Oracles Demons Of Tibet

This book is a study of the Tibetan protective deities, those gods worshipped by the Tibetans as protectors and guardians of Buddhism.

Religiously motivated violence caused by the fusion of state and religion occurred in medieval Tibet and Bhutan and later in imperial Japan, but interfaith conflict also followed colonial incursions in India, Sri Lanka, and Burma. Before that time, there was a general premodern harmony among the resident religions of the latter countries, and only in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries did religiously motivated violence break out. While conflict caused by Hindu fundamentalists has been serious and widespread, a combination of medieval Tibetan Buddhists and modern Sri Lankan, Japanese, and Burmese Buddhists has caused the most violence among the Asian religions. However, the Chinese Taiping Christians have the world record for the number of religious killings by one single sect. A theoretical investigation reveals that specific aspects of the Abrahamic religions—an insistence on the purity of revelation, a deity who intervenes in history, but one who still is primarily transcendent—may be primary causes of religious conflict. Only one factor—a mystical monism not favored in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—was the basis of a distinctively Japanese Buddhist call for individuals to identify totally with the emperor and to wage war on behalf of a divine ruler. The Origins of Religious Violence: An Asian Perspective uses a methodological heuristic of premodern, modern, and constructive postmodern forms of thought to analyze causes and offer solutions to religious violence.

he theatrical culture of Tibet is probably the last to remain virtually unknown to the outside world, and to the West in particular. As well as describing the current situation of studies on Tibetan theatre, the current volume also provides an essay on imagination and how it is concretely manifested by the Tibetan people and their actors. Recent decades have seen radical change for Tibetan theatre, ache lhamo, now performed by a diaspora for whom a declining artistic and technical change derives from an uncertain politics concerning secular and popular culture, as well as the ongoing cultural genocide caused by China’s subjection of Tibet.

"This book is about two immortals whose friendship has spanned nearly five hundred years across the Tibetan plateau and beyond. The first immortal is the Dalai Lama, the emanation of a bodhisattva, an enlightened being who voluntarily takes rebirth in the world to benefit sentient beings. The second immortal is a wrathful god named Pehar, who has possessed the Nechung Oracle since the sixteenth century. This book is the first to examine the relationship between these two monolithic figures that began in the seventeenth century during the reign of the Fifth Dalai Lama (1617-1682). This study is also the first extensive examination of the famed Nechung Oracle and his institution. In the seventeenth century, the protector deity Pehar and his oracle at Nechung Monastery were state-sanctioned by the nascent Tibetan government, becoming the head of an expansive pantheon of worldly deities assigned to protect the newly unified country. While the Fifth Dalai Lama and his government endorsed Pehar as part of his larger unification project, the governments of later Dalai Lamas continued to expand the deity's influence, and by extension their own, by ritually establishing Pehar at monasteries and temples around Lhasa and across Tibet. Pehar's cult at Nechung Monastery came to embody the Dalai Lama's administrative control in a mutually beneficial relationship of protection and prestige, the effects of which continue to reverberate within Tibet and among the Tibetan exile community today"--

Divining with Achi and Tārā by Jan-Ulrich Sobisch with contributions by Solvej Nielsen offers an introduction to and two detailed case studies of Tibetan dice and prayer bead divination. Translations, interviews, and glossaries and appendices enrich an already valuable book.