Tibetan Lamas Research Articles

Mongolian Monastery Erdeni-zu: History and Modernity (Results of an Expedition)

The history of Erdeni-dzu, the first stationary Buddhist monastery in Mongolia, founded in 1585—1586, is considered, and attention is paid to its current state. The relevance of the study is due to insufficient knowledge of the history of individual monasteries that played an important role in the spread of Buddhism, which include Erdeni-dzu, which was a model for other Mongolian monasteries and had a cultural significance in the ethnic history of the people. The novelty of the study is seen in the conclusion that the first monks — Tibetan lamas, who belonged to the Sakyapa school, contributed to the Mongolian lamas in the study and development of the fullness and integrity of the Buddhist theological tradition. They supported the creation of the actual Mongolian monastic community — the sangha, which, until the closure, the Erdeni-dzu monastery was one of the religious, cultural and economic centers of Khalkha-Mongolia. It is reported that in the 30s of the XX century the monastery was closed, in 1944 it was taken under state protection, in 1947 it was transformed into a museum. According to field data obtained by the authors in 2022, it is one of the most actively visited tourist centers and continues to be one of the main factors in the preservation of the cultural heritage of the Mongolian people.

ЩО ЛІПШЕ: ФІЗИЧНА КУЛЬТУРА ЧИ СПОРТ?

According to the Federal center of kinesitherapy and sports medicine of the Ministry of Health and Social Development of the Russian Federation, only 12% of people who are involved in sports become apparently healthy. There has long been a polemic in literature, which is better physical education or sports? Physical culture is a part of General human culture. And the sport is just one of many means of physical exercise within this more General category of «physical culture». Today, unfortunately, culture prevents to live not only for athletes, but also politicians, businessmen and government officials. The article draws attentions to the negative aspects of sports that have become more prominent in recent years: injury, illness and even deaths of elite athletes. The article provides facts, statements of famous scientists, traumatologists, doctors and trainers about the reasons for the negative impact of sports and recommendations how to avoid it and warn that exercise: sports like smoking are dangerous to health. Recommendations for beginner athletes are given. The doctor's consultation and recommendations what kind of sport is best to do need to be at least in this problem. What should be: sportswear, shoes and most importantly what loads to use in the beginning. It is forbidden to go in for sports with a diagnosis of cancer and immunodeficiency diseases, colds and other inflammations and even if you feel ill. You need to listen to your body, finish training at the first signs of fatigue and avoid strenuous physical activity, which is rarely noticed by coaches. According to the statistics of injuries among runners: the most common injuries are knees, then ankles, hips, lower back, muscles and tendons, thighs and calves, upper back and neck. The US Safety Commission has registered 554,000 injuries to cyclists in one year. The recommendations of Academician M. Amosov are shown: a set of 10 exercises, repeating each exercise 100 times. Tibetan lamas recommend only 5 exercises and repetitions from 3 to 21 times each of the exercise. Everything can be used for good or harm. Everything is food, and everything is poison, the main thing is moderation. You can choose high sports achievements and records or high efficiency and healthy longevity.

Mauss and Organ Transplants: Ideas of Connectivity between Recipients and Donors and the “Spirit of the Gift”

This article aims to describe the relationship between donors and their recipients in the context of organ transplants. This analysis is made in the light of Marcel Mauss’s work, offering an expansion on an analysis of his discussion on the “spirit of the gift” and his idea that gifts require reciprocation. It is argued that some recipients of donated organs receive a personal element from the donor in that there is a transfer or sharing of the donors’ personality and spiritual qualities. The article examines the nature of this form of “interconnectedness”. The article considers the qualities of this form of interconnectedness between donors and recipients by examining two specific cases of gift giving. One such case concerns the accounts of the reception of organs by recipients and how they may feel connected with a donated entity. The second case of gifting is the case of Tibetan lamas concerning their funeral ceremonies, where, following cremation, their relics are donated to disciples. This “donation” does not take place by dissecting useable parts of a body for use in another person, but rather by ingestion of the remains of the corpse following cremation. This example shows how such “donations” are seen as incorporating the spiritual qualities and attributes of the donor [1]. The article concludes that while scholars have employed different forms of metaphors to understand the cultural context of organ donations this article analyzes the elements of the “spirit of the gift.” This form of analysis may best be understood in terms of Mauss’s notions of the return of the gift and the creation of a “communal bond”.

Consuming belief

This essay examines two domains in which wealthy Chinese seek to cultivate social distinction. The first section examines luxury consumption and highlights the ambivalences surrounding global luxury goods in China. Given that luxury goods often fail to deliver on their promises of distinction, many wealthy Chinese have turned to new forms of money-mediated spirituality—in particular, patronage of Tibetan Buddhism. I argue that in a context in which forms of value, authenticity, taste, morality, etc., are all too easily reduced to quantitative, monetary terms, appropriation of the spiritual power of Tibetan lamas and the authenticity associated with Tibetan Buddhism has become increasingly attractive to wealthy Han Chinese. This appropriation, however, has generated tensions between practitioners for whom Buddhist patronage is an extension of worldly projects of social distinction and wealth accumulation and those for whom Buddhism is imagined as an isolated spiritual retreat from those same concerns.

Tendrel: A Memoir of New York and the Buddhist Himalayas by Harold Talbott

Reviewed by: Tendrel: A Memoir of New York and the Buddhist Himalayas by Harold Talbott Maria Turek TENDREL: A MEMOIR OF NEW YORK AND THE BUDDHIST HIMALAYAS. By Harold Talbott. Marion: Buddhayana Foundation, 2019. 344 pp. The Tibetan term tendrel describes, among other things, auspicious connections, which benefit those involved. Harold Talbott's autobiography, thus entitled, chronicles the many people who rendered the author's existence a life worth living, indeed a precious human life—in the words of Buddhist teachings, to which the author devoted the largest part of his life. Sadly, Harold Talbott passed away shortly after the publication of this volume. His book may therefore serve as a commemoration of the author's remarkable life, of his contribution to American Buddhism as well as a celebration of the early era of Buddhism's rapid globalization in the twentieth century. In his modesty, the author does not devote many lines to report on his own achievements, important for the activity and support of his Buddhist mentors and friends. Yet Harold Talbott was an influential scholar and practitioner of Buddhism, supporter and benefactor of Tibetan lamas, prolific book editor, and cofounder of the practice center in Marion, Massachusetts, the site of early encounters between Americans and Tibetan masters. Following the epiphany paradigm found in narratives of conversion, the memoir is divided into two parts, the "before" and the "after," devoted to, respectively: the time in the author's life before he was able to meet with and appreciate the teachings of the Buddha; and the part of his life since that happened. The book's first part describes the sophisticated society amid which Harold Talbott was raised and educated. In light of the author's openness about his homosexuality and effeminate boyhood persona, the title "Swanning About" of part 1 appears quite reflective of Talbott's brilliant and self-deprecating humor—a trait that he displays throughout his work. Wit is merely one of the many merits that makes this account so delightful to read. The author impresses us with an erudite knowledge of various faith traditions. The scintillating and thoughtful descriptions of encounters with an imposing amount of cultural and religious luminaries of his day are delivered in the matter-of-fact, yet refined, narrative style we can expect of a man born into the elite and educated in the finest of American schools, but who chose to live a nearmonastic life as a full-time, lay practitioner of Buddhism. [End Page 479] Beyond the many pleasures that this book undoubtedly offers, Talbott's memoirs also provide significant insights into the emergence of networks of cooperation necessary for the functioning of contemporary Buddhism as a world religion. The operation of these plexuses, initiated by tendrel (auspicious connections), is described in the book's part 2 "In Search of the Nature of Mind." This title is, first of all, an homage to the spiritual path and goal of the Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen tradition, of which Harold Talbott became a devoted practitioner. The author also recognizes the role that intersectarian Buddhist connections played in his spiritual quest—his most notable relationship being with the Dalai Lama himself, who is the most celebrated representative of another Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the Gelukpa. Talbott also pays great respect to the two champions of interfaith dialogues that occurred during the 1960s and the 1970s: the Benedictine Prior and theologian Dom Aelred Graham (1907–1984) and the Trappist friar and poet Thomas Merton (1915–1968). In Harold's youth, the mentorship of these two Catholic monks, both fascinated by Buddhism, had a lasting impact on the formation of the author's religiosity and his later conversion to Buddhism. At the end of Talbott's book are eight appendices: transcripts of interviews with and about Dom Aelred and Merton, excerpts from teachings by great Dzogchen masters, and a list of books edited by Talbott for one of his Tibetan teachers, Tulku Thondup Rinpoche. The final appendix, and thus the closing section of the book, is an expression of the author's enduring esteem for and gratitude to the Christian faith of his childhood and youth, which takes the form of a reproduction of the emotively beautiful...

ON THE ISSUE OF THE EARLY INTERACTIONS OF THE MANCHU RULERS WITH TIBETAN LAMAS

The article is devoted to the study of the early connections of the Manchu rulers with the highest leadership of Tibetan Buddhism. Probably, the countdown should be conducted from the 1620s, when the Manchus intensified their interaction with the Mongolian peoples (Chakhars), where the Tibetan lamas already had strong positions. Further development of Buddhism among the Manchus happened due to the important political events: the coming of the Dalai Lama to power in Tibet in 1642, and the seizure of Beijing by a new Qing dynasty in 1644. For the new rulers of China, lamas had been of the fundamental importance, because, thanks to their support, the Manchus have had the right to claim succession of the government (the “mandate of Heaven”) from the Mongol Yuan dynasty, and at the same time, they were able to “appease” the Mongols. Apparently, after a visit to Beijing by the Dalai Lama in 1652, a new phase of the relationship between emperors and lamas began, which brought the Qing China to clashes with the Dzhungar Oirats.

Self-possessed and Self-governed: Transcendent Spirituality in Tibetan Tantric Buddhism

ABSTRACTAmong Tibetan Buddhist tantric practitioners, including in the U.S., visualisation and incorporation of mandala deities imparts a parallel world against which conventional reality is considered impermanent and afflicted. Tantric adepts aspire through meditation, visualisation, and mind-training to dissolve normal selfhood and simultaneously embrace both ‘conventional’ and ‘ultimate’ reality. Ethics of compassion encourage efficient reengagement with conventional world dynamics rather than escaping them: the transcendental ‘non-self’ is perceived to inform effective and compassionate waking consciousness. Transformation of subjective ontology in tantric self-possession resonates with Foucault’s late exploration of ethical self-relationship in alternative technologies of subjectivation and with Luhrmann’s notion of transcendent spiritual absorption through skilled learning and internalisation. Incorporating recent developments in American Tibetan Buddhism, this paper draws upon information derived from a range of scholarly visits to rural and urban areas of the Himalayas, teachings by and practices with contemporary Tibetan lamas, including in the U.S., and historical and philosophical Buddhist literature and commentaries.

Revisioning Buddhism as a Science of the Mind in a Secularized China: A Tibetan Perspective

Tibetan Buddhism is one of the fastest growing religions among Chinese in the twenty-first century. The transnational teaching activities of numerous Tibetan lamas attest to this religious trend in the popular realm of contemporary China. Unlike on their native soil, Tibetan lamas immersed in urban China encounter converts whose acceptance of Buddhism often rests upon a “scientific” assessment of Buddhism. Thus, the Buddhism-science dialogue stands out as a central theme in contemporary Sino-Tibetan Buddhist encounters. Based on the authors’ collaborative study of the Buddhism-science entanglement in this transnational Buddhist context, this article will illustrate that science signifies not merely the conventionally accepted system of knowledge, based on the modern, empirically-driven search for the understanding of the material world. Instead, it connotes a web of interconnected social meanings pertaining to Buddhist understanding, critique, and appropriation of this web. In this regard, the authors argue that simultaneously, science is identified as an integral part of the iconoclastic secularism in modern China subject to contemporary Buddhist critique, science is utilized as an instrument of Buddhist conversion, and science is reconceived as a neutral, open social space for knowledge making, in which an increasing number of Buddhist teachers persistently claim Buddhism as a science of its own.

ВВЕДЕНИЕ В ИЗУЧЕНИЕ ТИБЕТСКИХ ТРАДИЦИОННЫХ МУЗЫКАЛЬНО-ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИХ СОЧИНЕНИЙ (XI–XIX ВВ.)

The paper provides a general overview of the main features and characteristics of Tibetan theoretical works on music written in the 11th-19th centuries. It is generally recognized that a written document of any kind is in many respects a product of the culture and epoch of its creation. To understand a document more correctly a researcher should first learn the respective cultural background. Given below is a concise account of the cultural circumstances in which Tibetan traditional works on music theory appeared as well as some preliminary remarks on the contents and peculiarities of the Tibetan theoretical writings on music already known to contemporary researchers. In fact, works on music theory written by learned Tibetan lamas were not in the focus of traditional Buddhist education. Those were often included in voluminous encyclopedias – without being properly studied. Despite this obvious neglect of musical aspects by the Tibetan Buddhist community, the texts represented in the paper contain a lot of valuable information about Tibetan music theory and practice, Tibetan philosophy of music and music education. On studying these traditional Tibetan works on music theory, researchers would be able to draw a realistic historical timeline telling about the development of Tibetan music culture and, eventually, to introduce this local historical narration into the framework of the global history of music. It should be noticed that at present the articles by Russian researchers that deal with Tibetan music are quite few. A hope is expressed that the paper will help attract the attention of scholars engaged in different fields of research to the problem of investigating Tibetan music theory and traditional theoretical works.

Consuming the Lama

Tibetan understandings about the bodies of spiritual teachers or lamas challenge the idea of a singular and bounded form. Tibetan Buddhists believe that the presence of the lama does not depend on their skin-encapsulated temporal body, or a singular lifespan. After death, it is not uncommon for a lama to materialize in other appearances or to become incorporated into the bodies of others through devotees’ consumption of their bodily remains. In this article, I discuss how the European ingestion of the holy bodies of Tibetan lamas creates new possibilities for embodied intersubjectivity, and also how this practice repositions bodily substance in cannibal discourse.

The spread of Tibetan Buddhism in China: charisma, money, enlightenment

The Spread of Tibetan Buddhism in China: Charisma, Money, Enlightenment. By Dan Smyer Yu. London: Routledge, 2012, xi + 222 pages, ISBN 978-0-415-57532-4 (cloth), $138.00. According to Dan Smyer Yu's informative new book, the marketing era of Tibetan Buddhism has begun (4). Charismatic Tibetan lamas and urban intellectuals, in concert with upper-class Chinese devotees and Western enthusiasts, are working to revitalize Tibetan religion and culture in contemporary socialist China, against the backdrop of economic globalization and religious commercialization. While Western observers typically lament the irrevocable loss of Tibetan cultural institutions under the weight of modern Chinese economic expansion, both Tibetan Buddhists and Han Chinese converts are taking full advantage of the opportunities afforded by the growing market economy to recast Tibetan Buddhism as antidote to the crisis of post-Maoist China. This is the story told in Smyer Yu's The Spread of Tibetan Buddhism in China, which focuses on the revivalist efforts of Chinese and Tibetan adepts of the Tibetan Buddhist Nyingma sect in and around the Kham and Amdo regions of Sichuan and Qinghai provinces, respectively. Based on extensive fieldwork in these regions as well as in several urban Chinese centers, Smyer Yu examines the new forms of Tibetan Buddhism that have developed through and within the growing counter-culture of Sino-Tibetan cyberspace. Smyer Yu illustrates how this Tibetan Buddhist revival is trans-cultural, cross-regional, tech-savvy, conversant with modern science and familiar with the economic system (5). And on this last count especially, he emphasizes how global market dynamics have both contributed to the growth of Tibetan Buddhism in China and led to the commodification and thus corruption of Tibetan Buddhist charisma. After an introductory chapter that sets this mise-en-scene of contemporary Tibetan Buddhism, Chapters two and three focus largely on the Weberian concept of and how it is complicated by the case studies that Smyer Yu examines. In Weber's classic formulation, authority derives from the unique force of personality displayed by individual leaders, both religious and secular, which draws crowds of followers and forms the basis for the development of traditions and institutions. With the rise of these institutions, then, the personal charisma of their long-departed founders becomes routinized--calcified into laws and dogmas that lead to the predominance of traditional and legal forms of authority. Smyer Yu argues that in several respects the case of contemporary Tibetan Buddhism contradicts these classic Weberian theories. In Chapter two, Tulkus, genuine and its transmissible interiority in Kham and Amdo, Smyer Yu emphasizes how Tibetan charisma functions as a collective religio-spiritual phenomenon (30). For one, given that the spiritual power of tulkus (reincarnate lamas) derives not from their individual personalities but from their claimed lines of reincarnation, Smyer Yu argues that Weber's charisma needs modification to account for the trans-personal, karmic trajectory of tulku authority. Secondly, integrating an avowedly Durkheimian perspective, Smyer Yu describes Tibetan charisma as a collective representation of the totemic bond between lamas and their followers (36). In other words, a lama's persona is (in part) created and reinforced by his community of followers, as exemplified in the case of Sangye Tsering Rinpoche, an eminent Nyingma tulku of the Smyoshil Monastery in eastern Kham. This fact, Smyer Yu maintains, gives cause to re-evaluate Weber's model of routinization as a degradation of pure charisma into petrified institutional structures. Instead, these very structures often guarantee the renewal of genuine Buddhist charisma, as charismatic education in the Tibetan case is a rejuvenation rather than a process of demise (38). …

A Preliminary Theory of the Defining Dynamic of the Healthy Human Mind

This article presents some of the results of an ongoing study of Tibetan lamas in which the lamas are being individually interviewed about their experiences of their own mind in meditation for the purpose of developing an empirically valid theory of the nature of the healthy human mind. The article begins by first briefly summarizing the case for the position that an empirically valid theory of the healthy mind must be, for reasons of scientific method, a theory that has been derived from observations of the phenomena that appear in the stream of consciousness. It then goes on to: (1) present a descriptive science of these phenomena as they have been described by the lamas in this study; and then (2) derive from this descriptive science a preliminary theory of the defining dynamic of the healthy human mind. An appendix at the end of the article contains a representative sample of the lama interviews from which the data and hypotheses of this article have been derived.

Escaping the Politics of the Irredeemable Earth—Anarchy and Transcendence in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon

Escaping the Politics of the Irredeemable Earth—Anarchy and Transcendence in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon Seán Molloy (bio) But staggering subsets, fellows – you see what this means don’t you? Those Indian mystics and Tibetan lamas and so forth were right all along, the world we think we know can be dissected and reassembled into any number of worlds, each as real as ‘this’ one (Against the Day, 1212). In her discussion of Orwell’s 1984, Judith Shklar makes a compelling case for the use of literature in political theory contra the Platonic opposition to the poets. She concludes that political theory is not tied to an external reality, but rather is part of the ‘languages of the republic of letters’ and that it is by ‘attending carefully to all imaginative and scholarly literature’ that one can ‘establish the historical identity of ideas’ (Shklar, 1985, 17). The advantage of widening political theory’s compass to include literature is that this allows a greater capacity to play out the potentialities inherent in political theory, as literature, ‘illustrates, dramatizes, personalizes, and raises the questions that political theory asks and the ideas it suggests. It even helps us to tell our stories, and indeed may even help us to decide what story to tell and how to go about it’ (Shklar, 1985, 17). Richard Rorty goes further when he states: ‘Fiction … gives us the details about kinds of suffering being endured by people to whom we had previously not attended. Fiction … gives us the details about what sorts of cruelty we ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets us redescribe ourselves. That is why the novel, the movie, and the TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change and progress’ (Rorty, 1989, xvi). Perhaps the most eloquent testimony regarding the benefits of using literary texts in relation to politics and ethics is that of Martha Nussbaum: ‘certain truths about human life can only be fittingly and accurately stated in the language and forms characteristic of the narrative artist. With respect to certain elements of human life, the terms of the novelist’s art are alert winged creatures, perceiving where the blunt terms of ordinary speech, or of abstract theoretical discourse, are blind, acute where they are obtuse, winged where they are dull and heavy’ (Nussbaum, 1989, 5). America, the ‘Applied Enlightenment’ according to Ralf Dahrendorf (Hoffman, 1995, 219) and dedicated above all to the concept of democracy, almost as a consequence has to produce political literature, as Deneen and Romance express it, ‘it is hard to imagine such a democratic society not producing a literature that is decidedly political’ (Deneen and Romance, 2005, 1). Allowing that literature provides us with alternative realities and vocabularies from which to extract lessons and to play out the logics and narratives of political life begs the question, which of our contemporary leading authors can lay claim to the mantle of being the successor to politically aware writers such as Huxley, Koestler, Orwell, Nabokov? Thomas Pynchon, the National Book Award winner and perennial Nobel Prize for Literature candidate, is one such figure in that his writings, to varying degrees, exhibit both literary excellence and also consistent engagement with political questions, such as the role of the state, the possible emancipation of the individual and society and ultimately the transcendence of politics itself. Such is Pynchon’s cultural significance that Harold Bloom has described Pynchon as, ‘the crucial American writer of prose fiction at the present time’ (Bloom, 2003, 1). In addition to his cultural importance, Pynchon is a significant political thinker because, as Samuel Thomas expresses it in Pynchon and the Political, ‘he is a novelist capable of startling political insight. Furthermore, he is also a novelist who forces us to rethink what the political actually is’ (Thomas, 2007, 152). In the absence of a political manifesto penned by Thomas Pynchon those interested in what his works have to say about political life in late modernity are forced to interpret his texts and from them reconstruct a political philosophy. Given that these texts represent some of the most difficult in English literature, this is no...

The Dialectical Phenomena and Processes of the Mind

For the last 14 years, the author has been interviewing Tibetan lamas at considerable length about their experiences of their own mind in meditation for the purposes of: 1) developing a formal descriptive science of the phenomena that appear in the stream of consciousness; and 2) using that descriptive science to describe the defining characteristics of the healthy human mind. This paper will present the central elements of the descriptive science of the stream of consciousness that has been generated by these interviews. It will do so as a means of making the case that the psychological processes that appear in the stream of consciousness have, as a group, a coherent functional identity. This paper will also present representative excerpts from the interviews from which the descriptive science has been derived.

Medicine and Compassion: A Tibetan Lama-s Guidance for Caregivers

Medicine and Compassion: A Tibetan Lama-s Guidance for Caregivers

Devotion to Tibetan Lamas, Self Psychology, and Healing in the United States

Abstract This essay offers an alternative, self psychological model for understanding the possible healing dynamics of the guru-disciple relationship. Previous psychological studies often have interpreted the devotion of Americans to Eastern gurus as inherently enriching pathology for the disciple, yet this understanding does not helpfully explicate much data derived from more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork at a Tibetan Buddhist center in the United States. Instead, re-exploration of the dynamics of the transference and the vicissitudes of Buddhist practice for disciples reveals positive healing processes for some disciples as a result of guru devotion practice.

Enchantment with Tibetan Lamas in the United States

This article explores the relationships of non‐Tibetan American disciples with Tibetan spiritual teachers (lamas) in terms of theory, practice, and experiential meaning. Contrary to some previous studies, data for this article indicate that submission to the lama is not an end in itself, but rather ideally provides an opportunity for disciples to become lamas themselves. Many disciples may find personal empowerment, oriented around the theme of compassionate social action. Understanding that surrender to the spiritual teacher is only a means to a personally empowering goal clarifies our understanding of many Asian religious practices in the West.

Himalayan Dialogue: Tibetan Lamas and Gurung Shamans in Nepal

In the mountain valleys of Nepal, Tibetan communities have long been established through migrations from the North. Because of these migrations over the last few centuries, Tibetan lamaism, as one of the world's great ritual traditions, can be studied in the Himalayas as a process that emerges through with the more ancient shamanic tradition which it confronts and criticizes. Here for the first time is a thorough anthropological study of Tibetan lamaism combining textual analysis with richly contextualized ethnographic data. The rites studied are of the Nyingma Tibetan Buddhist tradition. In contrast to the textual analyses that have viewed the culture as a finished entity, here we see an unbounded ritual process with unfinished interpretations. Mumford's focus is on the dialogue taking place between the lamaist and the shamanic regimes, as a historic development occurring between different cultural layers. The study powerfully demonstrates that interrelationships between subsystems within a given cultural matrix over time are critical to an understanding of religion as a cultural process.

: Himalayan Dialogue: Tibetan Lamas and Gurung Shamans in Nepal . Stan Royal Mumford.

American AnthropologistVolume 93, Issue 2 p. 468-469 Himalayan Dialogue: Tibetan Lamas and Gurung Shamans in Nepal. Stan Royal Mumford. Ernestine Mchugh, Ernestine Mchugh University of California, San DiegoSearch for more papers by this author Ernestine Mchugh, Ernestine Mchugh University of California, San DiegoSearch for more papers by this author First published: June 1991 https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1991.93.2.02a00310AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume93, Issue2June 1991Pages 468-469 RelatedInformation

Aspects of vocal multiphonics

Abstract The author has labelled her new vocal sounds vocal multiphonics. The effect is one of producing more than one tone at a time. The intent of this research project was to find out what the vocal mechanism is doing to produce these sounds. This paper includes: Chapter I, a detailed linguistic analysis of the Vooss/chant, a multiphonic similar to the chord chant of certain Tibetan lamas which was analyzed by Kenneth Stevens, Huston Smith and R. Tomlinson, and Chapter II, an of the author's repertoire of vocal multiphonics. The author has attempted to describe how she learned to produce each sound and what the physiological components of each sound are. The following supplementary material is available: Taped Examples 1–24, referred to in Chapters I and II, including long examples of each of her vocal multiphonics. Taped Example 25, Molly, a four channel tape composition by Alexina Louie, employing the author's new vocal techniques. Shriek, a 16 mm sound film by Alan Johnson and the author. This is a sound/movement improvisation which employs vocal multiphonics as the sonic vocabulary. Tapes and the film are obtainable from the author on request.