Sky Divinations: An Elemental Practice from the Unimpeded Sound Tantra

This paper presents a translation and analysis of two passages from an important work of Great Perfection (Rdzogs chen) contemplative philosophy, the Unimpeded Sound Tantra (Sgra thal ‘gyur), along with one of its earliest known commentaries from the 12th century. These passages pertain to the tantra’s fifty-first sermon, in which the Buddha responds to a disciple’s question: “How should we understand the signs of the elements?” The elements in question are the five primary constitutive elements—earth, water, fire, wind, and space. Elemental theories form a fundamental framework in Buddhist material philosophies broadly and play a central role in the cosmologies and contemplative theories of the Unimpeded Sound Tantra. As an extension of these theories, the text describes multiple forms of elemental prognostication—including “scrying” practices that divine information from fire and calendrical practices that algorithmically calculate elemental combinations to determine favorable and unfavorable conditions for action. These practices, the text indicates, are performed by trained professionals, yogis (rnal ’byor pa), on behalf of others, suggesting that divination was among the repertoire of community-oriented practices expected of contemplative figures.

Among these practices is a form of elemental divination that I refer to as “sky divination.” This otherwise unnamed practice involves interpreting signs appearing in the sky as omens, revealing insights into a community’s collective karma—understood as its reservoir of virtue and the corresponding likelihood of positive or negative destinies. The commentary then explains, through a detailed narrative, that karma operates within a network of relations that includes both humans and more-than-human beings, particularly the godly beings known as lha and their various emissaries, with whom human fates are intimately interconnected. The collective virtue or non-virtue of human beings is therefore not only theorized to bring about effects within the human community but also to extend to the community of non-human others, implying an ethical appeal to human beings’ sense of responsibility toward these others.

The “sky” in “sky divination” corresponds to the Tibetan word namkha (nam mkha’), the same word used to refer to the element of space, sometimes included within the set of five elements (‘byung ba lnga). I use the term “sky divination” to highlight the special role of the sky (or space) in these prognosticative practices: as a medium connecting human beings to the more-than-human lha, as well as to one another, since the sky represents a public and universal context in which these signs are displayed.

In this way, the themes of community and interconnection are emphasized in the sermon on sky divination in multiple interwoven ways: in the relationships implied between the contemplative practitioner and the communities for whom they perform divinations; in the narrative describing the interdependence between human communities and the lha; and in the text’s descriptions of human engagement with the elemental ecologies in which they are constituted.

Bringing attention to these three dimensions of the practice, this paper reflects on how these materials conceptualize shared karma between human, non-human, and more-than-human beings. I consider how this perspective challenges enduring perceptions of Buddhist contemplatives as “world-abdicating” renunciates, instead emphasizing a vision of contemplative life as embedded in overlapping social domains.