Consuming the Lama

(Dis)locations of Tibetan Bodily Integrity?

Buddhist doctrine assumes that our experience of being a self-existing entity is mistaken. Not only is there no ‘I’, but the reality of all phenomena – including our minds, bodies and the external world – is a mistaken assumption arising from a false belief in a truly existing self. In a chain of causation the experience of being a singular self-existing entity derives from contact between the sense-organs and their objects. This contact leads to grasping and craving, perpetuating the drives and impulses that obscure our experience and propagates an ignorance that leads to rebirth. The cyclical recurrence of death and rebirth reflects the impermanence of phenomena and the inseparability of birth and death, self and other, mind and body, for these conceptualizations are interdependent and intertwined. Importantly, Buddhist adepts do not aim for a purely theoretical knowledge of these causal conditions; nor do they seek only a personal liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth. Ideally, they endeavour to experience liberation from the illusory nature of the self and external phenomena, and to cultivate an altruistic intent (bodhicitta) for this realization to arise in all sentient beings. Liberation generally requires the transmission of blessings from a high-level lama who is considered to be an incarnation of a previous lama or an emanation of a deity; as such these lamas are held to be inseparable from the historical Buddha in that their lines of descent can be traced back to him. So the lama continually returns to worldly existence to lead others toward liberation from the cycle. On the one hand, attributing phenomena with permanent, inherent existence is the cause of worldly existence, and, on the other hand, belief in a continually enduring essence of the Buddha abiding in physical form is integral to the receipt of blessings that can enable transcendence of death and rebirth. This is a system that both propagates the Buddha’s teaching on the inherent non-existence and impermanence of self and phenomena, and maintains the worldly presence of the Buddha over time.

The body then is also understood, despite appearances to the contrary, as neither independent nor unified. Oneness is not an ontological reality for Tibetan Buddhists, who believe that the experience of having or being a body, or even the physical substance with which we are composed and which seems to make our bodies hang together or congeal, is an illusion based on a skin-clad appearance of separation from other beings and things. Bodies are thought to be interdependent with all other phenomena, and it is commonly believed that religious adepts experience this co-dependence through their own multiple embodied vehicles, which they achieve as a result of spiritual insight and meditative attainments (Zivkovic, 2010a, 2010b).

Although the Buddhist doctrine claims that the body is but an illusion born from the mind’s capacity to manifest appearance, there is an extensive and elaborate tradition of worshipping the bodily relics of the Buddha and other spiritual adepts. Across Buddhist Asia, bones, hair, nails and other apparently transmogrified corporeal material are placed in reliquaries where they are revered and vested with spiritual, even economic capital (Tambiah, 1984; Taylor, 1993). The ‘spiritual qualities’ of a high-status Tibetan lama ‘are considered to have permeated his flesh and bones’ and it is believed that ‘the preserved body will continue to radiate its benediction as long as it is kept’ (Ramble, 1982: 350). So, although after death nothing remains, for there was nothing with inherent existence prior to decease, elaborate efforts are made toward the continued physicality and memorialization of spiritually revered beings.

This article draws attention to the bodily incorporation of a lama’s bodhicitta, or the materialization of his altruistic intent, through the practice of consuming relics. In so doing, it explores both the dialectic between presence and absence that these post-mortem manifestations signify, and the conduits through which the lama is re-embodied and his accessibility reproduced or renewed among followers. Representing a particular personage and transferring value to its users, relics have been explored as indexically symbolic, exposing the conventions of cultural tradition and revealing the interpersonal context of action through which devotees create, establish or infer meanings (Tambiah 1984: 132). In other words, that which was present long ago is ‘indexically’ present in posthumous forms. This presence is re-established in relics and other indices of the deceased such as hagiographies and reincarnations (Zivkovic, 2010b), and reincorporated into the bodies of followers by ‘tasting’ sacred substances (Gayley, 2007). Commonly understood among Tibetans to be the body of the lama, relics are considered another manifestation of his presence. For the believer then, and phenomenologically speaking, the relics embody the sanctified form from whence they came (Martin, 1994: 274).

In an attempt to accommodate devotees’ experience of posthumous interrelations with the lama, I employ phenomenological approaches to intersubjectivity and embodiment. Csordas characterizes embodiment as an ‘indeterminate methodological field defined by perceptual experience and the mode of presence and engagement in the world’ (1993: 135). Csordas’s notion of embodiment incorporates ‘somatic modes of attention’ that are ‘culturally elaborated ways of attending to and with one’s body in surroundings that include the embodied presence of others’ (Csordas, 1993: 138). Embodiment in this sense involves an inter-corporeality that can be ‘diffused with other persons and things in a unitary sociomythic domain’ (Csordas, 1994: 7). It does not ‘entail a notion of the subject or of selfhood as some skin-encapsulated, seamless monad possessed of conceptual unity and continuity’ (Jackson, 1998: 6). On the contrary, it includes and enables a new morphological understanding of the body through which people can cross between human and extrahuman worlds, and thereby feel that they can imaginatively if not actually control the universe as a particular extension of their subjectivity, much as tools allow one to manipulate matter as an extension of one’s own body (Jackson, 1998: 6–7).

The Setting

Between 2004 and 2006 and over a period of 18 months I researched the lives and deaths of Tibetan Buddhist lamas and their followers in India’s Darjeeling Hills. In the village of Mirik, which straddles the Nepalese border and lies 48 kilometres south of Darjeeling town, I attended, and to some extent participated in, the final week of 49-day funeral ceremonies of Bokar Rinpoche, a high-status lama within the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism. Here I met a large number of European Buddhists who had come to pay respects to their lama. Like the monastic and local lay population they were there to receive his blessings and to pray for his swift reincarnation during the critical juncture when he remained in between bodies. I later returned to Mirik periodically to attend ceremonial events and to meet with monastic and lay practitioners during informal occasions.

At the funeral rites I learnt of a common Tibetan discourse that high-status lamas possess trikaya, the three kaya or ‘bodies’ of the Buddha: an all-pervasive and non-dual dharmakaya; the sambhogakaya, corresponding to the manifestation of celestial deities; and the nirmanakaya, or emanation body, the vehicles into which spiritual exemplars consciously incarnate and reveal themselves to ordinary human beings (Samuel, 1993: 282–3; see also Cleary, 1986; Mills, 2003: 275–7; Narayan, 1987: 29; Samuel, 1989, 1993: 255; Thurman, 1994: 330). Bokar Rinpoche is believed to have attained these bodies. As a reincarnate lama, his physical body, albeit deceased, was his nirmanakaya vehicle. His accomplishment of the deities Chenrezig and Tara through tantric practice enabled his manifestation of their sambhogakaya forms, and his spiritual attainments, evidenced through a saintly death, were commonly signalled as the activity of dharmakaya.

In a more worldly portrayal of the lama, Bokar Rinpoche is accredited with working to reorganize Tibetan Buddhism both in India and abroad. Exiled in India, he followed in the footsteps of his own teacher, Kalu Rinpoche, who, from the 1970s, established Kagyu Buddhist centres in America, Europe and Taiwan, actively pursuing the new formations of a growing international Buddhist community. After years of travelling and teaching overseas, Bokar Rinpoche developed an annual seminar programme which was held over ten days at a hotel in Siliguri, an Indian town a couple of hours drive away from his monastery. For a fee, participants with varying degrees of experience in Buddhism were initiated and instructed into some of the teachings of the Kagyu tradition, and, in turn, their payments contributed to the redevelopment of Bokar Rinpoche’s monastery in exile. Hundreds of students from around the world received instruction for over a decade and until his death in 2004 at the age of 64. The seminars and their entailed teachings were designed to meet the lifestyles of lay practitioners involved with family and careers; participation required a commitment to an hour a day or more of formal practice which could be accommodated within the ‘busy lives’ of western practitioners. ¹

The passing of Bokar Rinpoche was commemorated with the traditional 49 days of ritual ceremony. During this time monks from the different lineages of Tibetan Buddhism gathered together to conduct specialized rituals in separate rooms within the grounds of his monastery. I attended the final week of these rites, joining Bokar Rinpoche’s devotees in the main shrine hall, where eminent lamas along with lay and monastic disciples chanted the Kagyu Gurtso, songs of realization composed by Kagyu masters. ² Enshrined in an ornate box and adorned with colourful Tibetan brocade, the bodily remains of Bokar Rinpoche were the focal point of the shrine room during the funeral ceremonies. Together with long chains of marigold flowers, colourful fairy lights decorated the structure, flickering on and off, complementing the manifold colours of the edifice in which the body was enclosed. A platform around the body displayed flowers, ornamental statues of the Buddhas, photographs of Bokar Rinpoche along with incense, jewels, money and silk scarves, which disciples had offered during the continuous flow of circumambulations that extended throughout the ritual ceremonies.

Each week monks performed a different ritual sequence up until the forty-ninth day, which marked the end of the ceremonies. At the head of the shrine room, high lamas sat nearest to the bodily remains of Bokar Rinpoche and in close proximity to other prominent lamas, including Kalu Rinpoche, who in this present incarnation is heir to Bokar Rinpoche’s lineage and who was his teacher in a former life. Monks sat in line behind these eminent figures and international disciples filled the remaining space, sitting in allocated areas along the fringes of the room. A procession of local laity entered to pay their respects to Bokar Rinpoche; often joined by other disciples, they would prostrate themselves toward the body and circumambulate the circumference of its enclosure. On occasion they would sit among the international disciples, many of whom accompanied the monks in prayer.

Sitting cross-legged, monks followed old wood-block texts with pages crumbling at the edges, lifting each leaf of prose carefully, page by page. Day after day, prayers were recited, their voices blending in rhythmic harmony. Spacious and immaculate, the shrine room accommodated the increasing numbers of new arrivals, finally containing hundreds of disciples, many of whom were Bokar Rinpoche’s foreign students. Lining the outer reaches of the room, international guests from regions as far-ranging as Europe, Taiwan, America and Australia participated in various capacities. ³ Arriving in Calcutta or Delhi after long-haul flights and further journeying into the foothills of the Himalayas to ceremonially commemorate the passing of their lama, they remained in the main shrine to be near his physical remains. Many read and chanted along with the monks in Tibetan language, reading from either wood-block texts or modernized versions published in overseas dharma centres, which contained Tibetan script alongside phonetic and semantic translations. Alongside the fluent recitations of Tibetan chant others quietly read the English-language publication of the Kagyu Gurtso, titled Rain of Wisdom. A handful of people had brought their well-loved copies of this text and read it line by line as those around them chanted. In the evenings, both foreign students and monks from Bokar Rinpoche’s monastery gathered to chant prayers. Composed and published in Tibetan and English, a book of chants for the swift reincarnation of Bokar Rinpoche had been produced after his death and was freely distributed inside the monastery.

Consuming Body

As is common in Tibetan (and South Asian) contexts, the bodies of spiritually superior beings are transformed through religious practice to such an extent that even in death their bodily wastes, by-products and flesh are given the same status as the living person from where they originated (Martin, 1994: 273–4; Tokarska-Bakir, 2000: 77). In the course of the funeral ceremonies, participants were informed that Bokar Rinpoche’s dead body continues to carry a soteriological power, and accordingly various methods were used to ‘extract and benefit’ from its properties (Ramble, 1982: 353; cf. Garrett, 2010). Salt crystals, which were used to embalm the body, drawing out the moisture and drying the corpse, were distributed to devotees for their consumption. Other substances such as blood and semen were ritually prepared and refined before being distributed to devotees in the form of red and white bodhicitta pills. Although commonly understood as the virtue of an altruistic intent, bodhicitta also refers to the creative substances of the body, which can be transformed and purified through tantric practice. The Tibetan abbot of the monastery, Khenpo Lodro Donyod, discussed the appearance of bodhicitta as integrally connected to Tibetan Buddhist embodiment. He informed the international disciples that Bokar Rinpoche had attained trikaya, the three bodies of a Buddha. His material and impermanent form, or nirmanakaya body, had now passed away. This death was communicated as consciously determined by Bokar Rinoche, who, it was reported, remained in a state of meditation for three days after his physical death. This state of meditation, or samadhi, was marked by his ‘abiding in dharmakaya’, a non-dual and consequently non-spatial and non-temporal vehicle, from which all things and beings are said to emerge. Made possible through his accomplishment of the deity in tantric practice, the cessation of this samadhi involved his manifestation in sambhogakaya form and the discharge of red and white bodhicitta from his nostrils. As the abbot communicated to Bokar Rinpoche’s disciples:

His death was unlike that of ordinary beings. For three days after his passing, he remained in samadhi. This samadhi is a profound state of concentration. It is an unshakable state of dharmakaya. When the body has the appearance of samadhi the mind is in dharmakaya. Then, three days after his passing Bokar Rinpoche released his meditation, manifested in sambhogakaya form and bodhicitta left from his nostrils in the form of red and white creative fluids.

A German devotee later explained the emission of these substances as the accomplishment of an advanced meditation involving the movement of subtle energies around the body and through five power centres (genitals, navel, heart, tongue and crown). The simultaneous release of bodhicitta and arising as the deity, or manifesting in sambhogakaya form, signals a transmutation of gross physicality into purified nectar, a process described at length in Tibetan texts and which is believed to be achieved by union with a deity through tantric practice (Garrett, 2010). Diluted with water and mixed with herbs, bodhicitta was circulated among devotees in the form of tiny red and white pills, along with other pills made from the water used to clean Bokar Rinpoche’s corpse. Mixed with clay, this water was also used to make small tsa-tsa, or images of Chenrezig, commonly understood among the devotees as the deity of compassion whom Bokar Rinpoche was said to embody or emanate in sambhogakaya form. These clay images, along with squares of fabric from the robes worn by Bokar Rinpoche at the time of his death and during his samadhi, were also distributed. The abbot informed us that these objects were relics from the trikaya complex of Bokar Rinpoche and devotees commonly held that these materials were blessed by virtue of their impregnation with bodhicitta, both an altruistic quality and the bodily substance of their lama.

Foreign disciples often discussed these bodily remains as a means through which they could access dharmakaya. His physical corpse and the bodhicitta pills, made from the procreative substances, were said to contain his ‘dharmakaya mind’. I was told:

This is what he can offer to disciples. Now is the time that they can merge their minds with his. When an enlightened being dies he remains in the dharmakaya. The ceremonies and prayers are performed so that we can merge with his mind. We are assisted in this process by being here, by circumambulating the kudung and even just by being near the physical body we are strengthening our connection with Bokar Rinpoche and receiving his blessings. This is why the body is being kept. The body will be preserved and later, once the embalming process is complete, displayed inside the monastery for the benefit of his disciples and anyone who sees it. By eating the pills and salts we can become closer to the lama.

By appropriating Tibetan understandings of the activities that unfold in and around the lama’s body at the time of death, devotees came to perceive bodily substances not as representations of an absent lama but as the materialization of his presence, a sacred embodiment of dharmakaya materialized as bodhicitta. In identifying both the lama and his relics as physical embodiments of this altruistic intent, it was not unusual for European devotees to speak of their experiences of love and compassion when in contact with his materializations. Freund (2009) has discussed morphological imaginations of photic or light experiences as the materialization of charisma for devotees of the Guru Maharaj Ji; similarly, devotees understand the quality of bodhicitta to be embodied in relics.

The salt has drawn out the moisture from Rinpoche’s body. It holds the liberated vehicle of his dharmakaya mind. You can put some in an amulet to wear around your neck for protection. But you can also put some in hot water and drink it before a meditation practice or to feel Bokar Rinpoche with you.… This salt, like the bodhicitta pills … is the physical substance of his compassion for all sentient beings. I don’t know how to explain, it is beyond description. It is the manifestation of his realized mind, the dharmakaya. Bokar Rinpoche abides in these substances and depending on the strength of your devotion he can pervade your being when you taste it.

The ‘pervasion’ by the lama of the bodies of followers indicates an intersubjective extension of bodily integrity where boundaries between self and other, presence and absence, even life and death are blurred. Extending Samuel’s argument that Tibetan Buddhism is a ‘transformative practice’ that can effect shifts in western followers’ sense of ‘self’ (2005: 339), I assert that these ‘shifts’ transpire through practices like the ingestion of relics because these practices enable an experience of reciprocated intersubjectivity with the lama in ways that affect their own bodies in a ‘transmission of force or intensity’ (Clough, 2010: 224). These affects or intensities are considered to be particularly palpable in the experience of consuming, even coming into contact with highly realized lamas and their posthumous embodiments, or materializations of bodhicitta. In communicating these affects, devotees often described a general feeling of contentment even blissfulness, sometimes accompanied by sensations of lightness or subtle vibrations felt both inside the body and on its surface. Devotees would frequently remark that they felt the lama inside them, as if there had been a ‘pervasion’ of their being. Juliet, a French devotee, reported an experience of Bokar Rinpoche entering her as ‘the deity, as sambhogakaya’:

There was no me. I did not know my name or who I was there was only Bokar Rinpoche. It was so deep, so strong. When I had this feeling I was overwhelmed with deep, deep love for Bokar Rinpoche …

For me Bokar Rinpoche is my master, a reflection of my true self. He is also my mother, my father, sister and brother, the whole family, everyone and everything.…

Since his death I feel him even more strongly. Before I needed to go and see him. Now I know I will not see him again, not in the same form. Before I always had to be near his physical body and now I do not have to go anywhere. I feel his presence inside. He is dharmakaya. He is inside, outside, everywhere. Now he is always with me, guiding me. I know I do not need to be here in India near the monastery. When I go home to France I will feel him; he will be with me there.

Such affects sometimes occurred spontaneously, but, more frequently, they were cultivated through Buddhist practices, including meditating on the lama and reciting prayers or mantras, and such practices occurred in tandem with devotees’ ingestion of relics. It could be said that these devotees were ‘learning to be affected’ (Latour, 2004) through increased engagement with Buddhist categories of knowledge and the development of sensory capacities or new modes of attention. Like Thai Buddhist meditation on cadavers and photographic images of dead bodies (Klima, 2001), religious followers see the lama’s deceased body or bodily substances as a ‘desirable aesthetic’ as they learn to be affected in ways that ‘lead to an intimate awareness, a seeing of the body in the body, a visceral reproduction in which, ultimately, a copy of a body can be re-transformed and restored into an original: into a body once again’ (Klima, 2001: 569).

Importantly, these bodily substances were not raw dead flesh: they were refined and consecrated in their ritual preparation as pills, salts and iconography. They were by-products of a cadaver, albeit a holy one. Common ideas about the desirability or repulsiveness of certain bodily objects were thus eschewed in discussions about Bokar Rinpoche’s corpse. In refashioning categories of edibility to reflect Tibetan classifications of bodily purification, foreign disciples reconstructed the lama within their own bodies and renegotiated their understanding and experience of the world in ways that overcame Kristeva’s source of abjection, the appearance of an object or that which is ‘opposed to I’ (Kristeva, 1982: 1).

It is in these cross-cultural encounters that we can see Jackson’s ‘existential imperative’ at play, the agency that enables individuals to redefine their world. The vehicles through which lamas relate to others and engage with the world are constantly remade in the human ‘ability to gainsay and invent, to countermand in our actions and imagination the situations that appear to circumscribe, rule, and define us’ (Jackson, 1998: 29). In their consumption of Buddhist body concepts and relics, a new wave of Buddhist practitioners domesticates their perception and experience of the trajectory of the life-course. In assuming the continued existence of other human beings through relics, they endeavoured to make sense of the ‘flux of experience’, extending a person’s life through conceptual models such as trikaya because such models and classifications ‘provide a way of salvaging some sense of mastery over a world that masters us, of regaining or renegotiating a balance between what we can and what we cannot control’ (Jackson, 1998: 32). By its very nature, culture and its categories of knowledge are elusive; they are always a negotiated process of the give and take of social life. This creative capacity to act in and ‘think of the world as something one creates’ (Jackson, 1998: 29) is a reciprocal affair; Bokar Rinpoche’s foreign disciples were refashioning the cultural contours of their embodiment while the actual continuity of the monastery was garnered from their support. In their consumption of relics and relic discourse they were re-inventing the parameters, not only of their own bodies and the body of their lama; they were in turn re-creating Tibetan Buddhism in a new cultural milieu.

Conclusion

Research on mortuary endocannibalistic practices, in which the body or bodily parts are ingested as a means for the living to demonstrate affection for the deceased and their kin (Conklin, 2001) and to regenerate social institutions (Meigs, 1984), underscores the importance of group renewal. Social reproduction is also relevant to the Tibetan Buddhist consumption of bodily relics, especially in the diasporic Tibetan religious community. However the postcolonial tendency to describe European consumption practices as metaphorically cannibalistic tends to reproduce the dualism between primitivism and civilization that it seeks to dislodge. It also raises questions about the group to which the European Buddhists actually belong. Is the European consumption of Tibetan Buddhist bodies and culture exo- rather than endo-cannibalistic? How do we renegotiate these boundaries in a postmodern world?

Tibetan Buddhism itself holds that the consumption of body parts from a spiritually eminent being is an auspicious and sacred act. Their bodies are not vile; on the contrary, they are consecrated and form part of a higher gastronomy than that which is attributed to the mundane world of everyday edible foods (Garrett, 2010). ‘Dead flesh and bodily excretions may normally be sources of pollution, but in the case of high bla-ma foul becomes fair’ (Ramble, 1982: 353). Accordingly, discourses of cannibalism, which equate the practice of consuming bodies with savagery and violence, do not adequately reflect Tibetan practices of consuming consecrated flesh or human by-products. Importantly, Tibetan Buddhism itself espouses a philosophy of the interdependence of all phenomena – humans, animals, ghosts, hell-beings and buddhas – in a complex continuum of our minds, bodies and world (Germano, 2004: 52). The central tenets of Buddhist philosophy hold that we can experience the world within ourselves. We can incorporate the other into our own bodies through Buddhist practice and we can ‘incorporate an Other as food’ (Garrett, 2010: 326).

Classical figurations of cannibalism, which entail the incorporation of power in the embodied eating of flesh, are refashioned in neocannibalism, a late-capitalist entanglement of consumption, desire and power (MacCannell, 1992). Neocannibalism entails the absorption of difference in practices that consume cultural others. Such practices, MacCannell argues, lead to the exploitation of vulnerable, marginialized groups and an increasing homogeneity of cultural forms. ‘If we are all one’, he states, then ‘it is necessary to incorporate everything, to leave nothing outside the self.… It is not merely that everything is a mirror image of the self; everything, including other human beings, is the self’ (1992: 57). MacCannell’s neocannibalism could be applied to the European adoption of the Tibetan practice of becoming empowered through eating by-products of the lama’s corpse. But are devotees ‘swallow[ing] up’ (Root, 1996: 6) the life-force of other cultural entities through a cannibalistic extension of imperialist colonization? Do they engage in an asymmetrical system of appropriation, dehumanizing and ‘eat[ing]-up these people and their lives’ (King, 2000) and cultures through the imposition of late-capitalist ideology?

Although the experience of European devotees cannot be the same as the experiences of Tibetan devotees, for they are flavoured by different cultural contents, the symbolic usage of the term ‘cannibalism’ to convey a western consumption of foreign cultural practices and patterns implies the incorporation and negation of alterity (King, 2000). It raises questions about the quality, tenor and authenticity of traditions as they move into new cultural contexts, begging the question, not only of what is lost in the transmission of tradition across cultures, but also of what is imposed by western Orientalism (Bishop, 1989, 1993, 1997; Lopez, 1998). However, fixation on cultural loss can overlook the reality of cultural change, and Orientalist approaches detract from the control and development of Tibetan heritage on their own terms. Locking Tibetans into passivity, their beliefs and practices become consumed by outsiders’ constructions.

Historical and existential agency thus must be taken into consideration when attempting to determine what is genuine and what is spurious at any given point in time and space. In other words, what might have been ‘authentic’ in 1958 is not necessarily so in 1997 and vice versa. (Korom, 1997: 10)

Scholarly criticism of cultural consumption and innovation can adhere to notions of a ‘salvage mentality’, where the negotiable nature of cultural influence is undermined in favour ‘of authenticating the past by placing more value on it in the present’ (Korom, 1997: 3). Such views, however, disregard the general trans-temporal and trans-spatial nature of cultural displacement, and they pass over quintessential Buddhist categories of knowledge regarding space and time. The temporal and spatial habitations of high lamas, reflected in the conceptual framework of trikaya, take hold in diverse forms. In their nirmanakaya vehicles they can endure in material formations of relics and reincarnations. In sambhogakaya they reign in a quasi-physicality. In dharmakaya they pervade all appearances in a plane of existence beyond birth, death and all other reference. In this ontology the presence of the lama continues from life to life, and in ever-changing material and ethereal constitutions.

This extension or evolution of these modes of presence is remade in new intersubjective relations between the devotee and the deceased. Tibetan assumptions of intersubjectivity involve a spatial and temporal extension beyond a singular bodily form and lifespan, which, to some extent, is propagated by devotees from other cultural contexts who reproduce the lama’s posthumous presence as a social reality. Emphasizing bodily relics as a medium in which the lama is memorialized, I have attempted to develop an orientation for exploring various posthumous modalities of presence. In highlighting the importance of consuming bodily relics, I demonstrate how this phenomenon can be seen as a vehicle through which the presence of deceased lamas can influence or permeate the physical and emotional states of their followers. I attempt to expose how coming into contact with the lama in his posterior forms is believed to effect a transmission of power in a transformative interexperience between lama and devotee that is considered an acquiescence to divine potential within the recipient. Religious followers commonly understand that the presence of a lama does not depend solely on a skin-encapsulated temporal body, a singular physical form or lifespan; presence can be expressed through other ways of being.

This presence travels from body to body in the process of reincarnation; it passes through words uttered during ritual recitations; it penetrates the landscape of monastery and home; it can diffuse into ringsel and other relics; and it is consumed by the bodies of the faithful. These various modalities of presence permeate boundaries: they pass in between bodies.

The cross-cultural encounters at the funeral rites of Bokar Rinpoche demonstrate how ‘authenticity’ changes over time through the reciprocal relations that characterize the flux of social life. Bokar Rinpoche, or Tibetan Buddhist cultures for that matter, cannot readily be viewed as easy victims of subjection controlled by western desires. Through offering the bodily remains of Bokar Rinpoche to his European devotees, the social institution of the Kagyu school was renewed and reproduced as connections between an exiled people and foreign lands became sedimented in the substrate of physical bodies.