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Special issue - Rekindling Narratives and Heroes of Nepal

Analogies and antinomies in Tamang stories and heroic deeds: Heroes and victors of immemorial battles and/or victims of ancient curses

Analogies et antinomies dans les histoires et les actes héroïques des Tamang. Héros et vainqueurs de batailles immémoriales et/ou victimes de malédictions anciennes
Brigitte Steinmann

Résumés

Les Tamangs sont-ils convaincus d’être les héros de leurs récits mythiques originels ou les éternelles victimes d’une histoire religieuse et nationale malheureuse ? Comment découvrir leurs réponses et leurs propres analyses dans les trésors oraux de leurs traditions épiques ? Cette lecture sémiotique interroge les subjectivités et les éléments de conviction et/ou de controverse des Tamangs sur leur propre histoire, tels qu’ils se révèlent dans certains gestes héroïques de lamas, de chanteurs de contes, de chamans et de gens ordinaires.

De nombreuses réponses à ces questions existentielles et institutionnelles prennent une forme héroïque dans certains récitatifs chantés par le chanteur de contes tamang, le tamba : idées sur la cosmologie et la fin des temps, énigmes sans réponse sur les origines du ciel et de la terre, des êtres vivants visibles et invisibles, récits d’alliances controversées entre les hommes, les dieux et les démons. Mais on trouve d’autres formes héroïques dans les évocations théâtralisées des origines de la société, déclamées et jouées par des lamas à partir d’anciens corpus religieux rnyingmapa, où les ancêtres sont les héros d’une histoire de rois et de reines du ciel qui ont perdu leur trône à la suite de crimes incestueux. En contrepoint de ces histoires, les drames chantés par les chamans lors de leurs longues transes mêlent arguments épiques et religieux, les plaçant au cœur de leurs combats incessants, tant contre le héros des lamas, Guru Rinpoché, que contre les démons, ennemis de l’humanité. Enfin, certaines idées émises par les gens ordinaires à travers leurs récits et leur langage secret soutiennent cette mémoire collective tissée au cœur d’analogies et d’antinomies religieuses et nationales, évoquant en toile de fond les batailles institutionnelles et politiques.

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But the fact is that they [the Breton peoples] have a complete traditional literature in their legends, their stories, their mythological fantasies, their superstitious worships, their poems hovering about here and there. It was the same with the greater part of our heroic legends before they were repudiated by the cultured part of the nation and got into low company in the ‘Bibliothèque Bleue’.
Renan, The Future of Science. Ideas of 1848 (p184)

  • 1 The data, hypotheses and analyses presented in this article were initially the subject of a (...)

1The wealth and variety of festive celebrations in Nepal, whether they involve singing, reciting texts, dancing, acting or miming; whether or not they give rise to a sometimes gigantic and astonishing machinery to honour the gods and ancestors throughout the city, to please them, appease them, seduce them, constrain them; or to perform multiple blood sacrifices, implorations and supplications to attract the favour of protective or malevolent entities, no longer need to be demonstrated. Among the exceptionally varied populations of Nepal, Buddhist Tamangs of the regions surrounding the Kathmandu Valley are distinguished by the fact that they draw on Hindu and Buddhist mythologies, great Tibetan myths, epics and cosmologies, as well as heroic Indian tales of the Mahābharata and ancient Vedic literature, to address men and the gods. These gods, it must be stressed, are not mere characters in a ritual theatre but the object of complex narrative constructions to which the performance gives body and voice, thus becoming a series of ‘deities’ to whom people pay homage and to whom they turn in order to face the countless challenges of everyday life.1

2If we try to understand the reasons why their Buddhist lama officiants, their shamans and their poets put all their energy into staging battles against the obstacles that constantly stand in people’s way, if we indeed share the harsh daily life that was the lot of rural and mountain populations during the last decades of the twentieth century, we begin to understand how real tragedies occurred and that the heroic deeds at the heart of their festive corpora are responses, however remote, to ancient social and political dramas from which they are forever proclaiming to be capable of emerging victorious, despite proof to the contrary in the form of political, religious and social setbacks. More than a simple hypothesis, their great political resilience to this degrading status, an unshakeable optimism and confidence in their ability to escape their enemies and overcome the ancient curses and historical devalorisation still translate, despite everything, into a certain triumph of Eros over Thanatos, and great faith in human and social endeavours to overcome adversity and to obtain real political status.

  • 2 On the proper meaning of saṃsāra, see Zimmermann and Galey (2021).

3This triumph, however, expressed through endless adventures and battles between human and divine characters, is only achieved through the recognition of a difficult past in which men describe themselves as the vanquished in national history and, from a religious perspective, as more similar to the demons they fight than to the gods they venerate. Evidence of this can be found in their origin myths in which Tamangs trace their history back to bestial and incestuous alliances, while their ultimate destiny is described in terms of negative karma, more oriented towards burning hell than Amitabha’s paradise. Thus, suffering and impermanence would be the watchwords of a history of disorder, chaos and vain religious and political hopes rather than of a victorious outcome outside the rules of the Wheel of Rebirth or saṃsāra,2 and the infamous national classifications in the Muluki Aïn, the national code.

  • 3 On the subject of antinomies, I refer here explicitly to the critical philosophy of Kant, (...)

4Against this backdrop, we wish to show how antinomies (contradictions between two general ideas derived from reality) and analogies3 are closely interwoven in a global heroic gesture that is given to hear, see and think about – within a global cosmological as well as political and aesthetic framework – and whose heroic motifs we attempt to unravel here: are they merely the flip side of a history of defeat, powerlessness and fatality or the permanent reaffirmation of the superior powers of the Tamang masters of rituals and of the optimism deeply rooted in society?

  • 4 By ‘semiotic’ analysis, I refer to the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, and to the d (...)

5Rather than studying Tamang recitatives separately, here we carry out a semiotic4 analysis of the signs that refer us to epic elements – poetic metaphors, attributes and qualifiers of heroes, epithets – by considering them on their own and in relation to the ritual actions and myths that give them meaning. In comparison with each other, they reveal a single heroic thread, a kind of overall epic character whose meaning we seek to decipher through a study of theoretical and formal syntax of elements drawn from the recitatives and ritual constructions that accompany them. We should also remember that the notions and concepts that refer to these heroic characters and actions, and the spatio-temporal frameworks of their stories and/or songs, draw on Hindu, Buddhist and shamanic philosophical, cosmological and religious registers, some of which are very old.

  • 5 If I refer very explicitly here to the notion of the symbolic, it is in the sense given (...)

6The final analysis here seeks, on the one hand, to show how there is permanent tension between the themes of heroes, lamas, bompos, tambas, personally victorious over the obstacles accumulated by man’s enemies, the invisible entities; and on the other hand, to present the idea of their permanent defeat. It’s as if this signifier of ‘heroism’ could only be read through hazardous analogies and antinomies: what we wish to say, what we do and what we demonstrate is constantly contradicted, interpreted and transformed by obscure powers against which we must never stop defending ourselves, proclaiming our power and strength, but with an intensification that is in fact a proclamation of assured impotence and failure; a permanent duality between extending the struggle or giving up, downfall and resignation. What are the foundations of these antinomies and the primary elements of the symbolic forms5 that Tamang lamas, tambas and bompos give us to see and hear?

Heroic gestures given to see and hear 6

  • 6 On the meaning and scope of this formula, see the approach to ritual analysis taken by Seve (...)

7Let’s begin by tracing some of the threads of this Tamang heroic gesture through the vast corpus of books, songs and recitatives, whether accompanied or not by the beat of a drum whose motifs we seek to decipher:

  • 7 See Steinmann et al (2020).
  • 8 In Tamang, this is the concept of mheme chodpa.

8Tamang lamas’ books, written in Tibetan script, read aloud during great exorcism rituals7 for ancestors (meme chodpa),8 for lineage gods and for the domestic world; the playing of musical instruments (cymbals, drums, conches) during funeral rites. In addition, and by analogy, supernatural entities are always accompanied, during ritual actions, by formulas and gestures (mantra and mudrā), which always have a precise value, both in themselves and as a function of the position of the deity they accompany and its iconographic form. Masters of rituals thus evoke the attributes of the gods through gestures, metaphors or epithets that sum up their modes of appearance and the effects they produce.

Fig 1: rnyingmapa lamas, reading in rhythm to their drum (nga), during the ancestor ritual (Doila).

Fig 1: rnyingmapa lamas, reading in           rhythm to their drum (nga), during the           ancestor ritual (Doila).

Photograph by Brigitte Steinmann 1998.

9The songs, tales and riddles of poets and historians – the tambas – were intended to forge links between men and the gods, to celebrate living beings and make alliances, and to recite riddles about the universe, and were set to songs to be sung by two tambas accompanied by a tambourine.

Fig 2: The tamba, Bahadur Singh, recites in rhythm with his tambourine (damphu).

Fig 2: The tamba, Bahadur Singh,           recites in rhythm with his tambourine (damphu).

Photograph by Brigitte Steinmann 1980.

Fig 3: The book ‘Jigs rten gTam chos kyi lo rgyu bshug so: ‘Buddhist Teachings for the World’, with an extract from the Book (Rama Tāmbale gebama banne hrama) containing the Tamba’s words during the funeral ritual.

Fig 3: The book ‘Jigs rten gTam chos kyi lo           rgyu bshug so: ‘Buddhist Teachings for the World’, with an           extract from the Book (Rama Tāmbale gebama banne hrama) containing           the Tamba’s words during the funeral ritual.

Photograph by Brigitte Steinmann 1980

10Long recitatives by Bompo shamans, sung to the beat of a drum during nocturnal trance sessions, shamanic remedies alternating between accounts of epic battles with the spirits and affirmations of their powers, particularly during major pilgrimages to holy places.

Fig 4: Bompo shamans taking part in a drum joust during a pilgrimage to the mountain of Sano Sailung (Doramba district, Nepal).

Fig 4: Bompo shamans taking part in a drum joust during a           pilgrimage to the mountain of Sano Sailung (Doramba district,           Nepal).

Photograph by Brigitte Steinmann 1981.

11All these more or less ancient bodies of work, which sometimes find their inspiration in the Vedic world as well as the various more contemporary stories and songs recorded in booklets and opuscules, contain heroic elements in the form of references to exploits attributed to heroes: mythical or real characters, human or non-human ancestors, gods and/or demons. If it is not the gods who are heroised, it may be the reciter or singer who presents himself as a demon-slaying hero, the victor in ancient battles or the victorious guardian of the righteous doctrine, who is nevertheless set up by the institutions to fail; a failure often conceived by tambas as a fatality, a condemnation not of state but of religious origin.

Figuration of invisible things

  • 9 I show how antinomies and analogies correspond to certain ‘iconographic’ choices to ‘give b (...)
  • 10 Mūrti are statues or images used as supports, foci of devotion and meditation. They are som (...)

12In the semantic and semiological analysis of all the terms examined here, we can therefore take into account both what is seen, ie supports for the figuration of invisible entities, images made to make invisible beings appear and to give them substance; and words, mantras, formulas and sounds closely associated with the making and evocation of these figurative supports. By describing them in precise terms and placing them in strict relation to the explanations for them, to the gestures that make them and to the myths that are recounted about them, it becomes clear how the construction of these heroic narratives is based on analogies and antinomies; in other words, a permanent oscillation between iconography and aniconism.9 In Nepali, Hindi, Tamang and Tibetan terminology, this is the opposition between mūrti (मूर्ति),10 the concrete form of a deity that enables its cultic vision (darśan), and a more abstract form with which we can associate the notion of rten in Tibetan, or support, which would correspond to pratima (प्रतिम) in Sanskrit and Nepali, ie resemblance, similarity or representation of a deity; in Tamang and Tibetan, we would use laku (Tamang) or la sku (Tibetan).

Fig 5: Different mediums of figuration, from left to right: tormos, kur, mingjyang, Namkha shyal (Doila).

Fig 5: Different mediums of figuration, from left to right:           tormos, kur, mingjyang,           Namkha shyal (Doila).

Photographs by Brigitte Steinmann 1981–1988.

The heroic scene as a tripartition of worlds

13Let’s start with a first poetic formulation, that of the recitations of Tamang poets and historians (Nep kāvi ra itihāskar), of tambas, who speak of the appearance and origins of beings, things and times based on invisible presences and who offer a way to describe a space-time of the origins of worlds: how are primitive times, future time cycles (Tam ngonki kalpa dangbori) understood? What form do they take in successive time periods, the future (Nep samsāra or Tam Tharpaling), namely wandering in the phenomenal world or accessing the Land of Deliverance? If one is to be reborn (Tam dhosi kela wa akela: reborn or not), then what kinds of human suffering (Nep and Tam dukha/sukha) will one still undergo as a result of offending the entities living on the different levels of the cosmic universe? Finally, what is the profound nature of life hic et nunc, the present moment, ‘similar to the rainbow, raindrops and dew’, sings the tamba, where moments and forms are always elusive because linked in reality to an idea of disappearance, of luminosity as evanescent as it is improbable, and of a sign of the powerlessness of ordinary people to attain liberation outside saṃsāra (see footnote 2)?

14For Tamangs, this schema of space-time is expressed in antinomies that divide time into a time of the emergence of things and beings, different from the time of human birth itself; a past that is always already there, since it never ceases to reproduce itself in the present and is, at worst, a symbol of renewed suffering and impermanence; and finally an uncertain future, an object of anxiety but also of social and material investment that is all the more important given the uncertainty of human ends. The space-time framework is part of a global cosmic universe (Tam Jambuling-Jambudip, Sk triloka), shared in Nepal by Hindus and Buddhists alike, but which, among Tamangs, is the source of a veritable tripartition corresponding to the hierarchy between the different ritual masters: lamas, tambas, bompos, a hierarchy of characters, each of whom act in their own way as veritable individualised heroes, intervening at different levels of this cosmic universe. They make it visible and audible to people in different, often opposing and conflicting ways. To sum up:

15Lamas refer to heaven – svarga, ākāsha or Tharpaling, celestial realms –, and deal with higher beings, la, devā, Sangye, Cyomdande (Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, great heroes of the past and masters of lineages), one of the most important being Guru Rinpoche (Tam Remporshe).

Fig 6: Guru Rinpoche painted on the walls of the konpo (Tib dgon pa) temple of Temal (Kabhre Palanchok).

Fig 6: Guru Rinpoche painted on the walls of the konpo (Tib           dgon pa) temple of Temal (Kabhre           Palanchok).

Photograph by Brigitte Steinmann 1980.

16Tambas are the masters of the world of the living and the spirits of the intermediate spaces between heaven and hell (Nep prithivī, bhū, bhūmi, sa or Jambuling-Jambudip); they address everyone in the context of their social ties and their different ages (Tam mi, mikate, rokate, akhe-mam), masters and mistresses of the house, gods of the Jyoho-Jyomo lineages, goddesses of the Earth, benevolent or malevolent characters who inhabit it (gods of the earth, territory; Nep and Tam shime-bhume, gods of the rocks and waters, Tam tsen, lu); but they also intercede with the powers above on behalf of those who died recently (Tam chende), and watch over a person’s vital and mobile principles (Tam so, sato, bla).

17The bompos reign over the Pātāla, or Nāraka (Nep and Tam), infernal subterranean worlds, and they address their auxiliary spirits (various Indo-Buddhist deities), Mahākala, Yamā Rāja Yamā Rāni but also malevolent spirits (Tam mamo, gyalpo, mhang, bhut), kings and queens of the underworld, and Karko, a kind of figure of evil and disease reified in demonic form. They hunt down lost souls and fight long battles against the enemies of mankind.

Fig 7: The bompo making the king of the demons gyalpo, alias karko.

Fig 7: The bompo making the king of the demons gyalpo, alias           karko.

Photograph by Brigitte Steinmann 1980.

Material supports for figurative art

18It is through actual figurative supports that people have access to the metaphorical meaning or sumbolon of these spaces and their inhabitants. There are countless material elements and supports for all invisible entities; here we exclude Buddhist canvas paintings (thangka) which refer to the official forms of Tibetan religious art. Only ephemeral figurative bases, those which are doomed to be destroyed, are listed here:

  • Images, diagrams, formulas (Tam mantar) printed on rice paper, with the bodies of a whole magical bestiary, and given to the sick to swallow; effigies (Tam jyangbu) on paper with a stylised drawing of the deceased; temporary constructions made of bamboo or pieces of cloth (Tam kur) as intermediate dwellings for those who died recently and a physical image recalling their body.
  • Statuettes made of cereal or rice dough (Tam tormo, solmo), temporary supports for the gods and demons that are invoked, and which serve as offerings.
  • Polyhedral shapes made from interlacing rods and coloured threads (Tam and Tib Namkha’, mdos), figurative or otherwise, which can temporarily embody spirits and gods, or give form to living beings and the dead. All these objects are destroyed and disposed of at the end of the rituals after intense meticulous work and a considerable accumulation of resources. Sometimes there are also several images of bodies made up of aggregated elements, reflecting the invisibility of a goddess while at the same time giving hera body. For example, in the tamba’s songs, Lhasin Devke Dolma, goddess of the land and earth (equivalent to Dharati Mātā for the Hindus), is the result of the aggregation of the eight different classes of gods and demons in Tibetan literature (Tib Lha srin de brgyad).11

19Another class of images should be mentioned; those featuring on funerary monuments and memorials (Nep and Tam chörten, stūpa, cakli) where more or less stylised portraits of donors can be seen, painted or engraved on the monuments, and decorated with local motifs and colours that may refer either to local domestic and religious life or to high-ranking Buddhist figures. Great memorials to the Buddha (the great stūpa of the Kathmandu Valley) give rise, among Tamangs, to the same kind of veneration and respect as that shown to minor monuments and/or more ephemeral images. All these images link the living to the dead and to their ancestors, to those who have passed on. However, it is as if a chain of progressive dissolution was in fact expressed through the quality of the support, from flimsy materials destined to disappear, to solid materials destined to last.

  • 12 For further developments on this topic, see Steinmann et al, 2020, Worshipping Ancestors, C (...)

20However, this diversity and complexity of cults, their iconographic references and the variety of media in which they are represented present a certain homogeneity when we adopt a historical reading linked to the major doctrinal reforms of Tibetan Buddhism in Nepal and to the imposition of Hindu state ideology since the eighteenth century12. The tensions and paradoxes between these various practices and beliefs, which are played out through hierarchies of specialists, take on new relevance in the contemporary transformations of the globalisation of Tibetan Buddhism. Of all the forms of worship practised by Buddhist populations, none is more concerned with the great alternations between life and death and the links between human and non-human living beings, than those of the Tamangs. Their annual festival of the dead centred around the great Stūpa of Bodnath and the celebrations performed by lamas and tambas around the chortens in the mountains; the pilgrimages to sacred places (Nep and Tam tirthā) where the deities of the Hindu pantheon and their powers of life and death (Vishnu and/or Shiva-Mahādeu) are celebrated by shamans; along with other forms of worship of supernatural entities such as the gods of the land (Tam yulha), all bear witness to this. They also celebrate other entities linked to nature, such as mythical and petrified animals (rocks called ‘the cow, the crab and the tiger’ in the Sailung region, for example), which remind us, along with the great Vedic figures of the Hindu pantheon, how closely linked are the visible and invisible presences synonymous with life and death, and man’s obligations towards those still alive, the departed and those whose death has yet to come.

Fig 8: Recitations for the dead by the tamba B Singh of Temal, near a chorten.

Fig 8: Recitations for the dead by the tamba B Singh of Temal,           near a chorten.

Photograph by Brigitte Steinmann 1980.

21Tamang heroism would therefore be just as real as it is socially and virtually constructed, without being based on a duality opposing nature and culture, visible and invisible forms of life, the animal world and the human world. The ways in which it was expressed, at least in the last decades of the twentieth century, proposed a whole moral and political ethic strongly linked to respect for and protection of the global environment, all forms of life and the perpetuation of a humane and viable world for future generations, even if the chronic shortage of resources and underdevelopment has forced people to adopt sobriety or, in contemporary terms, endemic non-consumption.

The main places controlled respectively by tambas, bompos and lamas

  • 13 The tamba’s reconstitution of life is based on six different ways of being born as (...)
  • 14 In the Nepali language, kāvi ra itihaskar. In the Tamang language, tamba la hwai.
  • 15 The first Tamang texts published in Devanagari script were published in the 1960s. See for (...)

22The tamba, the great Tamang hero, controls the world of the living. He speaks of the Earth, intermediate spaces (transitional worlds) and the universe, Jambudip or Jambuling, as discussed below.13 But tensions and contradictions are present in the recitatives, where the poet-cum-historian, as he describes himself,14 and ‘master of an altar’ (Tam Dongi dopta thi ngapta), is a real-life hero encouraging the reproduction of life only on condition that he defends his flock against all adversities. His tambourine is the very instrument that scares away evil spirits, and it is his dialectic that makes unions possible: a fight against incest and degeneration due to ancestors’ misdeeds, but lasting hope in the ongoing recreation of the bonds that sustain life, both animal and human. The tamba’s powers and references are, of course, challenged by the lamas and bompos. Permanent tension weighs heavily on the heritage of the Tamang tamba, between sung and rhythmic poetry, books and writing. He possesses two talents, of being able to read and to sing, and while the poetry and recitatives are always accompanied by the one-skin tambourine (damphu), an instrument with Vedic origins, known as the tamba, he also relies on the reading of Tibetan and Tamang texts transcribed in Devanagari script. Until the mid-twentieth century, Tamang was only allowed to be written using the Nepali alphabet. Tibetan, as a language and a script, was reserved for lamas and monks, and remained under their control for a very long time.15

23However, radical transformations have occurred in the twenty-first century, after the political revolutions of the 1990s and the awakening of nationalities (jānajāti) heralded the demise of the Hindu Monarchy in 2006. Texts written in Tibetan, but in a language mixing Tamang locutions and Tibetan terms, entitled Rama, Jikten Tamchyoi, are published as the tamba’s own books, especially as he intervenes in the great Buddhist funeral ritual (gewa, Tib dge ba). Today, this character is the absolute emblem of Tamang nationalist claims to Tamsaling, the territory they claim as part of the new federation based on regionalism and language, and he is present at every festival, with men and women alike claiming to be tambas.

24In addition, a vast publishing movement has promoted Tamang-language dictionaries and grammars transcribed directly into the Tibetan alphabet. With the use of the images and poetic metaphors of the tamba as guardian of customs-cum-genealogist, the publication of Rama texts and the widespread teaching of Tibetan to all laypeople, even women, are now seen as a redefinition of social praxis and the division of roles between specialists in Buddhist rituals. Once the sole officiant of marriage, the tamba, who as a scholar was able to become a notable figure during the great administrative reforms of the 1960s in Nepal, is now officially a member of the hierarchy of Buddhist priests. Paradoxically, this is also the very moment he disappeared as a popular teacher of Tamang Buddhism and regulator of social life and kinship; a complete change in his functions took place with the democratisation of Buddhist teachings in monasteries and the new forms of mixed inter-caste and inter-ethnic marriage.

25Social tensions that were expressed in the poetic metaphors used by the tamba for a world of poverty and in verses describing the end of time and the apocalypse, such as

‘We cannot engage in meritorious deeds, such as going on a pilgrimage to holy places, making donations to monasteries, because of our poverty; we marry and procreate, but the purpose of life is to get out of it for good’, the tamba of Temal often repeated.

26are no longer watchwords at the heart of the concerns of those who rewrite and publish new songs by the tamba. Today’s major gatherings and celebrations are festive and staged tourist performances, very popular international and academic Tamang meetings where a theatrical revival takes place outside the village context, and a profusion of YouTube films are often produced by non-Tamang directors. Therefore, it’s no coincidence that back in the 1960s in Nepal, the Tamangs chose as a crucible of identity the importance of the educational role of the tamba, guardian of local memory and genealogies, and veritable hermeneuticist of the proper Buddhist doxa, which today has become the national symbol of the Tamang revival and the aspirations of the new middle classes fighting against the population’s continued political subaltern status. Since the mid-twentieth century, this doxa in Nepal has been largely inspired by the international vogue for Tibetan Buddhism. If the ancient Tamang pedagogy we are talking about here had a distinctly epic character, it was because it was expressed entirely in rhythmic recitative and song, in a village setting of close relationships and in Tibetan-style poetic formulas based on songs with responses and themes:

  • riddles sung16 at a wedding, poetic metaphors about the Lu-Tsen gods, based on references to the primordial elements of the cosmos (water, earth, fire, air), and the use of sign language.17
  • ideas of the bodies of supernatural entities based on Buddhist concepts: aggregation and disintegration of organs, of the cosmos, illusion of the lasting materiality of bodies, but constant tension about rebirth, insofar as one has to leave the universe, Jambuling, to be reborn and to die again: for this, the tamba relies on a theory of links (Tam and Tib ‘brelba, Tam prelpa), analogous to signs of these links found in nature (footnote 7). He thus celebrates the goddess of the earth, Lasin Devke Dolma, a goddess made from the aggregation of the eight kinds of beings of Tibetan Buddhism. He is also the poet of the young Kumari, the ritual celebration of the sacred nubile girls of the Newari traditions, who also appear in the Tamang ritual for ancestors (Doila). Finally, the tamba is the enunciator of questions concerning the karmic chain, of the causes and effects of human actions, which he illustrates through social dependence and kinship links between humans and the natural elements in a global metaphor of the alliance.
  • Songs originating from the tambourine, analogous to the organs of the dismembered demon Mathu Kaidap,18 which constitute parts of the drum, damphu. Nangalding mendo is the name of the drumstick, supposed to embody the demon’s sexual organ. In reality, the tamba strikes the tambourine with four fingers of the right hand. The twenty-four rods that hold the drumhead taut are the demon’s teeth, while the drumhead is the demon’s body. The tamba is therefore the hero in the fight against the Vedic demon.

27The bompo, or shamanic priest, hero of the infernal powers, is the eternal fighter of demons, to whom he must sacrifice animals (mostly hens) in exchange for the lost souls, and the great loser of the single combat between the hero of the lamas, Guru Rinpoche, alias Padmasambhava, and the first shaman, Dunjur Bon. Countless versions of this epic can be found in Nepal and in other forms throughout the Himalayas, not only among agrarian and Buddhist populations, but also among ancient hunter-gatherers, with shamans with links to Hinduism.

28The bompo expresses the tensions between the figures of the world of the dead, the sick and the insane using his own cosmology and phantasmatic motifs drawn from the Buddhist and Indian worlds: Narāk or infernal worlds, Yama Rāja-Yama Ranī or King and Queen of the Underworld; the demon Karko, or the reified figure of illness. The bompo is thus the hero who vanquishes the forces of death, the kings of the underworld that he encounters on his shamanic journeys. However, he is always liable to be defeated by the lamas who accuse him of wanting to ‘make the dead dance’ and prevent the latter from dissolving into emptiness.

29In the same way as mediums and intercessors in the world of the living, intercessors with the masters of the realm of the dead and the demonic forces that attack the living in their life cycle operate through certain concrete or abstract images and figurations. Shamans claim that waking dreams, trances and hallucinations are their own domain of knowledge of reality. If we look both at what they themselves say, and at what they give us to see and understand through their narratives, one characteristic immediately stands out, that of figures of inversion of up and down, day and night, upside down and right side up, including in relation to ordinary cosmic reference points, but also to language. They use a secret language based on the inversion of syllables and consonants when evoking the names of evil powers, and they similarly describe demons with features that are the reverse of those of human figures, teeth at the top, eyes at the bottom, and so on.

Fig 9: Left, the nine planets of the bompos, or Nau Graha, made from solmo; right, Hindu iconography of the Nine Graha ‘deva, asura, gandharva’, nine planets or ‘capturing forces’, carved on a bas-relief. Kathmandu.

Fig 9: Left, the nine planets of the bompos, or Nau Graha,           made from solmo; right, Hindu iconography of           the Nine Graha ‘deva, asura, gandharva’, nine planets or ‘capturing           forces’, carved on a bas-relief. Kathmandu.

Photographs Brigitte Steinmann 1980 and 2001.

30Shamans use divinatory and exorcistic techniques based on secret formulas to cancel out spells; they make celestial entities, auspicious and harmful planets (envious words, reified in the form of Mikha; planets or Graha), and copy the triangular diagrams (yantra) of the lamas to imprison demons. The veneration of Rahu graha Nau graha, the nine planets associated with time, is for the shamans both the synthesis of the celestial bodies and the antithesis of the planets venerated by the Hindus, particularly the Sun or Surya, and the Moon or Candra. Though Hindu iconography depicts them in the form of sculptures, the bompos simply make clay figurines. These planets can also be found in the opposition the tamba establishes in his songs between Lani/Dini, Moon and Sun, a formula where he refers to the influences of the combined actions of the water and rock gods, Lu and Tsen, on humans; all antithetical formulas intended to illustrate the dangers of these planets in human life.

31The bompos’ deities are made visible through ephemeral constructions: the king of the underworld, Gyalpo, the king of obstacles, Gyektor, whose avatars can be found in the Buddhist and Hindu pantheons (Mahākala, Yāmarāja). To depict them on material supports, they use substances such as rye flour or earth, which are of a dark colou, cereals considered to be poor and impure to make tormo, what they call solmo. They systematically reverse the qualities and colours of the materials used by the lamas, who use white rice to make tormo and rice flour to draw the bodies of the demons they exorcise.

32Their feats defy simple comprehension, such as making the dead dance, dancing on the ashes in the fireplace, bringing statues to life, bringing the inert back to life and evoking this through the carefully planned staging of rituals. They withdraw into their inner space using yogic techniques such as bindings of the organs of perception (bhanda), ascetic-type retreats to cremation grounds, and long journeys for pilgrimages to celebrate the great Shivaite figures in caves and holy places.

33Finally, they systematically practise transgression in the form of open contact with the downtrodden (untouchable blacksmiths or Kami) and ascetics (Shivaite tantrists). They have also converted en masse to Christianity under the oppressive influence of missionaries. The bompos have remained the poorest social strata, they have almost never had access to the higher status conferred by a school education or recognition in the hierarchies of power and, in this respect, remain the great social figures of sacrifice.

34The Lamas, undisputed heroes of the Good Law, guardians of the doctrine but also demon-slayers, display all sorts of ambiguities regarding the success of their powers and their exorcistic actions. Among Nyingmapa Tamangs, there has always been tension between, on the one hand, the powers that bind them to the gods of the worlds above, the pure worlds, the great figures of the Lamas that belong to ancient lineages and have rightly converted to the Buddhism of the revealed texts of the North and, on the other hand, those who emanate from clans with animal and demonic ancestors, the Lhabon, linked to the underground and shamans’ obscure forces. All of them, lamas and lhabon, claim to have the power to dissolve the images (lingam) that symbolise evil and vice (pride, envy, ignorance), the power to heal and regenerate cosmic and earthly ancestors, and therefore the power to spread prosperity and strength (yang) among mankind. Where do the tensions and paradoxes expressed by the tambas and bompos lie?

  • 19 See reference in footnote 1.

35Despite all the contemporary practices of alignment with the major monastic rebirth policies in Tibet and Nepal, which followed the political upheavals in Tibet – which became Chinese from the 1950s onwards –, Tamang Nyingmapa lamas are still suspected of doctrinal deviations: their language is not officially written in Tibetan, and their Nyingmapa practices have constantly been subjected to reform or sidelining. Today, this is borne out by repeated attempts to rebuild prestigious lineages (Ruichen Cyopge, Jikten Tamchyoi) through publications and ritual activities, and to revive cathartic theatrical practices and funeral dances that emulate or, on the contrary, mock those of the Nagpa tantrists. Tantric masked dances are used not only in funeral rituals (for the dead and for the living, Tam kewa, Tib dge ba, Tam so rapne, Tib gson rab gnas),19 but also in other new types of ritual designed to drive away or get rid of evil spirits. The proper extraction of the conscious principle (Tam namshe, Tib rnam shes) of the person recently deceased, which is said to be extracted almost physically from the sinciput, is particularly dangerous because the soul of the dead can be captured by evil spirits.

36Exorcisms are also performed to subjugate the spirits responsible for madness with the use of mirrors and masks, alternating with readings from Tibetan books. Finally, we should mention the use, up until the 1990s, of psychopomp animals in funeral rituals, as well as animals sacrificed during the ritual of the ancestors or Doila. But this Buddhism was a genuine response to the beliefs and expressions of popular emotions, alternating between mourning, sadness, laughter, farce and masquerade, and always the unrepressed expression of joyful, unbridled sexuality.

37Strong oppositions, if not paradoxes, have thus emerged between the ancient powers of the lamas who, in the last decades of the twentieth century still largely resorted to magical practices similar to those of shamans, and which today depend very much on the authorisation granted to them by the religious hierarchies. The Buddhist authority of the rningmapa Tamang sect has always been based on references to ancient bodies of Tibetan texts handed down among Tamang lamas, but also on landholdings (guthi) and non-monastic forms of Buddhist worship. Today, the old dichotomy between, on the one hand, references to the greatTibetan ascetic traditions and the veneration of the great masters of the doctrine to cure the population of its illusions and, on the other hand, the various actions of Tamang lamas linked to the great magician of Buddhism, Guru Remborshe (alias Rinpoche), with all the reified conceptions linked to his conversion actions – such as, for example, the veneration of mountains, the magical imprints of the Buddha’s hands and feet, the direct ingestion by the sick of the Guru’s mantras inscribed on talismans etc – still remains. However, it is globalised forms of Buddhism that predominate today, and many laypeople learn the Tibetan language in order to read the texts themselves. It is not a question of confining and reducing these ancient beliefs and practices to archaic worlds or to a kind of evolutionary thought that would go from the irrational to the rational and to the contemporary scientific, but of reading in them the still active traces of the way in which global human praxis needs concrete images to represent its own interiority. We can also gather from contemporary changes in religious Buddhist practice the search for a higher status, either in terms of the heroisation of Tamang cult specialists or in terms of new forms of obedience to far away religious hierarchies. These paradoxes and antinomies are particularly well reflected in the new uses of lamas’ books for personal and religious purposes that are no longer strictly linked to the Tamang community alone.

Modern heroes: the successors of the northern lineages (byang gter) of the Yolmo region and printed images of the great Buddhist heroes of the past as forms of self-identity

  • 20 Oral version collected by Steinmann in Temal, Kabhre Palanchok (1998).
  • 21 Kundga’ rDo rje 1961.

38In the 1980s Buddhist populations that adopt great Tibetan traditions, such as Sherpas and Yolmopas, sought the best ritual means of constructing and demonstrating prestigious origins to enable them to connect with Tibet and the great masters of Tibetan Buddhism in the North. By contrast, rural Tamangs and those living in southern regions, with non-monastic traditions, continued to rely on oral references and abstract geographical notions concerning these same northern Tibetan worlds. For example, the remote and inaccessible region of Samye monastery in Tibet – referred to by Guru Rimpoche as ‘the centre for the dissemination of Tibetan doctrine’ for Tamangs, and of Tibetan myths of the origin of man from the descendants of a rock ogress and a monkey-bodhisattva – only reinforced their certainty of being collectively the degenerate descendants of inferior and incestuous ancestors. This myth was staged in particular around the celebration of their lineage and cosmic ancestors (Doila), and expressed all the social tensions surrounding their status and identity in the Hindu state of Nepal. Here I give the myth recounted by the Tamang tamba,20 which was inspired by a Sikkimese version of the Red Annals,21 and described human begetting in terms of the image of generation and corruption:

By giving this example, [the tamba] explains: The Buddha (Sangs rgyas bcom ldan ’das), or monkey-bodhisattva (Pha spre’u byang chub sems dpa’), was meditating. The Rock Ogre Mother (Ma brag srin bsgrol ma or Tara) was spying on the Bodhisattva (on what he was eating). She saw that Bodhisattva Pha spre’u was eating a dew-like substance, shaking something. He sprinkled this on the dew-like food. When the Buddha had finished meditating, he took this food (flour?) that looked like dew, shaking it: when he thought he had taken one pot, he had taken two pots; when he thought he had taken two pots, he had taken three pots... At the third pot, he began to sing a poem. When the Bodhisattva sang, the Ogress of the Rocks (Tara) waved her hands, awakening a carnal desire in him. Speaking with signs and remaining silent, the father-monkey bodhisattva told the ogress that he did not have the Buddha’s permission. He said to himself: I must go and ask permission from the Buddha and Avalokitevara. He went to ask permission, saying that the demoness of obstacles was there. Avalokitevara and Buddha told him that it would be good, that there would be prosperity and that human society would expand. They said that men would offer sacrifices to the eight categories of living beings (lha srin sde brgyad). They could offer milk to the snake-gods (nga) of the underworld; offerings to the living beings of the six lineages; they would be happy and prosperous. Having this mutual relationship was very important. As a result of establishing this relationship, human life would develop – he prays. So, after there had been a carnal relationship between the Bodhisattva and the Ogress of the Rocks, the bhote castes were born. Different kinds of relationships were established between men and society, between men and nature: in other words, a metaphor for the importance of nourishing living beings and protecting them.

  • 22 This rock ogress is readily assimilated by them to the terrible figures of matrika or (...)
  • 23 There is no notion of ‘production’ in Buddhism, nor of ‘creation’, but rather of ‘arising’ (...)

39While the Buddha was born from his mother’s armpit, men saw themselves as born from the union of a hairy simian being and a rock ogress (Tib srin mo).22 In their rituals, the Tamangs emphasised the carnivorous nature of the ogress and her transgressive role (she made the first fermented drink), whereas the simian being was already vegetarian and therefore a proper Buddhist. But they were all the result of the actions of this primordial couple.23 At stake in these dramatised myths were questions of social hierarchy, highly contested today, which were expressed in relation to the reference to the origin of the expansion of Tibetan writing in Nepal and its exclusion from certain societies. For a long time, Tibetan books were treasures that were only handled with reverence and ritualised gestures. Similarly, in Nepal, particularly among former rural populations and non-monastic Buddhists, the letter in Tibetan script has become the most widespread image of the appropriation of an ideal melting pot of identity, where reading and writing replace the heroic gesture.

40And it is precisely the contemporary manufacture of books, digitisation techniques and the facility in reproducing the great portraits of lineage masters, once only painted on thangkas, that has enabled the populations closer to the northern borders, the inhabitants of the Helambu regions of Nepal (Yolmopas), to reconstitute photographic authenticity of the prestigious sources of their lineages, and of their ancient authorisation to write Tibetan. For example, a black-and-white reproduction of Thonmi Sambhota appears in a recent book which discusses the reconstruction of Yolmopa genealogies in relation to the collections of ritual texts owned by the masters of the house. Tibetan texts stand alongside images of the great masters of the lineages, group photographs and personal identity portraits, all brought together by the same desire for authenticity in the sources thus displayed.

Fig 10: Recent publications: History of Yolmopa Indigenous People (2021), with illustrations of great heroic figures of the past: in the middle, Thon mi Sambhota (Tib thon mi sam bho ṭa), minister of King Songtsen Gampo (seventh century) who invented the Tibetan script, and Guru Rinpoche, called Padma Sambhava by the Yolmopas (the Great Buddhist Master of the eighth century).

Fig 10: Recent publications: History of           Yolmopa Indigenous People (2021), with illustrations of great           heroic figures of the past: in the middle, Thon mi Sambhota (Tib thon mi sam bho ṭa), minister of King Songtsen           Gampo (seventh century) who invented the Tibetan script, and Guru           Rinpoche, called Padma Sambhava by the Yolmopas (the Great Buddhist           Master of the eighth century).

Photographs by Brigitte Steinmann (from personal collection).

Conclusion

41Choosing to highlight the heroisation of the power of Tamang actors over the world through a global semiotic and lexical study, encompassing the use of various media such as manual arts and techniques as well as local epistemologies of religious texts and above all recitations, derives from an attempt to take into account the simultaneous coexistence, in Tamang collectives, of a learned cosmology and popular representations. The course of action taken regarding the modes of appearance of forms of the visible and the invisible (at least for Tamangs owning collections of ‘Tibetan books’ and living in the south-east of the Kathmandu Valley) was not intended to describe modes of individual or subjective forms of the incarnation of heroes of any kind, such as supermen distinguishing themselves from ordinary mortals by extraordinary and exceptional feats. Although each of these actors may behave in a particular way, as we have shown, it is rather a question of collectives, human or otherwise, interacting with each other and being both actants and acted upon: lamas addressing the ‘gods above’, tambas conversing with the inhabitants of the spaces ‘in between’ and bompo shamans mastering underground spirits and demonic forces. But it is together and in a close reciprocal relationship that they interact. This semiotic study is therefore essentially based on an overall dramatisation of society, its own order and its values, based on the words and gestures of the three main actors, lamas, tambas and bompos, who ‘give to see and to hear’ – as we have defined it – a vision of the world encompassing all living beings. Their concepts draw on Hindu and Buddhist religions and philosophies, as well as on more or less precise references to ancient Vedic cosmologies reinterpreted in a popular form of Hinduism. However, this in no way means that the populations in question have not already established internal hierarchies and distinctions between the powers and forms of expression of the existing groups to which they belong and to which these are addressed, and that they have not also developed an acute political and social awareness of the external boundaries imposed on them by other Nepalese collectives, in particular Hindu populations.

42However, by comparing, as we have done, the ancient Buddhist corpora written and recently recomposed by populations of the ‘North’ (Yolmopas close to the Tibetan borders and the sources of monastic Buddhism) and populations of the ‘South’, subalternised by not having spoken the Tibetan language and having been kept away from official Buddhist and Hindu government institutions, a form of heroisation has emerged based on a figure that acts as an intermediary between the three worlds, the tamba, spokesman for the living, cantor of alliances and symbol of Tamang struggles and demands for national recognition in the Hindu state. This is reflected in all the festive events and celebrations centred on the tamba’s own instrument, the dampa (or damphu) tambourine, which has become a ‘national Tamang monument’ on roads bordering Tamang countries.

Fig 11: The tamba’s drum (dampa) has become a national emblem and monument in Tamang regions. Here, on the road to Sailung (Doramba district).

Fig 11: The tamba’s drum (dampa) has become a national emblem           and monument in Tamang regions. Here, on the road to Sailung           (Doramba district).

Photograph by Brigitte Steinmann 2024.

43The figure of the lama hero, Guru Remborshe (alias Rinpoche), largely dominates Tamang statuary in the mountains but it is more the product of an internationalised tourist industry and of the many attempts today by the Tamangs themselves to assimilate their practices with those of their ‘Tibetan’ neighbours, than of a collective consciousness of its own. This came about in the 1960s with the opening up of Nepal to the outside world and, more recently, with the creation of identity cards and passports for the whole population. A great number of Tamangs chose ‘Lama’ as their last name, the symbol of an ancient desire to be recognised as a distinct population in the former Hindu kingdom and, today, as an international Tibetan Buddhist society.

Fig 12: One of the most recent statues of Guru Rinpoche on top of the ancient ‘hidden country’ (Tib sBas yul) of Sailung (Doramba district), Nepal; now a frequently visited tourist spot.

Fig 12: One of the most recent statues of Guru Rinpoche on top           of the ancient ‘hidden country’ (Tib sBas           yul) of Sailung (Doramba district), Nepal; now a frequently           visited tourist spot.

Photograph by Brigitte Steinmann 2024.

  • 24 B. Steinmann (ed) 2006, and 2016.

44Finally, from a religious point of view, it is as if the great desire for power and the heroisation of society had constantly come up against Tibetan Buddhist doctrinal schemas enjoining the dissolution and destruction of images, the disintegration of bodies and substances, and as if all the stories of the genesis of the world, life and death were constructed only through conflicts mediated by supernatural powers for whom we alone can act as spokesperson, without ever being able to grasp their intentions and ultimate reasons. The success of ever more powerful exorcistic actions, invented by lamas and shamans, never ensured final victory. Behind all these ritualised actions is a sense of irreparable adversity, the real nature of which – demonic, mythical and/or political – we are always reluctant to reveal, but to which we respond with great conviction by similar demiurgic actions designed to bolster collective morale. Moreover, it is no coincidence that all young Tamangs involved in the Maoist revolution in Nepal24 committed themselves to the very messianic conceptions of salvation through armed revolution and self-sacrifice advocated by the leaders and became ‘martyrs’ (shahid, who were particularly manipulated by the military leaders).

45All the heroic attitudes we have tried to describe here, and all the tensions and paradoxes that can be seen and heard in the ritual activities of the masters, constantly replicate, for marginalised populations, the devaluing classifications into which they have been inscribed throughout the reforms of Tibetan Buddhist practice and the promulgation of Nepalese codes of law (Muluki Aïn). The Tamangs may well have thought that they were destined to be reborn again and again as inferior beings, as confirmed by employment statistics, emigration strategies to seek cheap labour and global dispossession, at least until the last decades of the twentieth century. Actual excess in the imitation of techniques and postures attributed to the upper social strata (images of the great masters of the North, monastic ceremonies and ecclesiastical pomp, contemporary self-censorship) would be the latest proof of this.

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Bibliographie

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Cassirer, E. 1973. La Philosophie des Formes Symboliques. Paris: Editions de Minuit, pp9–27.

Kundga’ rDo rje. 1961 [1346, revised in 1538]. The Red Annals 1961. Namgyal Institute of Tibetology: Gangtok, Sikkim. Copy found in dbu med.

Lama Dawa Sangmo Yolmopa (ed). 2021. History of Yolmopa Indigenous People. Great pilgrimage sacred Yolmo mountains region and history of Yolmopa indigenous people. Yolmo Press: Nepal.

Lama, Santa bir. 1965. Tamba Kaiten hwai rimthim, Shri Purna Bhandar, Ilam, Mechi Ancal, Nepal.

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Steinmann, B. 1996 ‘Choses secrètes et questions sans réponse. Joutes oratoires et énigmes des Tamang du Népal’. Traditions orales dans le Monde indien. Collection Purusartha: Editions de l’EHESS 18: 403–418.

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Notes

1 The data, hypotheses and analyses presented in this article were initially the subject of a presentation at the Journées organised by the Réseau chercheurs Népal (RCN, Nepal Research Network) in Paris, on 8–9 June 2023. It has been rethought and rewritten with a view to publication in the EBHR. I would like to thank Nolwen Vouiller and Florent Grazide for all their suggestions, corrections and patient work on the final formatting of this publication. The ethnographic data and ethnological analyses on which this work is based date from the 1980s to the present day, and are the result of intensive repeated periods of fieldwork over the years.

2 On the proper meaning of saṃsāra, see Zimmermann and Galey (2021).

3 On the subject of antinomies, I refer here explicitly to the critical philosophy of Kant, who established – contrary to traditional metaphysics – that any proposition relating to a beginning, an ultimate principle, a first cause of the world etc was irremediably doomed to be contradicted by a proposition that was also demonstrated. We shall see that in the non-theistic world of the populations in question, all sorts of contradictory hypotheses are also formulated, often in analogical terms (associations of ideas, correspondences), concerning the great cosmological principles, man’s ideas of the origins of time and phenomena, about the final ends of human life; veritable antinomies, hypotheses that are always uncertain and subject to opposing or contradictory interpretations.

4 By ‘semiotic’ analysis, I refer to the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, and to the definition they give of ‘bodily symbolic semiotics’. It has been defined by Maurizio Lazzarato as: ‘Les sémiotiques symboliques corporelles (tout moyen d’expression pré-verbal, corporel, iconique – la danse, la mimique, la musique, une somatisation, une crise de nerfs, une crise de larmes, des intensités, des mouvements, des rythmes, etc) ne dépendent ni du langage signifiant, ni de la conscience. Elles ne mettent pas en jeu un locuteur et un auditeur parfaitement discernables comme dans le modèle communicationnel et langagier et la parole n’occupe pas une place de premier plan. Ces sémiotiques sont animées par les affects et donnent lieu à des relations qui sont difficilement assignables à un sujet, à un moi, à un individu. Elles débordent les limites subjectives individualisante (des personnes, les identités, les rôles et les fonctions sociales) à l’intérieur desquelles le langage voudrait les enfermer et les réduire. Le ‘message’ ne passe pas par des chaînes linguistiques mais par le corps, des postures, des bruits, des images, des mimiques, des intensités, des mouvements, des rythmes, etc [my translation: ‘Symbolic semiotics of the body (any pre-verbal, bodily, iconic means of expression – dance, mimicry, music, somatisation, a fit of nerves, a crying fit, intensities, movements, rhythms, etc) depends neither on signifying language nor on consciousness. It does not involve a perfectly discernible speaker and a listener, as in the communicational and language model, and speech does not occupy a prominent place. This semiotics is driven by affects and gives rise to relationships that are difficult to assign to a subject, a self, an individual. It goes beyond the individualising subjective limits (of people, identities, roles and social functions) within which language seeks to confine and reduce them. The ‘message’ is not conveyed through linguistic chains but through the body, through postures, noises, images, facial expressions, intensities, movements, rhythms and so on’). https://transversal.at/transversal/0107/lazzarato/fr#:~:text=Selon%20Deleuze%20et%20Guattari%2C%20l,r%C3%A9alisation%20d’un%20tel%20flux

5 If I refer very explicitly here to the notion of the symbolic, it is in the sense given by E Cassirer in his Philosophie des formes symboliques, and in particular in ‘Langage et mythe, à propos des noms de dieux’ (1973: 9–27), where Cassirer demonstrates, on the basis of linguistic studies – those of Usener, and more generally of von Humboldt – how the images and words chosen to speak of the gods are not simply reflections of empirical data or of the imagination, but creations of forms objectified in language and always referring to a sensitive and concrete experience.

6 On the meaning and scope of this formula, see the approach to ritual analysis taken by Severi and Houseman (2009), a study whose theoretical choices I share, emphasising the gestures in rituals and the complexity of the overall interpretation by ethnologists. The codes of Hindu and Buddhist iconography can also be found in Mediterranean antiquity: see, for example, Une formule homérique : μέϒʹ δχθήσας by Audiat (1947).

7 See Steinmann et al (2020).

8 In Tamang, this is the concept of mheme chodpa.

9 I show how antinomies and analogies correspond to certain ‘iconographic’ choices to ‘give body or image’ to certain ‘non-human’ beings, and how ‘aniconism’ corresponds to a total refusal of a ‘concrete image’, visible to humans (eg the deity called Lhasin devke in Tamang by the tamba).

10 Mūrti are statues or images used as supports, foci of devotion and meditation. They are sometimes abstract, sometimes crude like Jagannāth (or Krishnā), but are more often representations of gods and goddesses such as Shiva or Ganesh, Rāma, Krishna Sarasvāti or Kāli, which can be extremely complex (especially those of Shiva and Vishnu).

11 See Steinmann (2002, 2003).

12 For further developments on this topic, see Steinmann et al, 2020, Worshipping Ancestors, Conquering Heaven: Himalayan rituals in context. Vajra Book Publications, Kathmandu, Nepal.

13 The tamba’s reconstitution of life is based on six different ways of being born as men (‘Gro ba rigs drug mi chags cim). This is an Indo-Tibetan model of six categories of living beings or ‘six kinds of beings’ associated in Hindu and Tibetan mythology with six spheres for possible rebirth: – the world of the gods above (Tib la, Nep devā – the world of titans or demigods, (Tib lha mayin, Nep asurā) – the world of men, (Tib mi, Nep manis) – the world of animals, (Tib gro sgrub, Nep janavar) – the world of greedy spirits, (Tib yi dvags, Nep bhut-pret) – the world of infernal spirits, (Tib bdud, Nep narak). See also footnote 7 on the eight kinds of beings or Lha srin de brgyad.

14 In the Nepali language, kāvi ra itihaskar. In the Tamang language, tamba la hwai.

15 The first Tamang texts published in Devanagari script were published in the 1960s. See for example Santa Bir Lama, 1965, Tamba Kaiten hwai rimthim, Shri Purna Bhandar, Ilam, Mechi Ancal, Nepal. This booklet was translated and commented on by Macdonald, 1966, ‘Les Tamang vus par l’un d’eux’, in L’Homme, 1966, vol 1, p27–58. It was situated in a ritual context and translated and commented on by Steinmann, 1987, Les Tamang du Népal. Usages et religion, religion de l’usage. Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations, ADPF, Paris.

16 The Tamangs’ ‘riddles sung’ or hattula hvai seem to be avatars of the Tibetan lde ’u and the Indian prahelikā, through which R A Stein has shown the transition from epic to the art of argumentation. See Steinmann (1996).

17 This form of literary expression, which forms the metaphorical fabric of Tamba songs and stories, is based on the theory of the consecutive production of twelve causes (Nep prattyasamutpatti, Tib rten ’brel bcus gnis), associated with omens or precursory signs. For Tamangs, this Buddhist doctrine of the causes at work in the world refers to the general mechanism of the Wheel of Existence. Poetically, the tamba explains that life can only be understood in terms of the different links between the elements, the tree and the bird, the fish and the river etc, all links that determine existence but also connect beings to it.

18 On Madhukaiḍabha or Mathu Kaidap, alias the Vedic demon Madang Rudra, see Steinmann, op cit infra 1996.

19 See reference in footnote 1.

20 Oral version collected by Steinmann in Temal, Kabhre Palanchok (1998).

21 Kundga’ rDo rje 1961.

22 This rock ogress is readily assimilated by them to the terrible figures of matrika or mamo, terrible tantric goddesses whose evil interventions are constantly suspected, via women and sources of physiological pollution; of constantly marring the whiteness of the pure vegetarian offerings made by men to their lineage deities (milk, raw rice, butter). It is worth pointing out that, for the Tamang, this rock ogress has nothing to do with the Tibetan demon nailed to her back, guts in the air; and which can be seen spread out in the form of the longest wall of prayers (mane) in Mustang.

23 There is no notion of ‘production’ in Buddhism, nor of ‘creation’, but rather of ‘arising’ (Tam thungcim), and a certain ‘way of producing in a chain’, in a kind of radical materialism without matter, which dispenses with any idea of a creator and refers to a hidden symbolic order, the support of a great vital plan.

24 B. Steinmann (ed) 2006, and 2016.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Fig 1: rnyingmapa lamas, reading in rhythm to their drum (nga), during the ancestor ritual (Doila).
Crédits Photograph by Brigitte Steinmann 1998.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/2698/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 56k
Titre Fig 2: The tamba, Bahadur Singh, recites in rhythm with his tambourine (damphu).
Crédits Photograph by Brigitte Steinmann 1980.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/2698/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 313k
Titre Fig 3: The book ‘Jigs rten gTam chos kyi lo rgyu bshug so: ‘Buddhist Teachings for the World’, with an extract from the Book (Rama Tāmbale gebama banne hrama) containing the Tamba’s words during the funeral ritual.
Crédits Photograph by Brigitte Steinmann 1980
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/2698/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 32k
Titre Fig 4: Bompo shamans taking part in a drum joust during a pilgrimage to the mountain of Sano Sailung (Doramba district, Nepal).
Crédits Photograph by Brigitte Steinmann 1981.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/2698/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 74k
Titre Fig 5: Different mediums of figuration, from left to right: tormos, kur, mingjyang, Namkha shyal (Doila).
Crédits Photographs by Brigitte Steinmann 1981–1988.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/2698/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 288k
Titre Fig 6: Guru Rinpoche painted on the walls of the konpo (Tib dgon pa) temple of Temal (Kabhre Palanchok).
Crédits Photograph by Brigitte Steinmann 1980.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/2698/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 103k
Titre Fig 7: The bompo making the king of the demons gyalpo, alias karko.
Crédits Photograph by Brigitte Steinmann 1980.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/2698/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 104k
Titre Fig 8: Recitations for the dead by the tamba B Singh of Temal, near a chorten.
Crédits Photograph by Brigitte Steinmann 1980.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/2698/img-8.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 355k
Titre Fig 9: Left, the nine planets of the bompos, or Nau Graha, made from solmo; right, Hindu iconography of the Nine Graha ‘deva, asura, gandharva’, nine planets or ‘capturing forces’, carved on a bas-relief. Kathmandu.
Crédits Photographs Brigitte Steinmann 1980 and 2001.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/2698/img-9.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 297k
Titre Fig 10: Recent publications: History of Yolmopa Indigenous People (2021), with illustrations of great heroic figures of the past: in the middle, Thon mi Sambhota (Tib thon mi sam bho ṭa), minister of King Songtsen Gampo (seventh century) who invented the Tibetan script, and Guru Rinpoche, called Padma Sambhava by the Yolmopas (the Great Buddhist Master of the eighth century).
Crédits Photographs by Brigitte Steinmann (from personal collection).
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/2698/img-10.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 415k
Titre Fig 11: The tamba’s drum (dampa) has become a national emblem and monument in Tamang regions. Here, on the road to Sailung (Doramba district).
Crédits Photograph by Brigitte Steinmann 2024.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/2698/img-11.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 293k
Titre Fig 12: One of the most recent statues of Guru Rinpoche on top of the ancient ‘hidden country’ (Tib sBas yul) of Sailung (Doramba district), Nepal; now a frequently visited tourist spot.
Crédits Photograph by Brigitte Steinmann 2024.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/docannexe/image/2698/img-12.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 202k
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Brigitte Steinmann, « Analogies and antinomies in Tamang stories and heroic deeds: Heroes and victors of immemorial battles and/or victims of ancient curses »European Bulletin of Himalayan Research [En ligne], 63 | 2024, mis en ligne le 20 décembre 2024, consulté le 16 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/2698 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13mzs

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Brigitte Steinmann

Brigitte Steinmann is emeritus professor at the Institute of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Lille I, member of the research unit Centre lillois d’études et de recherches sociologiques et économiques (Clerse) jointly run by the University of Lille and the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) and associate member of the Centre for South Asian and Himalayan Studies (CESAH) jointly run by the CNRS and the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS). She has been studying social anthropology and carrying out intensive ethnographic research on Nepal and several Himalayan countries since the 1980s.

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