Tibetan Studies Initiative

a program of
the ICA Tibetan Studies Fund
administered by HCBSS

Lectures on Tibetan Buddhism 2009-10
 

Jacob Dalton
UC Berkeley

"The View from Dunhuang:
Dhāraṇī Ritual Practice and Its Texts

Thursday, April 1, 2010
time & location to be announced

 
The Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang include a large number of copied dhāraṇīs, both sūtras and spells. This paper will examine the content, the colophons, and the formats of these manuscripts and attempt to draw some broader conclusions about how dhāraṇīs were used by early Tibetan Buddhists living around Dunhuang, and what that might tell us about ritual developments in early medieval India. Accompanied by slides of the manuscripts under discussion, the paper will consider how Tibetans negotiated the magical power vs. semantic meanings of the dhāraṇī spells, transliterating some but translating others. It will then turn to the ritual uses of the manuscripts themselves. On the basis of the manuscripts’ colophons and their physical format, it is clear that some were copied for apotropaic or merit-making purposes, while others served as personal liturgies for daily practice. The latter were often gathered into collections (dhāraṇī-saṃgraha), collections in which certain structural patterns may be discerned. Finally the paper will turn to the “ritual manuals” (vidhi) that often circulated alongside these dhāraṇī-sūtras, to consider what the emergence of these manuals may tell us about ritual development in early medieval Indian Buddhism more generally.
 
Jacob Dalton holds a joint appointment in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies. A graduate of the University of Michigan, before moving to Berkeley, he worked as a researcher with the International Dunhuang Project at the British Library and taught at Yale.
   A specialist in Tibetan Buddhist history, he is the author of a forthcoming study on violence and the formation of Tibetan Buddhism, and co-author of Tibetan Tantric Manuscripts from Dunhuang: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Stein Collection at the British Library (2006).