Psychic sports in Tibet

 

What an amazing spiritual adventurer was Alexandra David-Néel, the Belgian-French "lady lama" who brought thrilling accounts of Magic and Mystery in Tibet to the West. I reopened that book and found myself with Naropa once again when he was interrupted by a dakini while engaged in black magic. She appeared in a corner of a magic diagram he had constructed to effect the psychic assassination of a rajah. The dakini, or khadoma ("she who moves through the air")  gave Naropa such a good scare that he changed his ways and endured years of hardship and humiliation in order to enter the service of the mahasiddhi Tilopa .
    Naropa was a Brahmin of Kashmir who was deeply offended by his rajah. He decided to kill the prince by black magic. He shut himself up in an isolated house and began what Tibetans call a dragpoi dubthab, a magical rite to cause death or injury. He was interrupted by a khadoma, a “mother fairy” who appeared at the corner of the magical diagram he had constructed. She asked if he was able to send the spirit of the rajah to a happy place in another world, or bring it back into the body and revive that body. Gambopa confessed he could do neither. 
    The khadoma cautioned him that in that case he would suffer profoundly in one of the purgatories. Terrified, Naropa asked how he could avoid this fate. The khadoma told him to seek out Tilopa and beg for initiation into the “Short Path” that frees a man from the consequence of his actions by the revelation of their true nature and can bring the attainment of buddhahood in one single life.
     So Naropa went to Bengal, where Tilopa lived. He was received with rudeness and practical jokes. Tilopa violated all rules, took many forms, and often Naropa failed to recognize him. When finally Tilopa allowed contact to be made – when Naropa found him lying like a corpse beside a funeral pyre – he taught Naropa nothing. He merely allowed him to trail along behind him and beg for food for his master. He was given disgusting assignments. He was told to drink raw sewage and had to endure torture, with wooden splints pushed under his fingernails.
    Enlightenment finally came when the master took off his shoe and whacked Naropa in the face with it. He saw the stars, and the meaning of the Short Path. [1]  

Before I read her books, I had thought of Mme. David-Néel as one of those eccentric Brits who went native in the days of the Raj. In fact, she was born in Belgium and the last part of her name (from her husband) has an acute accent on the first E, left off in most English editions.
     Her travelogue presents Lamaism (a better name than Tibetan Buddhism) as quite different from other forms of Buddhism because it became a theocracy and because of the emphasis on what she calls “psychic sports” and high and low magic. She describes the abuses by which a guru seeks to establish total authority over his apprentic. She describes gruesome rituals of necromancy in which the practitioner revives a corpse, wrestles with it and – if he wins the contest – bites off the dead man’s tongue, which becomes a powerful tool. (Its exact uses are not described). There is the practice of chod, or “severing” in which the performer gives his body to be torn apart by wild animals, demons and hungry ghosts in a ritual which – in the Tibetan mind – is not symbolic but literal.
    Despite the teachings that all realities are generated by mind, many things going on here, including the multitude of ghosts and demons who infest David-Néel's Tibet, do not appear (to almost anyone) to be merely thought-forms.
    Buddhism maintains that there is no individual soul or spirit that survives death, yet in Tibet religious practice seems at odds with this teaching. Famously, there  is the succession of tulkus, held to be reincarnations of high lamas (and others). After the death of a high lama, the search is on for his tulku. This normally gets under way two years after the death. He may have left clues. Seers are called in. An infant who may be the tulku will be tested; he has to identify which, in a selection of personal items, belonged to the deceased lama. The lama’s special drinking cup is the most important of these items.· 
     Then there is the practice of phowa which involves transferring the personality to another reality - or another body in this world. 

1. Alexandra David-Neel, Magic and Mystery in Tibet. (New York: Dover, 1971) pp. 170-8