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Obviously the previous discussion has been misconstrued one way or the other, so again, I think it's just simpler to ask the question a-fresh: do people feel the pre-Buddhist influences on Buddhism in Tibet are troubling, or is it more a matter of preferring our own imagery (or both)?
There are loads of other interesting links using those search terms--the NewBuddhist discussion was 5th.
I was mainly, at the time of the search, trying to deconstruct the terms "shamanism" and "shamanistic" to see if people (including myself) seem to have a generally shared view of what that term means, or whether our different views on what it means are at the root of some of our problems in discussing shamanism in TB.
shaman 1690s, "priest of the Ural-Altaic peoples," probably via Ger. Schamane, from Rus. shaman, from Tungus shaman, which is perhaps from Chinese sha men "Buddhist monk," from Prakrit samaya-, from Skt. sramana-s "Buddhist ascetic."
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federicaSeeker of the clear blue sky...Its better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak out and remove all doubtModerator
This is a great topic for it's own thread, I'd love to see a thread on this, but it's veering off-topic here, except for the article author's one-dimensional portrayal of Tibetan Buddhism.
I agree he may be oversimplifying (or just condensing? It sounds to me as if this may be a transcript of an oral presentation) in some cases--for example, the description of Bon--though perhaps he is referring to New Bon when he says:
"...if anything Buddhism created Bön as an organized systematic religion which is weirdly similar to Buddhism in many ways, rather than was (sic) itself inflected by Bön."
I like Vajranatha's breakdown of Bön:
1. Primitive Bon more or less corresponds to the archaic shamanism and paganism of ancient Northern and Central Asia. This shamanism is still practiced in its original and unreformed version is remote areas of the Himalayas, as well as on the borders of Tibet and China.
2. Yungdrung Bon or Old Bon (bon rnying-ma) was the high religious culture of the ancient kingdom of Zhang-zhung which centered around Gangchen Tise or Mount Kailas in Western Tibet.
3. New Bon (bon gsar-ma) was a deliberate and conscious amalgamation of the Bon of Zhang-zhung with the Buddhism of Indian origin, especially as this spiritual tradition was represented by the Nyingmapa school in Tibet.
I think the basic messages of Garfield's talk ring true to me, though, which seem to be that 1) transmission of Buddhism (or any religion) can be very three-dimensional and not simply a straight line--like human migration, there tend to be multiple waves back and forth in some cases, and 2) transmission of Buddhism may behave very differently according to variations in the cultures receiving it.
I do think he makes fascinating points about the differences between Tibet and China at the time each began to receive Buddhism, and how these structural and cultural differences in turn greatly affected the shape of Sinicized vs. Tibeticized Buddhism.
I was wondering to what extent, if any, this so-called "shamanism" might have been present in Buddhism long before its transmission to Tibet, given that it seems difficult to find any indigenous culture whatsoever that lacked shamanism in some form.
Here is an absolutely fascinating paper by Joy Manné, "Was the Buddha a Shaman?" which cites this quote:
Samuels sees early Buddhism as "an attempt to create a framework that could reconcile the literate, rationalised, hierarchical society that was coming into being with the human values of the older, shamanic form of society” and the Buddha's teachings as “an adaptation of the shamanic training for the new urban social context.” (Samuels, Geoffrey (1993), Civilized Shamans: Buddhism in Tibetan Societies. Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press.)
Comments
I was mainly, at the time of the search, trying to deconstruct the terms "shamanism" and "shamanistic" to see if people (including myself) seem to have a generally shared view of what that term means, or whether our different views on what it means are at the root of some of our problems in discussing shamanism in TB.
shaman
1690s, "priest of the Ural-Altaic peoples," probably via Ger. Schamane, from Rus. shaman, from Tungus shaman, which is perhaps from Chinese sha men "Buddhist monk," from Prakrit samaya-, from Skt. sramana-s "Buddhist ascetic."
"...if anything Buddhism created Bön as an organized systematic religion which is weirdly similar to Buddhism in many ways, rather than was (sic) itself inflected by Bön."
I like Vajranatha's breakdown of Bön:
1. Primitive Bon more or less corresponds to the archaic shamanism and paganism of ancient Northern and Central Asia. This shamanism is still practiced in its original and unreformed version is remote areas of the Himalayas, as well as on the borders of Tibet and China.
2. Yungdrung Bon or Old Bon (bon rnying-ma) was the high religious culture of the ancient kingdom of Zhang-zhung which centered around Gangchen Tise or Mount Kailas in Western Tibet.
3. New Bon (bon gsar-ma) was a deliberate and conscious amalgamation of the Bon of Zhang-zhung with the Buddhism of Indian origin, especially as this spiritual tradition was represented by the Nyingmapa school in Tibet.
I think the basic messages of Garfield's talk ring true to me, though, which seem to be that 1) transmission of Buddhism (or any religion) can be very three-dimensional and not simply a straight line--like human migration, there tend to be multiple waves back and forth in some cases, and 2) transmission of Buddhism may behave very differently according to variations in the cultures receiving it.
I do think he makes fascinating points about the differences between Tibet and China at the time each began to receive Buddhism, and how these structural and cultural differences in turn greatly affected the shape of Sinicized vs. Tibeticized Buddhism.
Here is an absolutely fascinating paper by Joy Manné, "Was the Buddha a Shaman?" which cites this quote:
Samuels sees early Buddhism as "an attempt to create a framework that could reconcile the literate, rationalised, hierarchical society that was coming into being with the human values of the older, shamanic form of society” and the Buddha's teachings as “an adaptation of the shamanic training for the new urban social context.” (Samuels, Geoffrey (1993), Civilized Shamans: Buddhism in Tibetan Societies. Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press.)
http://www.joymanne.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Was-the-Buddha-a-Shaman-Buddhism-Shamanism-and-the-Nature-of-Consciousness-131010.pdf