We Drew a Swastika of Grain: Vernacular Religion in the Tibetan Songs of Nubri, Nepal

Mason Brown

doi:10.3390/rel11110593

Abstract

The academic study of Tibetan Buddhism has long emphasized the textual, philological, and monastic, and sometimes tended to ignore, dismiss, or undervalue the everyday practices and beliefs of ordinary people. In this article, I show that traditional folk songs, especially changlü, are windows into the vernacular religion of ethnically Tibetan Himalayans from the Nubri valley of Gorkha District, Nepal. While changlü literally means “beer song”, and they are often sung while celebrating, they usually have deeply religious subject matter, and function to transmit Buddhist values, reinforce social or religious hierarchies, and to emplace the community in relation to the landscape and to greater Tibet and Nepal. They do this mainly through three different tropes: (1) exhortations to practice and to remember such things as impermanence and death; (2) explications of hierarchy; and (3) employment of spatialized language that evokes the maṇḍala. They also sometimes carry opaque references to vernacular rituals, such as “drawing a swastika of grain” after storing the harvest. In the song texts translated here, I will point out elements that reproduce a Buddhist worldview, such as references to deities, sacred landscape, and Buddhist values, and argue that they impart vernacular religious knowledge intergenerationally in an implicit, natural, and sonic way, ensuring that younger generations internalize community values organically.

Highlights

In many cases where textual and oral traditions have existed side by side, Western scholarship has gone through a period of privileging the text before eventually expanding its scope to include the oral and ethnographic.[1]
In the song texts translated here, I will point out elements that reproduce a Buddhist worldview, such as references to deities, sacred landscape, and Buddhist values, and argue that they impart vernacular religious knowledge intergenerationally in an implicit, natural, and sonic way, ensuring that younger generations internalize community values organically
Buddhism was largely founded by textual scholars, it retained an emphasis on the philological longer than many fields and sometimes seemed unconcerned with the Buddhism of the people—the vernacular expressions of the “Great Tradition” of mahāyāna/vajrayāna Buddhism contained in texts and perpetuated in monasteries (Trewin 1993, p. 377)

Summary

Introduction

In many cases where textual and oral traditions have existed side by side, Western scholarship has gone through a period of privileging the text before eventually expanding its scope to include the oral and ethnographic.[1]. These elements are connections between Ladakh and Ngari, the ancient kingdom of which Nubri was once a part, these placed in spatial hierarchies of “up” (the sun and moon in the sky), “down” (the grains of the earth), and in are different genres from distant quarters of the Tibetan cultural world, and they have in common the descending order of their appearance in the text (the lama, high minister, and parents), outlining the core values of the Tibetan worldview These elements are placed in spatial hierarchies of “up” To regard various positionalities as “jewels”, or objects of veneration with high religious value, illuminates a This song is another example of the trope of mandalizing social and spiritual hierarchies in an rather conservative view of hierarchy while highlighting a communalism and egalitarianism that characterize idealized Buddhist organization of society within the nesting containers of the Universe and the communities like Nubri, as well as reiterating an “enlightened” point of view in which everything is perfect.

17 This oral-tradition record of him using the toponym yam bu rgyal sa”

Conclusions