Orality in Tibet
Anne Klein
Orality is a significant, multivalent element of Tibetan religious and cultural life. It is profoundly intertwined with the transmission of written texts, the performance of rituals, and esoteric learning.
Here I mention only three general categories from the very rich complex of oral practices. These pertain (1) to the teaching of texts, (2) to the pedagogical techniques of debate, and finally (3) to more esoteric understandings of what speech communicates in addition to literal meaning. Textual study is always accompanied by at least one, and often all three, of these oral processes, and by others as well.
1. Texts are not regarded self-explanatory units of information that can be digested outside the community of scholarly or ritual practices. The teacher's commentary is therefore a crucial element of textual reading. Oral scholarly traditions interpret, organize, compare, critique, expand upon, and make practical suggestions regarding the material in the text. Sometimes these oral discourses are themselves written down and become texts for further oral comment in a subsequent generation.
2. Tibetan pedagogy, as Georges Dreyfus has amply illustrated in his new book, 1 relies on a dialectic of commentary and debate. Debate itself involves a great deal of memorization and oral incantation of texts; debate is an interactive process in which students must defend philosophical positions in the in-your-face give and take of heated debates. These debates are the chief training ground for scholars in many Tibetan traditions; they are also a major spectator sport. Rhetorical strategies involve textual citation, the thrusting of unwanted consequences on the defender, and feinting through chess-like moves that suggest one line of thought when actually headed toward another.
In all these ways, oral traditions are crucially involved in the training and performance of scholars. In some contexts however, spoken words [End Page 98] transmit something other than erudite learning itself. We can consider two main examples of this phenomenon.
3. Certain sacred Sanskrit syllables, transcribed into Tibetan, are carriers of qualities important to scholars as well as practitioners. Debates, for example, typically begin with the incantation of the syllable dhi, considered the essential sound of Manjusrí, personification of wisdom. In this way, the debater invokes the presence of divine wisdom before beginning to test the mettle of his own. Likewise, his study of the texts whose tenets he will probe dialectically would have been preceded by his receiving scriptural transmission, or lung on that text. Lung simply entails hearing the work read aloud by someone who has himself received lung on it. Such transmission is understood to facilitate connection to that text. Only afterward would the intellectual engagement begin.
Further, in the course of being consecrated into any tantric practice, one receives a consecrated lung of the mantra, literally "mind-protector," which is understood to hold the central power of the practice itself. This must be received orally. Thus, the gate to textual learning opens through orality, texts are studied through oral performance, and the most esoteric of the practices they teach are essentalized in spoken sound.
In all these ways we might say that book learning, however elaborate,
never becomes in Tibet a place apart from the living, spoken, and
enchanting speech of those most closely allied with teaching and
transmitting its texts.
2
Professor of Asian Religions at Rice University, Anne Klein researches Indo-Tibetan Buddhist thought and practice as well as comparative and crosscultural work on women and Buddhism. The second edition of her Knowledge and Liberation: Tibetan Buddhist Epistemology (1986) was published in 1999.
© by Anne C. Klein.
References
Dreyfus 2003
Georges B. J. Dreyfus. The Sound of Two Hands Clapping:
The Education of a Tibetan Buddhist Monk. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Jackson 1996
Roger R. Jackson. "'Poetry' in Tibet: Glu, mGar, sNyan
ngag. and 'Songs of Experience.'" In Tibetan Literature: Studies
in Genre. Essays in Honor of Geshe Lhundup Sopa. Ed. by
José Ignacio Cabezón and Roger R. Jackson. Ithaca: Snow
Lion. pp. 368-92. [End Page 99]
Klein 1994
Anne Klein. "Introduction." In Path to the Middle:
Oral Madhyamika in Tibet, The Spoken Scholarship of Kensur Yeshe
Tupden. SUNY Series in Buddhist Studies. Albany: State University
of New York Press. (Adapted as "Oral Genres and the Art of Reading in
Tibet," Oral Tradition, 9 (1994):281-314.
Patrul 1994
Patrul Rinpoche. The Words of My Perfect
Teacher. Trans. by the Padmakara group. San Francisco: Harper Collins.
Samuel 1996
Geoffrey Samuel. "The Gesar Epic of East Tibet." In Tibetan
Literature: Studies in Genre. Essays in Honor of Geshe Lhundup
Sopa. Studies in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. Ed. by José Ignacio
Cabezón and Roger R. Jackson. Ithaca: Snow Lion. pp. 358-67.
Footnotes
1. Despite the widely recognized significance of oral traditions in Tibet, relatively little has been written about them. However, a recent and very compelling analysis of oral debate, including its significance as a pedagogical tool and its juxtapositional logic, rhetoric, and dialects is the partly autobiographical account of Georges B. J. Dreyfus (2003), the first Westerner to become a Tibetan Geshe.
2. For an introduction to epics and poetry, see Jackson 1996 and Samuel 1996. To my knowledge my work (Klein 1994) remains the most extensive overview of categories of orality in Tibet. Patrul 1994, full of teaching stories, lists, and advice for practitioners, is a famous example of a text that began as oral commentary.
