Reviews

The Taming of The Demons

Violence and liberation in Tibetan Buddhism

By Jacob P. Dalton
Yale University Press, 2011
$40; 336 pages

Reviewed by Rory Lindsay

Mahakala (Buddhist Protector) - Shanglon (Minister)
1800 –1899
Nyingma and Geluk Lineages

T
here once stood a buddha coated
in spiders, scorpions, and snakes.
He had nine vile heads, enormous
wings, eighteen hands clasping fearsome
instruments, and spat fire as he trampled
the beings underneath him. The perfec-
tion of compassion, he forced a trident
into the torso of a ruthless demon named
Rudra—a formerly devout Buddhist
who became an enemy of the dharma
after misunderstanding key doctrines—
and consumed him, thereby ending his
awful career. In the buddha’s stomach
Rudra was purified, and after emerging
from the buddha’s anus, he pledged alle-
giance to him and begged for liberation.
The buddha offered teachings before
finally destroying him, liberating him
into emptiness and reconstituting him
as a protector of the dharma.
Told and retold in various tantric
Buddhist sources, this narrative has long
served to justify the tantras’ insistence
on compassionate violence as a path
C o l l e ct i o n o f R ub i n Mu s e u m o f Art ( a cc . # P 1 9 9 5 . 2 1 . 5 )

to liberation. Violent ritual, Buddhists

have reasoned, became necessary when
Rudra emerged as a powerful demonic
force. The longest extant version of the
story is found in the Compendium of
Intentions Sutra, a central work of the
Anuyoga class of tantras belonging to

Rory Lindsay is a Ph.D. student in the Department

of South Asian Studies at Harvard University.

77 fall 2011 buddhadharma: the practitioner’s quarterly

 Reviews
the Nyingma, or “Ancient,” school of
Tibetan Buddhism. In his new book,
The Taming of the Demons, Nyingma
specialist Jacob Dalton takes this text
as his starting point, building around
it a fascinating history of violence in
Tibetan Buddhism.
Associated with the Rudra myth are
numerous ritual manuals. Mimicking
Rudra’s liberation at the hands of a bud-
dha, these works identify the steps for
conducting the ritual murder of those
who threaten the dharma. While nearly
all of these manuals recommend an effigy
of paper, cloth, or dough, Dalton finds
instructions in a tenth-century Tibetan
manuscript from the famous “library
cave” at Dunhuang that suggest the
involvement of a live victim. First, the
text lacks a summoning rite, by which
one draws the victim’s consciousness to
the effigy. It also describes lobbing the
victim’s severed head onto a mandala,
and then divining his or her next rebirth
based on the head’s position, explaining
that if it splits open, the rebirth will be
favorable. Such a rite, Dalton argues,
demands a three-dimensional effigy that
is capable of splitting apart. Another text
from Dunhuang even identifies both the
victim’s head and blood as offerings.
Yet, as Dalton carefully notes, none of
this guarantees that living victims were
targeted in the performance of these ritu-
als. The use of three-dimensional dough
effigies is common in Tibetan Buddhism,
and some of these effigies even contain
hidden pouches of blood. Similarly, these
texts may have guided only imagined
ritual practices, in which the meditator
performs the offerings in his or her mind.
Add to this a lack of archaeological evi-
dence and the matter becomes highly
ambiguous, resisting attempts at con-
clusive historical assessment.
Discussions of human sacrifice are
not confined to the ritual manuals,
however. Dalton turns to the writings of
King Yeshe Ö (947–1024), who issued a
buddhadharma: the practitioner’s quarterly fall 2011 78
public edict commanding the tantrikas
of Tibet to desist from “liberating” peo-
ple alive. Yeshe Ö laments that while the
great kings of Tibet’s imperial period—
Songtsen Gampo (circa 605–649/650)
and Trisong Detsen (circa 742–800)
among them—had successfully halted
blood sacrifices, these rites had resur-
faced during the century and a half of
political tumult and lawlessness preced-
ing him.
Yeshe Ö’s edict is striking in its men-
tion of human victims. Yet Dalton is
careful here too, situating the proclama-
tion in its legal and political context. At
the time of Yeshe Ö’s reign, local chief-
tains styled themselves as the inheri-
tors of both clan power and tantric
lineages, associating with practitioners
of various tantric traditions. Seeking
political dominance, Yeshe Ö aimed
to unite these chieftains and tantrikas
under a single Buddhist law, declaring
Buddhism the state religion, devising a
sophisticated legal system, and calling
for a return to institutional monasticism
and more conventional Buddhist ethics.
He chastised tantrikas who ate meat,
drank alcohol, had sex, frequented
cemeteries, and offered flesh to the bud-
dhas, along with the chieftains who had
allowed such behavior to occur. To him,
these individuals had misunderstood the
Buddhist teachings, taking them literally
while deeper, symbolic meanings were
available. Certainly, Yeshe Ö did not
seek to suppress the tantras entirely,
but rather to domesticate their practice,
dubbing “liberation” rites involving effi-
gies Buddhist, and “sacrifices” involv-
ing live victims demonic. While Dalton
does not believe Yeshe Ö’s edict reflects
pure self-serving political expediency—
it is possible that Yeshe Ö is responding
to real murderous undertakings—his
criticism of tantric violence worked to
justify the rational rule of law, highlight-
ing the consequences of the chieftains’
approaches to governance.
 Reviews
A more recent Tibetan work by the
Nyingma author Rigdzin Garwang
(1858–1930) echoes the violent impli-
cations of Yeshe Ö’s edict. At around
the time that L. Austine Waddell (1854–
1938) was writing The Buddhism of
Tibet or Lamaism, the first detailed
study of Tibetan Buddhism to appear in
English, Garwang was composing a text
titled The Dangers of Blood Sacrifice.
Unaware of each other, these two men
shared similar attitudes toward violence
and societal reform in Tibet. Waddell, on
the one hand, criticized Tibetans for defil-
ing true Buddhism with their sorcerous,
violent ways, and prayed that his fellow
British colonialists would one day liber-
ate them from their lamaist overlords.
Garwang, on the other hand,
addressed his fellow citizens of Nyarong,
a remote region on the border between
Tibet and China, who had only recently
adopted the traditions of institutional
Buddhism. He admonished those per-
forming perverse blood sacrifices, and
demanded observance of Buddhism’s
more conventional ethical ideals. While
declaring that Indian Hindus, Tibetan
Bönpos, and certain Buddhists clearly
had it wrong, he did not recommend
forgoing such rituals altogether. Rather,
he suggested that an authentic Buddhist
practitioner could perform a liberation
rite without anger, delivering the victim’s
consciousness into a pure buddhafield
before restoring the sentient being who
had been killed. As Dalton observes,
this remarkable procedure departs from
Yeshe Ö’s edict, blurring the distinction
between “sacrifice” and “liberation.”
Yet it also, in his estimation, points
to a context very similar to Yeshe Ö’s,
namely, a Tibet in which blood sacrifices
were actually performed.
Aside from questions of blood sac-
rifice’s historical reality in Tibet, Yeshe
Ö and Garwang’s texts also raise ques-
tions about what counts as Buddhist. As
Dalton notes, it is tempting to describe
the Dunhuang liberation rite as an
example of Buddhist human sacrifice,
but many Buddhists would regard the
coupling of the terms “Buddhist” and
“human sacrifice” as oxymoronic. The
majority of ritual manuals demand the
use of an effigy, and numerous Buddhist
texts, including the Buddhacarita, an
early Indian biography of the Buddha,
describe the Buddha’s rejection of
violent Vedic sacrifice. Tibetan histo-
ries such as the Sayings of Ba, more-
over, describe Buddhists condemning
Tibetans’ pre-Buddhist practice of ritu-
alized killings.
Such condemnations, Dalton explains,
continued until Garwang’s day, with
numerous lamas denouncing the use of
ritual violence. Whether in each case they
were responding to flesh-and-blood tan-
trikas to whom institutional Buddhism
seemed overly sanitized or, rather, the
mere possibility that certain practitioners
might take the tantras literally is difficult
to determine. Either way, though, their
writings can be seen as efforts to define
the boundaries of Buddhist practice in
the face of cryptic and authoritative
tantric literature, the difficulty of which
cannot be overestimated.
These are only some of the issues that
The Taming of the Demons so skillfully
illuminates. Much more could—and
indeed should—be said about this out-
standing book. Dalton treats a variety
of other violent matters, from early
Buddhist scriptural allowances for mur-
der, to the employment of Buddhist
rituals of warfare by both “the Mongol
Repeller” Sokdokpa (1552–1624) and
the Great Fifth Dalai Lama (1617–1682).
Equally compelling is his discussion of
violent mythology’s role in the construc-
tion of temples and the mapping of
Tibet’s geography. Each chapter, in short,
offers important insights into violence’s
place in Tibetan Buddhism, resulting in a
rewarding read for those willing to con-
front Tibet’s darker facets.
79 fall 2011 buddhadharma: the practitioner’s quarterly