represent an alternative and sometimes interrelated and equally rich category for Buddhist cultural narratives and material religion. At the same time, Buddhist narratives of self-sacrifice in terms of the gift of the body as sustenance for example, in this illustration of the Jataka of the Hungry Tigris. These narratives can be understood as another expression of today's theme on engaging the death of the body. Here, the hero feeds himself to a mother tiger in her cubs in a gesture of compassion and this is painted at a Buddhist site in Bhaktipur, Nepal. In these stories, the human body is an instrument for generosity or the acquisition or distribution of merit and is used to demonstrate the impermanence of the self. At the same time, this human body is often the condition for the correct understanding of Buddhist thought and the application of its virtues. Finally, similar acts of political acts of self-sacrifice by Buddhists can be understood as yet another category of instrumentation and bodily death. For example, self-immolation was historically an expression of devotion or religious convictions popular in China back to the fourth century and not always fatal. In recent decades, it has been used by Buddhists as well as pacifists and other demonstrators as a display of resistance and here you have an example from Vietnam in 1963 and there are many other well-recorded examples of Tibetan self-immolators from recent decades. This controversial performance can be said to treat the human body as an offering to its greater purpose and an instrument for an entirely new and complex setting for Buddhist practice, discourse and ritual action. All right. Our program today draws from these and many more possible narratives on death, the body and Buddhism. This is a huge topic of inquiry in this field and I'm just really glad that we have a few examples of people who are really engaging with it well today. Where my research is focused on ritual objects and their functions, the four scholars I invited to join us here today will enliven a broader discussion. Dr. Liz Wilson, who's done extensive work on death, gender and South Asian religion will be speaking to us on the contemplation of decaying female corpses in Indian monastic traditions. Dr. Rita Langer will be sharing her observations of death, food and the cultivation of merit amongst Sinhalese Buddhist communities and funerary practices in Sri Lanka and we'll have a tea break from 230 to three and come back to Weston Harris who will be speaking about death as a yogic opportunity in the biographies of Buddhist tantric masters and finally Dana Coleman who is a documentary filmmaker working in medical anthropology who will be sharing some selections from his film which is still in process on Tugdem or the performance of death in a meditation posture in Himalayan Buddhist communities.