But that's not Buddhism! Spirit Possession and Buddhist Studies

In the Kathmandu Valley, Newar Buddhist women known as dyaḥmāṃ are routinely possessed by the Buddhist goddess Hāratī and her children. Newars, particularly Buddhists, flood the living rooms of these women seeking resolutions to issues as varied as physical ailments, financial troubles, and domestic abuse. While these practices are never thought to be non-Buddhist by those people engaged in them, during one exchange with a colleague in Buddhist Studies, after explaining how these women performed Buddhism, the colleague replied with “but that’s not Buddhism!” Why does this not get to count as Buddhism? Consequently, how are we, as scholars defining this thing we call Buddhism? And finally, how can the study of Buddhist spirit possession traditions, as perceived marginalia, question the outmoded binary of text-primary and ethnographic approaches?

The study of possession, through an anthropological lens, as Janice Boddy has argued, “has rarely missed a theoretical beat” (Boddy, 1994). However, in the study of Buddhism in general, and Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna in particular, the phenomenon of spirit possession, not to speak of the study of possession, has remained something confined to the margins. In this paper, using both ethnographic data from the living rooms of dyaḥmāṃ and Buddhist texts composed by dyaḥmāṃ and devotees, I argue that possession is not Buddhism’s other, (similar to the Anthropology of Buddhism not being Buddhist Studies’ other) but rather needs to be understood as an integral part of what Buddhists do ergo Buddhism.

As Erick White demonstrates, the opposition between possession and Buddhism has been exaggerated. When it comes to Theravāda, “possession has consistently [been] representing an antithetical and oppositional outer limit in anthropological models of Theravada Buddhism” (White, 2017). While possession, I argue, is an important part of how Newar Buddhists do Buddhism, possession traditions have been confined to the margins of Buddhist life “as supplemental extensions to any local form of Buddhism” (White, 2017).  As Bruce Owens demonstrates, for Newar Buddhism and sacrifice, this assumption that things such as sacrifice and possession do not constitute Buddhism “appears anomalous by virtue of a false comparison between a current practice and selective readings of ancient monastic tracts” (Owens, 1993). Rather, I argue that monks and mediums need not be understood as oppositional, since while a first glance their goals may appear different monks and mediums are both invested in both worldly and other worldly dilemmas, issues, and questions (Gellner 1992; White, 2022).

In Kathmandu, dyaḥmāṃ sponsor a host of events, where they collaborate with Newar Buddhist priests. These are events such as, sacrificial offerings, feasts offered to powerful goddesses, and 800 people processions to Hāratī’s temple. As one dyaḥmāṃ whispered into my ear, while the image of Hayagrīva Bhairava was being decked out in the new jewellery she had sponsored, “dharma yāye mā,” meaning “[one] must do dharma.” For dyaḥmāṃ, their devotees, the deities involved in these acts of dharma, and the Vajrācārya priests who collaborate with them, these practices are not perceived as “marginal to or outside of mainstream normative Buddhist belief and practice” (White, 2022). Following Janice Boddy’s work in Sudan, since Buddhism is not separate from the local reality of possession, it also follows that deities and dyaḥmāṃ are concerned with “the essential values and moral tenets of their culture” (Boddy, 1989). How could Buddhist deities not be concerned with ethical matters? In the living rooms, this concern for the rules is manifested through the body with rules regarding what the dyaḥmāṃ can eat, or even through what those attending the event are allowed to consume prior to their arrival. Violations of the rules by the dyaḥmāṃ or those attending the ritual are embodied in the body of the dyaḥmāṃ, who will suffer illness because of these infringements. This ethical element will be rendered much more explicit, in the next vignette, where the gods and the dyaḥmāṃ do in fact participate in maintaining morality. Ethnographic evidence from these events will be presented to expand the horizons of what gets to count as Buddhist in Buddhist Studies, and challenge the association of monks to soteriological religion and mediums to instrumental religion.

In order to specifically address this perceived binary between text and context, I draw on the work of anthropologist Karin Barber who defines a text as an “utterance (oral or written) that is woven together in order to attract attention and to outlast the moment” (Barber, 2007). Analyzing vernacular Buddhist texts composed by dyaḥmāṃ and their devotees, which include life-histories, devotional hymns, and ethnographic studies, allows us to conceive of texts as forms of social behaviour that are central to people’s experiences (Barber, 2007). Texts, conceptualized as encounters, are dialogic and relational. They help shape social relationships and demonstrate how dyaḥmāṃ through the composition of texts and through embodiment are concerned with more than just the worldly.

According to Grimes, ritual perspectives provide us with a multi-perspectival view on the event in question (Grimes, 1988; 1990). Similarly, including these intersubjective perspectives allows for a repositioning of spirit possession traditions “inside the expansive messy umbrella of mainstream (if not official) Buddhism” (White 2022). The goal is to put “Buddhism in dialogue with multiple modalities of spirit possession” to recognize that this thing we, as scholars, call Buddhism is just as concerned with worldly goals as it is with other worldly ones (White, 2017; McDaniel, 2011). Put differently, instead of arguing that “there remains among the Newars, as in all Buddhist societies, an opposition between the Buddhist ritual specialist on the one hand, and the shaman, medium, or psychopomp on the other” (Gellner, 1992), I argue that If we look beyond the bāhāḥ, and the living room then we are presented with a unique vista onto the ways in which Newar Buddhist priests and Newar dyaḥmāṃ create Buddhism with the help of deities, and other Newar Buddhists.