“Tibetan Buddhist Materialities: Relics, Ritual, and Embodiment”

Closed Workshop: By Invitation Only

 This workshop is organized by Julia Hirsch, PhD student in Religious Studies. 

Workshop Description:

This half-day workshop brings together three  scholars whose work explores the material and embodied dimensions of ritual practice in Tibetan Buddhism. Building on recent developments in the study of religion—particularly the material, ontological, and sensory turns—the workshop foregrounds the roles of objects, sensory media, bodily practices, and ritual craft in Tibetan Buddhist societies.

Where earlier Buddhist Studies scholarship often treated objects and material practices as symbolic or peripheral, recent work has begun to take seriously the physical properties, transformative capacities, and ritual labor involved in Buddhist material cultures. Specifically, focusing on what materials such as bodily substances do—rather than merely what they represent—can reveal alternative models of agency and causation within Buddhist rituals, communities, and histories.

Invited speakers will reflect on how the bodies of Buddhist “special dead” have served as powerful—and at times contested—foci within the cultural and geographic contexts of their research. 

Program

Christian Luczanits, “Material Remembrance in Ladakh and Mustang" 

Abstract: 

It is well known that much of Buddhist art was produced in commemoration of someone who has recently passed. In the case of “special dead,” here taken as influential Buddhist teachers of different Tibetan Buddhist traditions, their material commemoration may take on elaborate and distinctive forms. In my contribution, I will review such forms of commemoration as I have come across during researching Buddhist art of Ladakh, India and Mustang, Nepal. My discussion will include the Alchi Sumtsek as a gdung khang for Drigungpa Jigten Gönpo (’bri gung pa ’jig rten mgon po; 1143–1217), the tradition of making chörten caves, such as the one of Luri, in Mustang, and the Lamdré lineage sets made in commemoration of Fourth Ngor abbot Gyeltsap dampa Künga Wangchuk (rgyal tshab dam pa kun dga' dbang phyug; 1424–1478).

Bio:     

Christian Luczanits is David L. Snellgrove Senior Lecturer in Tibetan and Buddhist Art at the Department of the History of Art and Archaeology, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His research focuses on Buddhist art of India and Tibet, the latter largely based on extensive field research and documentation done in situ. Before joining SOAS in 2014, he was Senior Curator at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York. Since 2012, he has led a research project on “Tibetan Buddhist Monastery Collections Today.”

Tawni Tidwell, “Materialities of Consciousness: Embodying Liberation in Tibetan Tukdam Postmortem Meditation”

Abstract:

Tukdam (Tib. thugs dam) is a meditative state at death in which practitioners, from a Tibetan Buddhist perspective, sustain subtle consciousness, while biomedically they display an attenuated and altered postmortem morphochronology, among other signs. Since 2013, the Tukdam Project—an international collaboration guided by His Holiness the Dalai Lama—has brought together neuroscientists, anthropologists, forensic specialists, Tibetan medical doctors, biomedical physicians, and Tibetan Buddhist monastics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Tibetan communities in India to document cases among Tibetan communities in India, where tukdam states often extend for weeks. The project links biomarkers and perceptual cues across two distinct intellectual traditions—Euro-American biomedical science on the one hand and Tibetan Buddhism and Tibetan medicine on the other—to investigate the materialities of consciousness and the liminal processes of dying. Practitioners entering tukdam are most often engaged in Vajrayāna deity cycles, with both extended and abbreviated states reported across Buddhist schools and practice styles. This talk examines the practices and embodied qualities of tukdam, focusing on its “material” marks of consciousness and the epistemological implications of how different traditions approach signs and expressions of dying, transcendence, and realization.

Bio:     

Tawni Tidwell, TMD, PhD, is a biocultural anthropologist, Tibetan medical doctor, and scientist at the Center for Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her work bridges Western scientific and Tibetan medical traditions, engaging their distinct epistemologies, ontologies, and pedagogies. She investigates the mind–body relationship as foundational to well-being, examining biocultural and Tibetan medical paradigms for flourishing, the cultivation of healthy minds and bodies, and processes of mindful dying. She is Principal Investigator for the Field Study of the Physiology of Meditation Practitioners and the Tukdam Meditative State (FMed, also known as the Tukdam Study), a collaborative research initiative guided by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. In addition to her academic work, she maintains a private clinical practice serving a broad range of patients.

Rory Lindsay, “Materialities of Death in Tibetan Islamic and Buddhist Writings”

Abstract:

This paper focuses on two Tibetan Muslim works and their discussions of the material dimensions of death and devotion. It looks to the Kha che pha lu, a popular Tibetan work authored by a Tibetan Muslim in the eighteenth century, and the Gsung rab phyogs btus, a partial translation of the Qur’ān from Arabic into Tibetan, which was published in 2011 by Tibetan Muslims in Lhasa. After briefly introducing the history of Tibetan Islam and the role of cemeteries and tombs as sites of mourning and worship, this paper examines the ways in which these two texts situate loss and devotion vis-à-vis place and material objects. It considers how they reflect on the role of material objects and physical spaces as points of access to divine intervention and inspiration. Finally, it compares Tibetan Muslim practices with Buddhist approaches to the physical remains of revered Buddhist masters, exploring their understandings of objects and soteriological power.

Bio:     

Rory Lindsay is an Assistant Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. He is also an editor at 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha and a visiting scholar at the Buddhist Texts Translation Initiative at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His book Saving the Dead: Tibetan Funerary Rituals in the Tradition of the Sarvadurgatipariśodhana Tantra (Wiener Studien zur Tibetologie und Buddhismuskunde, 2024) examines the history of Kunrik funerary practices in Tibet and the intersecting forms of agency—human, nonhuman, and material—that are described in Kunrik ritual manuals. His second book, coauthored with Tibetan scholar Khenpo Tashi Dorje, will examine the life and writings of the twentieth-century master Drayab Lodrö Gyaltsen.