In the post-mortem meditative state of tukdam, the bodies of advanced Tibetan Buddhist practitioners stay lifelike for days or even weeks after clinical death. Consciousness is still considered to be present in these ideal Tibetan deaths, keeping the bodies from succumbing to the usual processes of decay. These extraordinary bodies, I argue, share in characteristics of images as articulated by film and cultural theorists as well as anthropologists writing on mortuary traditions. According to film theorist André Bazin’s influential ontology of the image and cinema, the main purpose of image-making is to freeze time, hold off change – and ultimately death. Not only do images ward off change and help to deal with death, but they seem to share in the very nature of the dead, as observed by anthropologist Robert Desjarlais in the context of Tibetan Buddhist funerary practices: “Corpses are like images, and images are like corpses. Both stand for something else, something separate that is not fully present.” Images, like corpses, make present what is absent; it has even been argued that corpses served as models of, and thereby gave rise to images in the first place.
Tukdam bodies can be thought of in terms of these two characteristics of images: resisting change and death as well as embodying the dynamic of presence and absence. My primary interest lies in the latter, this dynamic that is central to images, life and death, and tukdam. Unlike images and normal corpses, which make present what is absent, a tukdam body is, by definition, imbued with presence. This is something not just felt but also seen. Beyond the astonishing physical signs such as non-decay and suppleness of the body, those in tukdam exhibit dhang (mdangs). Sometimes translated as “radiance,” this can be understood as a visual manifestation of presence, also associated with a kind of energy. Dhang is a multivalent term, with slightly varying and overlapping meanings in different contexts such as Tibetan medicine, non-Buddhist indigenous Tibetan usage (e.g. as applied to natural phenomena), and specific tantric contemplative systems like the Great Seal or Mahāmudrā (phyag rgya chen po) where it is a characteristic of the nature of mind.
As the phenomenon of tukdam disrupts normative categories of life and death, mind and body, so the perception of dhang seems to resist categorization into subjective or objective domains through a visuality – and felt presence – that exceeds both. The sense of dhang that emerges from textual sources as well as my ethnographic engagements with contemporary Tibetan Buddhist scholars and practitioners, Tibetan medicine doctors, and lay people, is of a phenomenon that multiple observers can perceive and agree upon, yet seems difficult to pin down as something “objective” (i.e. independent of living, conscious observers – though such notions of objectivity devoid of human experience have been shown to be aspirational fictions at best, even in the so-called hard sciences). For one, the visual traces of this radiance of vitality, presence, or consciousness may not be adequately captured in photographic representation – once seen as the paragon of objectivity – or film, although I’ve encountered varying views about this with my informants, among whom dhang emerges as a somewhat fuzzy, even multiple object with varying degrees of scientific inflection. Its scientific operationalization certainly presents interesting challenges, as I’ve also observed in a transnational scientific study on tukdam underway in Tibetan communities in India. Here scientists are plotting to record dhang through objective color measures of chroma, hue, and value. To what extent the radiance thus measured is the same object as the dhang perceived in those in tukdam is an open question.
It seems difficult to eliminate the subject, as old-school “mechanical” objectivity would have it, from the perception of dhang. As such, a study of dhang troubles and shows the limitations of modern categories of the subjective and objective, the development and contingencies of which have been well chronicled in history of science literature. Inviting a phenomenological approach, this visual radiance suggests a mode of intersubjective seeing occurring in a shared space of perception in the minds of living beings.
According to several of my Tibetan interlocutors, dhang may be represented in imagery in the halos of saints and Buddhas in thangka paintings, statues, etc. Although arguably part of Tibetan visual culture in a broad sense, the dhang of tukdam (or other phenomena where it also manifests), i.e. the actual visual object under consideration here may not however be that amenable to visual archives in terms of visual media or material objects. After all, most objects are dead, and images, like corpses, stand in for an absence. Then again, Tibetan tradition also knows sacred objects and images imbued with living presence, like a body in tukdam, opening possibilities of a (im)material culture of radiant presence.
In the post-mortem meditative state of tukdam, the bodies of advanced Tibetan Buddhist practitioners stay lifelike for days or even weeks after clinical death. These extraordinary bodies share in characteristics of images as articulated by film and cultural theorists as well as anthropologists writing on mortuary traditions. I focus on the dynamic of presence and absence, central to images, life and death, and tukdam. Unlike images and normal corpses, which make present what is absent, a tukdam body is, by definition, imbued with presence. Beyond astonishing physical signs like non-decay and suppleness, tukdam bodies exhibit dhang (mdangs). Sometimes translated as “radiance,” this can be understood as a visual manifestation of presence. Challenging photographic representation, once seen as the paragon of objectivity, as well as attempts at scientific measurement, the perception of dhang seems to resist categorization into objective or subjective domains through a visuality – and felt presence – that exceeds both.