RELIGION IN TAMANG SOCIETCg A BUDDHIST COM jm .IN NORTHERN NEPAL ANDREW

299 Pages·2017·20.53 MB·English

RELIGION IN TAMANG SOCIETCg
A BUDDHIST COM j m . IN NORTHERN NEPAL
ANDREW RQTELY HALL
FOR THE DEGREE OF PH.D
SCHOOL OF ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN STUDIES
(DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY)
UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
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ABSTMCf
This thesis examines the interrelationship of the religious
rituals, beliefs and specialists of a Tamang community in northern
Nepal, where a variant of Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism ('Lamaism*) is
found in tandem with Hindu festivals and an array of traditional,
tribal beliefs and practices including shamanism.
A comprehensive account is first given of the community,
including its economic basis and social structure. Particular
attention is paid to household composition and the domestic cycle,
and to clan and lineage structures. The importance of ritual in
strengthening social bonds is noted, as is the way in which util­
itarian activities are subordinated to religious values and ordered
according to symbolic ideas of time and space.
Three ritual modes are then described and discussed. First,
those concerned with the protection of the individual and the
community, either by appeals to the traditional village guardians
or by invoking the Buddhist protective deities. Second, the
use of exorcism to expel evil, personified as the demons and witches
believed to cause illness, misfortune and death. Third, rituals
which, by means of offerings to the high Buddhist deities, seek
access to their divine power and compassion in order to transform
the worshippers.
In the course of this account the religious ideas which struc­
ture the rituals are encountered, as are the symbolic forms through
which they are realised. Then the selection, training and empower­
ment of religious specialists are examined, as is their role as
mediators between men and the gods. Finally, the different reli­
gious complexes are shown to be United by common procedures and
strategies for dealing with external threats to individual and
communal well-being - and hence in competition with one another,
but differentiated and opposed by their attitude towards traditional
authority. Additionally they are hierarchically ordered in terms
of values and moral range.
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CONTENTS
Page
PREFACE ' 6
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION 8
1 INTRODUCTION 10
Scope of the thesis
The Tamangs
Himalayan tribal peoples
Religion and the study of ritual
Presentation of ethnography
Notes
2 A TAMANG VILLAGE AND ITS SETTING 32
Himalayan trails
Hie district - its geography» history and
ethnic composition
The village - settlement pattern and
population
Gaining a livelihood - agriculture and
animal husbandry
Other economic activities and occupational
specialisation
Symbolic space, sacred geography and the
religious calendar
Conclusion
Rotes
3 SOCIETY AND CHANGE 75
Clan, lineage and fictive kin
The household
Marriage and divorce
Secular authority and dispute settlement
The village and the outside world
Conclusion
Notes
THE CULT OF THE TERRITORIAL DEITIES 106
Clan myths
Constructing an altar
The ritual performance
The local pantheon and the territorial
hierarchy
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The Buddhist ceremony
The second stage
The Buddhist pantheon
Conclusion
Rotes
5 EXORCISTIC RITES AND THE CONTROL OF SICKNESS AND MISFORTUNE 135
The aetiology of affliction
Diagnosis and treatment
Shamanic exorcism
Buddhist exorcism
Conclusion
Notes
6 OFFERING RITUALSs THE GIFT OF LIFE AND THE PREPARATION I65
FOR DEATH
The monthly tse-chu
Offerings and the attainment of life
Ritual structure and process
The cosmological background
The nyung-ne
Conclusion
Notes
7 KNOWLEDGE AND POWER : THE ROLE OF RELIGIOUS SPECIALISTS 193
The career of a shaman
Shamans and society
Buddhism and the role of the lamas
Lamas and laymen
Conclusion - lamas and shamans
Notes
8 FULL CIRCLE: THE CYCLE OF DEATH RITUALS 230
Eschatology
The funeral rites
The transitional phase
The concluding feast
Notes
9 CONCLUSION 255
Notes
GLOSSARY - PART I 275
PART II 285
BIBLIOGRAPHY 28?
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* FIGURES Page
1 - Population of Syabru village by age and sex 5°
2 - Organisation of domestic space 62
3 ~ Gross and parallel cousins 83
4- - Reciprocal marriages linking clans in Syabru and Bharku 83
5 “ Tamang kinship terminology 85
6 - The Shangba birth-*god altar 113
7 - Ranking of territorial deities ' 119
8 - First Buddhist altar for the Protectors 122
9 - Second Buddhist altar for the Protectors 128
10 - The Buddhist pantheon 130
11 - Altar for tse-chu 167
12 - Classification of shamans 202
. 13 - Classification of lamas 212
TABLES
1 - Syabru and hamlets - distribution of households and 4-9
number of inhabitants
2 - Calendar of festivals 66-7
3 - Clans and landholdings in Syabru and the hamlets 78
4- - Household composition in Syabru and the hamlets 89
5 " Origin of women marrying Syabru men 95
MAPS
1 - Nepal 12
2 - Syabru and Langtang region 36
3 ~ Syabru sections and hamlets 46
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PREFACE
This thesis is an anthropological study of the religious
dynamics of a community of Tamangs living near the northern borders
of Nepal in Rasuwa District at the confluence of the Bhote Kosi and
Langtang Khola rivers. It is based on fourteen months fieldwork
between April 1977 and June 1978 conducted in and around the village
of SyabruP which is situated near what was once a major trade route
between Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, and the Tibetan town of
Kyirong. This area recommended itself for study for a number of
reasons? the ethnic homogeneity of its populations unusual in the
multi-ethnic society of Nepal; its location at the juncture of
Buddhist Tibet and Hindu Nepal, strongly influenced by both cultures;
and the changing social and political circumstances which have seen
the reduction of links with Tibet and the increasing participation
of once remote communities in the developmental processes of a mod­
ernising society. These factors suggested that the area, would pro­
vide an interesting opportunity to observe the intermingling of and
interplay between competing religious and social ideologies.
The study could not have been undertaken without the interest,
encouragement and assistance of many people and institutions, to all
of whom I am deeply grateful. Foremost amongst these are the people
of Syabru who willingly permitted me to participate in their lives
for a brief period and who extended to me and my family the neigh­
bourly hospitality which is such an important feature of village
life. As the result of a promise of anonymity made to the villagers
those mentioned in the text have been given pseudonyms. However,
I was especially fortunate in. finding in'Nyima* not only a landlord
but an engaging, humorous, and knowledgeable friend; his neighbours
became mine and, like him and his family, contributed greatly to the
success of the fieldwork.
In Kathmandu I benefitted from the assistance of the authorities
of Tribhuvan University, particularly Dr P R Sharma, Dean of the
Research Centre for Nepal and Asian Studies, in securing the necess­
ary permission to work in Nepal. During time spent in the Nepalese
capital I was exceptionally fortunate to enjoy the hospitality of
Dr Boudewijn de Smeth of UNDP and his wife Elsya Lewin; also that
of Simon Davey and Dudley Spain at the British Embassy.
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I should also like to thank all those who encouraged my interest
in anthropology, especially Dr Ursula Sharma of the University of
Keele, Professor Christoph von Flrer-Haimendorf to whose pioneexdng
work in Nepalese anthropology every student of that subject is in™
debted and, at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Professor
Adrian Mayer who provided the opportunity for me to pursue my studies
there and Dr Lionel Caplan who stimulated and directed their course
and patiently supervised my work. I am also grateful to Dr Richard
Burghart of SOAS for reading the completed manuscript and to Dr
Martin Williams for many lively discussions on the subject of Tibetan
Buddhism. Naturally the final responsibility for the views expressed
here remains mine alone.
My thanks are also due to the institutions which provided the
funds without which realisation of this project would have been much
more difficult: the Social Science Research Council of Great Britain
for the major part of the finance; the Central Research Fund of the
University of London for assistance with interpreting and the proviso
ion of photographic and sound-recording materials; and the Trustees
of the Radcliffe-Brown Memorial Fund for Research in Social Anthro­
pology for valued assistance during the writing-up period.
Lastly my gratitude to Kathie and Tara who shared the fieldwork
experience and contributed to it immeasurably.
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
Three languages are in current use in the part of northern
Nepal where this study was conducted. In everyday use the Tamang
people speak their own unwritten Tibeto-Burman tribal language which
they refer to simply as 'Tamang tarn' - Tamang language. The language
they use with officials, administrators, traders and service castes
visiting the village, and themselves when they go on trading trips
to Kathmandu is the national language, Nepali. This is spoken by
all men with varying degrees of fluency, by about half the adult
women and by some of the older children. There is also a consider­
able admixture of Nepali words in Tamang speech, particularly those
referring to land and certain crops perhaps relatively recently intro­
duced, and to matters such as taxation, education and those trappings
of modern life which have penetrated the area. Finally there is
Tibetan, the language of Buddhist religious practice in its classical
form, and in its modern form of the jOO or so Tibetan refugees who
live in the area; additionally there are Tibetan dialects spoken by
some of the remote communities of the border areas. The Tamang
priesthood are literate in Tibetan and most adults know prayers in
Tibetan and the basic terminology of Buddhist ritual. Again a
number of Tibetan expressions are used in Tamang speech and many
words clearly have a Tibetan origin, both those concerned with reli­
gion and various others.
The principles employed here for transcription and transliteration
of these three languages are chosen primarily to give maximum reada*»
bility while paying regard as far as possible to scholarly exactitude.
Thus I have not employed the phonetic conventions suggested by for
example, Taylor, Everitt and Tamang (1972) in their vocabulary of
Tamang spoken in Nuwakot District (which differs markedly from Rasuwa
District), for they would make for extremely cumbersome reading.
Instead Tamang words with no obvious Nepali or Tibetan derivation
are represented as they sound to an English listener and would be
spoken by an English speaker. Obviously this is a rather imprecise
method - for example, it loses the tonal distinctions - but confusion
is minimised because the context makes the meaning of similarly spelled
words clear and readability is greatly improved.
However, in the case of words which are clearly Nepali in origin
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they are identified "by (N) and transliterated according to the system
used "by Turner (I93I). The phonetic character of Nepali spelling
gives a clear guide to the pronunciation of the word.
Additionally, words of Tibetan origin are identified by (Tib.)
and the Tibetan spelling is given in brackets as a further aid to
identification. Here the system of transliteration proposed by
Wylie (1959)» which avoids the need for diacritical marks, is used.
Finally, certain words which are generally familiar in English
(e.g. guru, lama, karma) or which must bear a heavy weight of repeti­
tion (e.g. gompa, torma) are treated as English words and are not
underlined or further identified after the first appearance.
A Glossary of all foreign words in the text is appended, together
with a list of Tibetan names with their correct transliteration.