Shamanic rituals held by various specialists among Tibetan Buddhist communities such as the Sherpas and the Ladakhis usually have either disappeared under the influence of forms of Buddhism that did not support such worldly practices or have been absorbed into the hierarchy of the Buddhist monasteries. The pawo (dpa’ bo) and the nejum (rnal ’byor ma), the male and female shamans of the Sikkimese Lhopo, have remained independent of the Buddhist establishment and, for the most part, were neither suppressed nor greatly influenced by the lamas. In Tingchim, they perform their rituals side by side with non-celibate village lamas, usually independently but on some rare occasions, jointly.
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Buddhism, which firmly established itself in Sikkim in the seventeenth century, initially absorbed the cult of ancestral gods and local deities which eventually became central to the performance of rituals currently held by both village lamas and shamans. I argue that this shared conceptual view of reality, well rooted in the sacred topography and history of the land, is at the base of their amiable coexistence. So strong is this shared worldview, which links the body, the territory, society and the supernatural, that village lamas and shamans in Tingchim have at times together ignored reformist Buddhist ideas that have permeated into the village in recent decades, the most significant being the question of propitiatory animal sacrifice. Thus, contrary to how the lama-shaman relation has generally been presented in the literature, the situation in Tingchim suggests that viewing it as a dichotomy may be misleading. In her discussion about the relationalism of shamanism versus the individualism of Buddhism among the Sherpas, Ortner (1995) has indeed demonstrated that a simple dual analysis may hide at least as much as it reveals. Although the Buddhist project and its production of a non-relational self does exist and has been analysed by Adams in the context of Tibetan society (1992), instead of focusing on this binary opposition and the details of this process, or how Buddhist thought is pushing the shamans out of business, I chose to explore how and why the relational worldview refuses to die despite an obvious decline in Lhopo shamanistic practice per se.
Tingchim villagers’ worldview revealed itself best during the performance of curing rituals where the working relations of village lamas and shamans could be witnessed along with the infl uence knowledgeable outside lamas and Rinpoches have had on their practice. Not only do these moments of crisis reveal villagers’ ritual preferences, the necessity to save people’s lives provides the ritual specialists with the license to join hands and perform rituals that would, under normal circumstances, be considered unacceptable by orthodox Buddhist lamas. These rituals in turn best illustrate to what extent the ancestral gods and the local deities are thought to link people’s actions to the land, the body, the household, the lineage, the village and the state. I argue that this relational or shamanic worldview is so fundamental to the Sikkimese way of thinking that it underpins the lama-shaman duality. A number of historical, political and economic developments have contributed to the endurance of the shamanic worldview in Tingchim, which now seems to be maintained by the central importance attributed to household rituals as opposed to those held at the Buddhist monastery. Community membership entails mandatory participation in a number of domestic rituals, the performance of which indirectly sustains the amiable co-existence of shamanism and Buddhism at the village level. This study thus asks why village lamas seem uninterested in eradicating, or at least controlling, the shamans’ practices in the way that Tibetan Buddhist lamas generally advocate. And why villagers’ relational or shamanic view of the universe seems to endure despite a decline in shamanic practices? In the process of seeking answers to these questions, I have tried to gain some understanding of people’s ordering of their own world, its basic premises and the articulation of its various realms.
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Sikkim was an independent Himalayan Buddhist kingdom, founded in 1642 by Tibetan Nyingma (rNying ma) lamas and ruled by the Namgyal dynasty, a monarchy of Tibetan origin. It became a protectorate of the British Government in 1890 and was integrated into the Union of India in May 1975, simultaneously putting an end to the rule of the Chogyals. Sikkim is a small mountainous state squeezed between Nepal, Bhutan, West Bengal and Tibet. There is not a single stretch of flat land and altitudes vary from a few hundred metres above sea level to the world’s third highest peak, Mount Kangchendzönga at 8,585 metres. Agriculture is the basis of Sikkim’s economy and is the world’s main producer of large cardamom. The ethnic composition of Sikkim’s half million inhabitants is extremely varied considering that Sikkim is a tiny state of about 70 by 110 kilometres and that twenty percent of its territory lies under perpetual snow. The Anthropological Survey of India has documented twenty-five different communities that can be grouped in three main categories: (1) Bhutias (Lhopos) and Lepchas, the original inhabitants of Sikkim who now represent less than 20% of Sikkim’s total population; (2) people of Nepalese origin, mainly Limbus and Rais, who started migrating to Sikkim in large numbers from the 1870s and who now represent more than 75% of the population; and (3) people from the plains of India, mainly Marwaris, Biharis and Bengalis who are a small although rapidly growing minority of merchants and service castes.
Tibetan settlers came to Sikkim from the neighbouring valleys of Chumbi and Ha and regions beyond these southern valleys such as Kham Minyak from the thirteenth century onwards and established the kingdom in 1642. Their descendants call themselves Lhopo (lho pa—‘people from the south’) but are generally known as Bhutia, Sikkimese or even Denjongpas, the people of Denjong or Demojong (’Brasmo ljongs—‘the fruitful valley’, often translated as the ‘valley of rice’). Since the term ‘Bhutia’ can also refer to any Buddhist highlander living in the Himalayas, and ‘Sikkimese’ may be confusing considering that the Lhopos are now a minority in the state, I will refer to them as Lhopo, which is the term they themselves prefer.
Tingchim is an agricultural village of 54 corporate Lhopo households. Its 265 Lhopo villagers are organised in ten exogamous patrilineages that have little purpose beyond regulating marriages. The majority are descendants of migrants from the adjacent valleys of Chumbi (Tibet) and Ha (Bhutan) who came to Sikkim between 200 and 400 years ago. The village is located in Sikkim’s North District, some 53 kilometres north-west of the state capital of Gangtok along the highway that leads to the high valleys of Lachen and Lachung. It lies on the eastern bank of the river Teesta at an altitude of 1,300 metres and is part of a group of a dozen Lhopo and Lepcha villages centred around the Kagyud (bKa’ brgyud) monastery of Phodong and the Nyingma monasteries of Labrang and Phensang. Tingchim faces the Lepcha reservation of Dzongu, located on the opposite bank of the river Teesta where Geoffrey Gorer carried out fieldwork in Lingthem in 1937 (Gorer 1938).
~~Lamas, Shamans and Ancestors -by- Anna Balikci
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