Sociological Diacritics at Nechung in Exile

I begin my discussion of the macrocontext of the kang-so’s transmissibility with a description of the monastery in exile. I present its state of disarray and several diacritics distinguishing its monks, salient to understanding the secret.

Nechung at Dharamsala was a small monastery, its monks numbering between 70 and 100 during my years there. The original monastery was established near Lhasa in the seventeenth century (Thupten Phuntsok 2007, 3; Bell Reference Bell2021, 129–30). Reestablished tenuously in exile over the 1970s and 1980s (Thupten Phuntsok 2007, 153–55), the monastery had become quite prosperous by the time of my research. This was due in part to the efforts of the Nechung Medium, a highly charismatic figure. More importantly, though, it was due to the importance accorded by the present, fourteenth Dalai Lama to the Nechung Oracle, that is, the Nechung deity, possessing and speaking through the Medium. The Nechung deity (gnas chung chos skyong, the Nechung Dharma Protector) has been oracularly consulted by the Dalai Lamas for several centuries, during the trance ritual (spyan ’dren), that is inserted, when required, into the kang-so ritual performance.Footnote ⁹ These consultations were established anew in exile, with the Dalai Lama, the exile government (the Central Tibetan Administration), and other high lamas and associations regularly seeking the Oracle’s advice (Nair Reference Nair2010).Footnote ¹⁰

Despite its prosperity, the monastery was in a fair state of disarray. Over my field years, it lost a number of monks, among them many trained kang-so practitioners and teachers. Two monks died, and others chose to leave for diverse reasons.Footnote ¹¹ The monastery supplemented its numbers by bringing in several batches of children, who joined as novice monks and spent 3–5 years memorizing Nechung’s ritual repertoire, including those of the kang-so (Thupten Ngodup et al. 2009, 298; Nair Reference Nair2010, 301ff.). The ratio of senior monks to novice and less senior monks thus declined significantly over my years there.

Three sociological diacritics are relevant here: A first is the level of seniority. I use the labels novice, less senior, and senior monk as expedients. The monks whose views I discuss here were, in fact, all senior monks. They alone were entitled to express an opinion on the secret and my research, being trained kang-so practitioners who had typically held one or more positions of responsibility at the monastery, whether ritual, pedagogic, or administrative. They numbered around 20, and their ages ranged from the late twenties to the eighties. The oldest among them was the Ven. Thupten Phuntsok. Frail and ailing during my time there, he had previously been the monks’ main kang-so teacher and had occasionally conducted classes to instruct the adult monks on the profounder aspects of the kang-so (see Thupten Ngodup et al. 2009, 112–18). The other important senior monk was, of course, the Nechung Medium, the Ven. Thupten Ngodup (Thupten Ngodup et al. 2009). He played a key role in my research, as we will see below.Footnote ¹²

A second diacritic was the life stage at which the individual had entered the monastery in exile—whether in his youth or as an adult monk, having fled his monastery in Tibet. Most of the former, but only some of the latter, had received the old monk’s teachings on the deeper aspects of the kang-so practice.

The third diacritic was then the monk’s receipt, or not, of the old monk’s advanced teachings on the kang-so. Once he became too frail to teach, and some years before his demise in 2008, the old monk set down his teachings (khrid) in writing. Another monk had audiotaped him reading the manuscript together with the kang-so scripture. Tapes and photocopies of the manuscript circulated within the monastery, though I did not attempt to find out to what extent or how the monks used them.Footnote ¹³

Space constraints do not permit a thick description of the monks and their diverse views on the secret (see Nair Reference Nair2010). Suffice it to say that there was no clear correlation between view of the secret and type of monk, distinguished in terms of the above diacritics. The secret’s sociological form within the monastery was, at best, obscure, no doubt inflected by the monastery’s state of disarray and the heterogeneity of the monks’ relationships with the Nechung kang-so.Footnote ¹⁴

The Discourse on Karma at Nechung

A second salient aspect of the macrocontext was the discourse on karma (las in Tibetan). I encountered karma and its related terms in elicitations, in the kang-so’s verses, in documents pertaining to the consultation of the Nechung Oracle, and even beyond Nechung in the surrounding lay community (Nair Reference Nair2010). Karma is best understood as one of a family of terms that pertain to what may be termed the underlying cultural concept of the “state of fortune” of individuals or groups.Footnote ¹⁵ It was relevant to the kang-so, as the ritual could only be revealed to an “appropriate vessel” (snod rung), that is, a person who possessed adequate stores of karmic merit (bsod nams kyi tshogs). I mention two aspects of karma here: its potentially collective and its forever hidden nature.

First, the discourse at Nechung focused not merely on karma but on collective karma (spyi mthun gyi las), given the idea that social groupings on different scales could have a shared karma (Nair Reference Nair2010, 339ff.; Mills Reference Mills2015). This would explain why the monks appeared indifferent to publicly circulating artifacts relating to the Nechung kang-so—the scripture at the library, its contents cited in academic publications: They were not involved in the kang-so’s revelation in those instances; they were not part of the group to which accrued the collective karma thus generated.

Second, karma is a “radically hidden” phenomenon (shin tu lkog gyur; see Tillemans Reference Tillemans1999, 29). It is forever hidden from ordinary humans. Only its ripened effects are “manifest” (mngon gyur) to them, every single aspect of a person’s life and environment being the ripened effect of his or her hidden karma. Karma is known only to the omniscient Buddhas and to gods like Nechung, who possess a certain clairvoyance (Nair Reference Nair2010, 97 n. 25). The senior monks thus faced a problem when it came to revealing the kang-so: Karma being hidden, they could not know who an appropriate vessel was. They therefore adopted the following convention: Little boys or adult monks who joined Nechung were appropriate vessels. Their status as Nechung monks was a symbol, in the Peircean sense, of their karmic adequacy. I return to this convention below, in relation to the semiotics of authorization shaping the kang-so’s transmission.

This convention, of course, could not be applied to outsiders like me, to whom the kang-so was accordingly secret. The monks were thus unanimously against my research at the start.Footnote ¹⁶ The Nechung Medium, however, told me early on that I was not yet ready to study the kang-so, and that when I was, he would permit me to study it. This he did in August 2004, though I never managed to elicit an explanation of how he arrived at this judgment. Not one of the other monks accepted his view on the matter, however, and my research remained stalled. The monks finally suggested putting the question to the Nechung Oracle. This was done in December 2005, midway through my field years. What the Oracle said and how I eventually came to study the kang-so is a long story that I would have to treat elsewhere. Suffice it to note that the Oracle, in response, prescribed the performance of a host of rituals, stating that, if these were performed appropriately, and if I worked hard as envisaged, then “great excellent accumulations [of karma would accrue]” (legs tshogs che; see Nair Reference Nair2010, 284). His terse response thus recursively hinged on my—hidden—karma. And the monks unanimously deemed it ambiguous. Nevertheless, they helped me get the rituals performed at a nearby monastery, this being the standard mode of implementing such prescriptions (see Cabezon Reference Cabezon2010, 20). Once I had sponsored those and several other rituals, at the other monastery and at Nechung as well, somehow, a sufficient number of monks arrived at the decision that the Oracle’s words represented authorization of my research. I was thus finally able to begin my study of the kang-so, in late 2006. We will return to the Oracle’s pronouncement below, in considering the monks’ speech acts.

Secrecy in Tantric Ritual

The monks explained that the Nechung kang-so was of the Secret Mantra (gsang sngags) type, also known as tantra (rgyud; see Bell Reference Bell2021, 72–90).Footnote ¹⁷ The broader institution of tantric secrecy was thus a key part of the secret’s macrocontext. Two aspects of this macrocontext are important here: the stated reasons for tantric secrecy in general; and the Dalai Lama’s innovation in addressing his secret tantric discourse to publics.

One reason for keeping tantras secret (gsang ba), already familiar to the reader, is that karmically inadequate persons encountering them could develop wrong views (log lta), to which would accrue bad karma, which must be prevented. A second reason is to prevent the karmically inadequate from attempting to practice such rituals. For the tantras could be “dangerous” not only to those persons themselves (Beyer Reference Beyer1973, 57; Gyatso Reference Gyatso1998, 187) but also to others against whom the rituals could be malevolently aimed (Cuevas Reference Cuevas2010, 175).Footnote ¹⁸

The reason why such wrong views might occur, and why inappropriate practice might be dangerous, has to do with the fact that tantras typically involve acts that would appear to transgress conventional morality and ethics (Mayer Reference Mayer2015, 390): Within the ritual envelope the practitioner visualizes himself or herself as a Buddha (a meditational deity, yi dam), and then performs—generally, meditatively visualizes the performance of—antinomian acts. The acts are considered to be performed with a pure motivation of great compassion and an understanding of the true nature of reality. Consequently, no bad karma would accrue to such ritual actions, as it would in extraritual life (Cozort Reference Cozort[1986] 2005, 32–33; see Gyatso Reference Gyatso1998, 186; Reference Gyatso2002, 184; Bentor Reference Bentor2015). The uninitiated could misconstrue or incorrectly perform these acts. Hence the need for secrecy.Footnote ¹⁹

In case of the kang-so, the main type of act that could conceivably have been viewed as antinomian was the exhortation of Nechung to perform wrathful acts: The monk, ritually visualized as a Buddha, would, out of great compassion, exhort Nechung and the other Dharma Protectors to annihilate the Enemies of the Teachings (bstan dgra), those who harmed Buddhism and its practitioners. For the Dharma Protectors, and Nechung foremost among them, are a class of deities who are oath-bound to protect the Tibetan Buddhist faith from such enemies (Nebesky-Wojkowitz Reference Nebesky-Wojkowitz[1956] 1998, 94ff.; Bell Reference Bell2020, 55–64). Nechung, as was mentioned, is additionally sworn to protect the lineage of the Dalai Lamas. Outsiders could construe such violence as being antinomian. However, Nechung, the monks explained, was a highly advanced Bodhisattva, very close to attaining enlightenment; he would wield wrath without wrath, with great compassion toward all sentient beings. His compassionate wrath would destroy vast quantities of bad karma, saving Enemies of the Teachings from countless bad rebirths. This then was Nechung’s wrath, said to have wrought illness and insanity in the cases of those two researchers, and the monks feared it.Footnote ²⁰

The tantras have thus traditionally been kept secret, hidden from the karmically inadequate. For many decades, though, the Dalai Lama and various high lamas have chosen to publish their teachings on the most secret of tantras. The Dalai Lama has regularly bestowed mass initiations upon throngs of tens of thousands, all in multiple languages. How might we understand this in relation to the secret?

The stated reasons for choosing such an address of publics vary. Some high lamas stress the need to preserve tantric practice, post-1959 (Patrul Rinpoche 1998, xliv). The Dalai Lama avers that the tantras have been excessively disseminated by and to unauthorized, inappropriate vessels (Tenzin Gyatso [1975] 1987, 15–21). His duty is, accordingly, to dispel the prevailing wrong views, and this is best done using the same means that generated them.Footnote ²¹ The issue is a complex one. We will only concern ourselves with two aspects: the differences between the addressees, and the ethic in case of traditional tantric transmission versus in such public address.

The addressees of the traditional transmission lineage are individuals, personally vetted by a ratified teacher, who addresses his or her tantric teaching to them, orally, in moments of copresence. This address is founded in a karmic ethic. By contrast, taking the Dalai Lama’s address as exemplary, the addressees of published and broadcasted tantric teachings are strangers, of the generic sort that constitute modern social imaginaries—publics, nations, markets (Warner Reference Warner2005, 74–76; also Graan Reference Graan2022). This address hinges on an ethic of estrangement (Warner Reference Warner2005, 113). The two modes of address are thus coupled with differences in the “societal arrangements” constituted around them (Gal Reference Gal2018, 22; see also Agha [Reference Agha2011] on the mediatized practices involved). The rise of publications on tantras, for well over a century now, has thus involved a loss of traditional authority, which was previously constituted solely within oral transmission lineages. In taking up a public address, the Dalai Lama then draws on his own revered status to establish an authoritative center within modern organizations of interdiscursivity, from which may “emanate” (Silverstein Reference Silverstein2013) anew the authorized, authoritative meaning of the tantras as he and the high lamas see this.Footnote ²²

* * *

We have examined three key aspects of the secret’s macrocontext: exile, karma, and tantric secrecy, including the innovation by the Dalai Lama and other high lamas in addressing teachings on the most secret tantric rituals to publics. We are now ready to consider the face-to-face interactions revolving around the kang-so at Nechung.

Text Artifacts and the Kang-So’s Poetic Patterning in Performance

Of the text artifacts that mediated interactions focused on the kang-so, we are concerned with three: the kang-so scripture, the old monk’s instructional manuscript (khrid), and his audiotaped reading of that manuscript together with the scripture.Footnote ²³ The scripture was what the novice monks used in their memorization of the kang-so; it served as an aide-mémoire (dran gso; Nair Reference Nair2010, 69). The old monk’s instructional manuscript and audiotapes were aimed, in his absence, at teaching monks who were already fully fledged kang-so practitioners various profounder aspects of the meditation.

Crucially, none of the three artifactualized forms followed the sequencing of verses of the kang-so ritual performance itself, that is, the order in which the monks chanted the verses. The printed rituals were instead mixed or “shuffled” (dkrugs), as the Ven. Tenzin Gaphel once put it, explaining that this was a technique to maintain secrecy (cf. Bentor Reference Bentor2009; Cabezon Reference Cabezon2010, 15). The instructional manuscript and audiotapes thus concealed the secret in the same way as the scripture.

While the overall logic of organization of the rituals (see Nair Reference Nair2010, 76; cf. Cabezon Reference Cabezon2010, 17–18) was the same in the ritual chant and the scripture, the ritual chant nevertheless differed from the scripture’s printed order in the following three ways: First, the order of invocation of certain deities was shuffled in the scripture, whereby the cardinal directions with which several deities were associated in the ritual chant were different from those printed in the scripture. The mandala visualized in practice was thus different from the one represented in the scripture. Second, ritual acts were regularly repeated in the chant: lines and verses performatively instantiating a specific ritual act were taken from different rituals, composed by different authors and printed at different locations within the scripture, and chanted contiguously to form a dense set of laminations of that ritual act.Footnote ²⁴ Finally, the ritual chant as performed involved various verses that were not printed in the scripture. These served to laminate particular ritual acts even more densely, and with verses from other scriptures.Footnote ²⁵ These three sets of strategies served to poetically pattern the ritual chant (see Silverstein Reference Silverstein2004, 626). This was what the term secret indexed in the first instance. I only outline this elaborate poetics since, as mentioned, I will not be citing the kang-so’s rituals here.

The other text artifact involved in my interactions with the monks was, of course, my own (at that time, future) writing on the kang-so, in English, for academic audiences, as I regularly stressed.Footnote ²⁶ Speaking to me of the kang-so was no straightforward matter for the monks. They could not simply adopt the Dalai Lama’s mode of public address; they lacked the sociocultural warrant to do so. For the Dalai Lama was, in essence (ngo bor), a Buddha (as were the high lamas in general).Footnote ²⁷ His every action was thus essentially compassionate, enlightened, and beneficial to all beings. He could address publics on the subject of tantras and that could only be to the good. The monks, by contrast, being (self-professedly) mere humans, could not lay claim to such capacities. In revealing the secret to an outsider, they implicated themselves in any collective karma that accrued to that revelation and to future revelations to others by that outsider (on collective karma, see Mills [Reference Mills2015, 190, esp. 193–95]). This was why addressing me regarding the kang-so was anything but anodyne. To understand their situation, let us consider the address via which they received and transmitted the kang-so, within their oral transmission lineage.

Participation Frameworks and the Transmission Lineage’s Semiotics of Authorization

I have mentioned that the scripture served the monks as an aide-mémoire, each monk being himself an embodied repository of the kang-so ritual. For me, by contrast, it was the scripture itself that was the repository of the kang-so, once the monks had explained how its printed verses were patterned in the performance. Our distinct perspectives on the scripture indexed our different participant roles in interactions focused on the kang-so. In particular, the monks’ perspective on the kang-so indexed their embedding within a semiotic process of authorization.

The monks’ oral transmission lineage, via which they received and taught the kang-so, consisted in the lamination of a symbol, an index, and an icon: as mentioned, simply being a Nechung monk symbolized the person’s karmic adequacy and status as an appropriate vessel for receipt of the Nechung kang-so. Next, the monks, embodied repositories of the kang-so, performed the ritual and, in doing so, indexed their receipt thereof, in moments of orality and copresence, from their teachers, who had in turn received those verses from their teachers, and so on, all the way back to first, divine utterers and teachers, who were in essence Buddhas.Footnote ²⁸ Finally, in the ritual performance, each monk’s body, speech, and mind (lus ngag yid gsum [nonhonorific]) iconized the Body, Speech, and Mind (sku gsung thugs [honorific]) of the divine first utterers of the ritual verses via the aforementioned indexical chain.Footnote ²⁹ These were the laminations that constituted the semiotics of authorization (see Silverstein [Reference Silverstein2004, 626] on the similar semiotics of the Eucharist; Lempert [Reference Lempert2012, 59–61] on the figuration of authoritative tradition in the context of monastic debate; and Agha [Reference Agha2007a, 167–70] on such register models).Footnote ³⁰ Crucially, each lamination involved the Nechung monk himself. He was thus indefeasibly linked with the kang-so within the “social organization of interdiscursivity” that was the oral transmission lineage (Gal Reference Gal2018).

Outsiders were excluded from every lamination of this semiotics.Footnote ³¹ There was no established convention by which the monks could infer their hidden karma. As nonpractitioners, outsiders would never embody the kang-so or indexically iconize the lineage bearers. To them, the kang-so was then secret; to study the kang-so was to risk incurring bad karma and Nechung’s wrath.

In my case, it was with the Nechung Oracle’s pronouncement of December 2005 that the sea change occurred. For the monks who remained silent, the Oracle’s words were ambiguous. For the monks who spoke to me, however, his pronouncement symbolized his authorization of my research, constituting the first lamination of a new semiotics, authorizing a new line of transmission that could be grafted onto the old one (see Gal Reference Gal2018, 16–21). To understand the further laminations involved, we now consider the monks’ principal speech acts.

The Monks’ Speech Acts and a New Semiotics of Transmission

Consider first the interactions involving only monks, namely, their chanting in the ritual performance and the novices’ scripture classes. The principal speech acts involved were ritual performatives that performed the ritual act they described. In these, the event of the monks’ chanting was simultaneously nomically and reflexively calibrated with the events they chanted (see Silverstein Reference Silverstein1993, 48–53; Reference Silverstein2021). On the one hand, the event of chanting (within the temple, within the ordinary, everyday world) was stipulated as belonging to a realm that is ontically distinct from that of the events chanted (the divine realm of the ritual, in which the monks were Buddhas exhorting Nechung, etc.). The event of chanting and events chanted were thus nomically calibrated. On the other, the event of chanting was metapragmatically regimented as being one and the same as the events chanted (through the use of spatial deictics, first person pronouns, etc.). The event of chanting and events chanted were thus reflexively calibrated. The simultaneity of these two calibrations entailed that the event of chanting and the chanted events were chronotopically superimposed, the ontically distinct realms being, then, one and the same within the ritual envelope.Footnote ³²

In interactions with me, the monks’ principal speech acts were of two types: citations and silences. In their citations, the events of citation were reportively calibrated with the ritual events they cited. This reportive calibration was explicit, their citations being marked by the quotative clitic, a certain sibilance audible at the end of each citation (cf. Lempert Reference Lempert2007; Reference Lempert2012, 34). Now reportive calibration marks the event of citing as necessarily chronotopically distinct from the event cited (Nakassis Reference Nakassis2013, 56–57). In citing the kang-so to me, the monks then articulated an irreducible gap between themselves within the event of citation, and the events cited.Footnote ³³ This was a key departure from their ritual utterances, wherein there was no such gap.

Juxtaposed with citations, the monks’ silences then appear as refusals to cite the ritual verses to me, that is, as refusals of precisely this gap, between themselves within the event of citation, and the ritual events cited. On a higher metapragmatic level, then, the monks’ silences performed the view that the kang-so’s verses were undecontextualizable from their traditional oral transmission lineage: when uttered by the monks, semiotically indefeasible from their transmission lineage, the verses were rigidly performative, possessed of a perduring (pragmatic) “force” (Fleming Reference Fleming2018), producing particular (metapragmatically stipulated) effects across contexts.Footnote ³⁴ For instance, in the monks’ idiom, if an outsider encountered the verses, that could generate bad karma and provoke Nechung’s wrath. The monks’ silences thus performed the stance that they could not transmit the kang-so outside their transmission lineage.Footnote ³⁵

The monks who cited the kang-so to me were performing a very different stance on the kang-so’s transmissibility; they effectively performed a new semiotics of transmission. Their citational gap enabled, as such gaps do, the indexical iconicity (via image, diagram, or metaphor) of the cited events across events of citation.Footnote ³⁶ This gap proleptically figurated the future gap that would obtain between themselves and the monastery, on the one hand, and the kang-so’s verses, on the other, the latter circulating across events of citation, among academic publics, in my writings and in writings that cited mine. And all those indexical iconicities involved in all those citations were possible because a significant number of monks had chosen to view the Nechung Oracle’s 2005 pronouncement as symbolic of his authorization of my research. This was the new semiotics of transmission performed by the monks’ citations. It enabled the monks to delink their utterances of the kang-so from themselves and a karmic ethic, relocating the verses within an ethics of estrangement, free to circulate among strangers (see Warner Reference Warner2005, 113). In other words, the monks performed and instantiated a new transmission line or social organization of the kang-so’s interdiscursivities.Footnote ³⁷