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252 | 16 Examining Agency, Discourses of Destiny, and Creative Power in the Biography of a Tibetan Child Tertön Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa Introduction Ascertaining a child’s perspective and experience of religious tradition and practice can be a difficult feat, made all the more complex by the tendency for adults and scholars to reinterpret, overlook, or even omit children’s explanations of their experiences in depictions of religion. While recent scholarship (particularly by the scholars included in this volume) has introduced the child’s voice into studies of religious ritual and experience in a number of cultural contexts, in studies of Tibetan religion, children remain largely absent as agents and participants. Establishing the perception of historical children and their experience is made all the more difficult by the lack of source material available, since most of what can be found has been written by adults about children. What can these sources reveal about a child’s perspective on religion? This essay will explore a culturally Tibetan case, but will address the challenges faced by those wishing to do child-centered research across many (if not most) religious traditions in the absence of an archive created by actual children. One way to develop a child’s perspective is to examine general scholarship within a religious tradition that features children. An important genre of such scholarship is religious biography that features children or, in some cases, has children as their subject. In traditional Tibetan scholarship, there are several sources that not only indicate the role of children in religious life but also suggest that in certain traditions particular children played important roles of authority beyond that of lay ritual participation. The obvious example of this is the Tibetan tradition of recognizing children as emanations or incarnations (Tibetan Sprul sku) of deceased religious masters. Granted authority through complex cultural matrices of destiny and spiritual virtuosity, these children receive Examining Agency, Discourses of Destiny, and Creative Power | 253 specialized training and education after they are recognized as incarnations of former masters. Following confirmation of their new identity, they are placed on a trajectory of activity, or a career, that they are expected to enact as they grow into adults. The most famous example of these emanations is the institution of the Dalai Lama, who acts as a religious, cultural, and political authority within Tibetan culture. Although not all children are emanations , many are often recruited into monastic life at a young age, or are born into a family that transmits its own set of teachings and ritual practices on a heredity basis. There are also children in Tibetan history who exemplify several of these strands at once but who were unique in that, from a young age, their activities contributed to the formation of Tibetan religious and intellectual systems. One prominent example is that of Tertön Namchö Mingyur Dorje (Gter ston Gnam chos Mi ‘gyur rdo rje, 1645-1667; hereafter Namchö Mingyur Dorje),1 a prominent teacher in the Nyingmapa (Rnying ma pa) tradition of Tibetan Buddhism who in his short life is held to have transmitted the influential collection of Sky Treasure (Gnam chos) teachings. Namchö Mingyur Dorje is a significant case study for the examination of children and their experience of religion for a number of reasons: first, Namchö Mingyur Dorje was regarded as a prominent religious teacher and practitioner from his childhood. However , unlike with other incarnations, his authority was gained through his participation in different, almost apocryphal discourses of destiny. He was believed to have been a Treasure discoverer (gter ston) who was predestined to “discover” religious relics and teachings that had been concealed in the eighth century CE by the important religious master Guru Rinpoche, a figure who had played a crucial role in the dissemination of Buddhism in Tibet. Therefore, Namchö Mingyur Dorje’s precociousness and virtuosity were not remarkable due to his age: instead, it was his place within broader systems of knowledge associated with Treasure revelation that brought him recognition from Buddhist communities within Tibet. Namchö Mingyur Dorje appears, then, to be a pertinent example for this volume of a child who gained significance within a religious culture despite (not necessarily because of) his age, and in this culture, his own experience and understandings of rituals and visions were believed to be extremely important and therefore were meticulously recorded. Does this case study suggest a traditional example of what we are trying to uncover: of a child’s religious agency and voice being restored to...

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