CIVILIZED

CIVILIZED

SHAMANS

Buddhism

INTibetan Societies

Geoffrey Samuel

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION PRESSWASHINGTON AND LONDON

PART II p. 350CIVILIZED SHAMANS

SOME RECENT LAMAS

Kalu Rimpoch'e was born in Trehor in 1906 not far from the Gelugpa gompa of Dargy (see Gesh Rabten, above). His father was a married reincarnate lama, Ratak Trulku, whose family claimed descent from the family of the 1st Karmapa. The 5th Dzogch'en Rimpoch'e felt that the child was a trulku and requested his father to allow him to be brought up at Dzogch'en gompa. His father refused, wishing to bring the child up himself. Later, Kalu Rimpoch'e was recognized by several lamas as the activity reincarnation of the great Rimed lama Jamgn Kongtrul.12At the age of 13 he was ordained by the 11th Situ Rimpoch'e of the Karma Kagydpa gompa of Pelpung. Three years later he began a three year, three month, three day retreat at the retreat center near Pelpung. His root lama was Norbu Dun-kun Drubpa and he also studied with Situ Rimpoch'e and other great lamas, receiving the transmission of the Karma Kagyd and Shangpa Kagyd teachings.13 After completing the retreat he went to Bengen gompa in Trehor, his birthplace.

For thirteen years, from the age of 25 onwards, he did yogic practice in many uninhabited meditation spots, completing the Tantric practices of kyedrim and dzogrim. His level of accomplishment became widely known, and Situ Rimpoch'e appointed him director of the retreat center at Pelpung where he taught for many years. Kalu rebuilt the Pelpung retreat center and traveled throughout Hor raising money for a fund to maintain the monks in retreat there. He also constructed many mani-stones, stpas, and other religious objects. On a journey to central Tibet he restored various Shangpa sites and taught the Six Doctrines of Niguma from the Shangpa tradition to many Gelugpa lamas.

In 1955 he left K'am, where the political situation had deteriorated seriously, and moved to the head Karmapa gompa of Ts'urp'u in central Tibet. A year later, he was asked by the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa to take charge of a gompa in Bhutan where he built two more retreat centers and a large stupa. In 1962 he moved to India, settling at Sonada near Darjeeling in West Bengal. He subsequently established Buddhist centers teaching traditional Tantric practice in India, France, the USA, Canada, and elsewhere. Kalu Rimpoch'e died at Sonada in 1989.

Kalu Rimpoch'e's informal recognition as a rebirth of Jamgn Kongtrul did not involve the assumption of headship of a gompa, and the Rimpoch'e attached to his name indicates the high regard in which he was held rather than any formal trulku status. His career is thus in some ways more like those of the `ordinary monks,' Gesh Rabten or Tromo Gesh Rimpoch'e, than those of the various trulku we have consid350ered, although he was the son of a trulku and was clearly destined by his father for a religious life from early on (see Kalu 1985:3o-33).

Kalu Rimpoch'e's life was more exclusively oriented towards yogic practice than that of any of the other lamas we have considered so far.14 Kalu Rimpoch'e was a monk, however, not a lay yogin, and most of his career took place in the celibate gompa setting of Pelpung. This combination of celibacy and yoga was a feature of the lives of many Rimed teachers, whether ordinary monks or trulku, although it was by no means universal. In Chapter 17 we came across another example, the Nyingmapa lama Tr'ulshig Rimpoch'e, a celibate monk, formerly abbot of Dzarong and now the abbot of a gompa in Sherpa country, but there were also famous lamas such as Ch'oggyur Lingpa and Sakya Sri (see Chapter 17) who were not celibate practitioners.

Kalu Rimpoch'e's centers in the West give a traditional presentation of the Tantric teachings and yogic practice according to the Karma and Shangpa Kagyd lineages. He was the first lama to take a group of Western students through the traditional three year, three month, three day retreat, in France in 1976-1980 (Kalu 1985:48).

My last two examples take us outside the context of celibate monasticism altogether. We will consider two Rimed practitioners who remained, formally at least, lay people: Ayu K'andro and Changch'ub Dorj. These lamas, one female and one male, were both students of a famous K'ampa lama and tertn of the late nineteenth century, Nyagla Pema Duddul, and they were both teachers of the contemporary lama and scholar, Namkhai Norbu Rimpoch'e, whose accounts of their lives I summarize here. These lamas belong to an older generation than Kalu Rimpoch'e: Ayu K'andro met some of the actual founders of the Rimed movement.

Ayu K'andro

Ayu K'andro is the only woman among the eight lamas discussed in this chapter. Female teachers were not unknown in Tibet, although there were always fewer of them than male lamas. Another recent example, Jetsn Lochen Rimpoch'e, beginning like Ayu K'andro as a wandering yogini, became abbess of a community of more than three hundred female practitioners at the gompa of Shugseb in central Tibet (Dowman 1988:143).15 The background of female teachers is usually

351~ rn

CIVILIZED SHAMANSSOME RECENT LAMAS

yogic rather than academic, which doubtless reflects both the acknowledged role for women in Tantric practice and the difficulty for women of undertaking academic and philosophical study.16 There were no female equivalents of Drepung or Sera. This account is summarized from Namkhai Norbu's short biography in Tsultrim Allione's Women of Wisdom (1984:236).

Ayu K'andro was born in 1839 in the village of Dzongsa in Tagzig in K'am and named Dech'en K'andro by a local yogin, Togden Rangrig. Her family had once been wealthy, but was of middling status at the time of her birth. She was the youngest child of three sons and four daughters. The sons were all traders and the daughters did nomad's work, looking after animals.

Dech'en K'andro's aunt was a yogic practitioner, living in a cave near the Togden, and the girl went to stay with her aunt from the age of 7 to 18. A disciple of the Togden taught her to read and write. At the age of 14, she went with her aunt and the Togden to attend a consecration performed by three of the leading Rimed lamas, Jamyang Ky'entse Ongpo, Jamgn Kongtrul, and Ch'oggyur Lingpa. The two women received many teachings, and on the way back Ayu K'andro also visited Situ Rimpoch'e. Subsequently, she began doing the Longch'en Nyingt'ig preliminary practices. Later Jamyang Ky'entse Ongpo initiated her and her aunt into a White Tara practice he had received as a gongter.

When she was 19, she married a man from a wealthy family at her parents' insistence. Her husband was kind and generous, but she became ill. because her desire to lead a spiritual life was being blocked. After three years, her husband agreed that they should separate so that she could go into retreat. When she was 27, the Togden, who had been her principal teacher, died at the age of 77, exhibiting various miraculous signs. During the cremation her aunt also died. Ayu K'andro did a three-year retreat in her aunt's cave, assisted by the Togden's disciples.

At the age of 3o she began to travel around practicing chd along with two of the Togden's disciples. She visited Adzom Gar, the center of the teacher Adzom Drugpa, and stayed there for the visit and teachings of Nyagla Pema Duddul. She continued to travel, visiting the gompa of Dzogch'en, Shech'en, and Dzongsar, and Derge Gonch'en, and going to stay for some time with Nyagla Pema Duddul. He sent her and a female friend off to travel around Tibet doing chd practice in cemeteries and sacred places and prophesied that they would meet two yogins who would be important for them at Ts'aba and Lhok'a. They traveled to central and western Tibet and Nepal, meeting the prophesied yogins and developing their practice.

In 1881 she returned to her home country. Her former husband, who had remarried, built a hut for her and in 1885 after another visit to the lamas

352

Adzom Drugpa, Jamgn Kongtrul, and Jamyang Ky'entse Ongpo she began a seven-year retreat. With one brief interruption in 189o, she remained there for the rest of her life, dying in 1953 at the age of 115.

The story of the enforced marriage is a characteristic problem for female practitioners17 but, this aside, Ayu K'andro's life was similar to that of many male yogins. When Namkhai Norbu visited her in 1951, she was still living in her tiny stone hut with two assistants, an old man and an old nun, both yogic practitioners themselves (Allione 1984:236).

Changch'ub Dorj

We have less information about Changch'ub Dorj's life than on Ayu K'andro's. His life is nevertheless of considerable interest as showing how a lay ch'opa can establish a reputation as a teacher and gather a community of lay followers around him. The following is summarized mainly from material in Namkhai Norbu's The Crystal and the Way of Light (1986b:107, 131-135, 156-157; also see Norbu 1988).

Changch'ub Dorj originally came from the Nyarong region in southeastern K'am. He was born in the mid-nineteenth century and studied with Adzom Drugpa, Nyagla Perna Duddul, and the Bnpo teacher Shardza Rimpoch'e. Changch'ub Dorj headed a community called Nyagla Gar in a remote valley in Gonjo to the east of Derg. According to local legend, he met his future wife in Gonjo while on his way to Lhasa on pilgrimage. He met her again on the way back.'$ They settled down together in Gonjo in 1895, and the community gradually grew up as people came to live around him and study with him.

Nyagla Gar was a self-supporting community consisting entirely of lay practitioners, yogins, and yoginis.19 Changchub Dorj was widely known as a physician and consulted by people from far around, although he had never actually studied medicine, his medical knowledge having arisen as a byproduct of his meditational accomplishment.

Free soup and simple food were provided daily at Nyagla Gar for those without resources and paid for by other members of the community who could afford to do so. Everyone who lived at the community participated in working in the fields, collecting herbs, and preparing medicines.

When the Chinese Communists arrived in the area they left the community alone since it already fitted their definition of an agricultural commune. Later, however, Changch'ub Dorj was arrested and tortured. He died

CIVILIZED SHAMANS

in 1981 shortly after his release. His daughter died in a Chinese prison camp, exhibiting the signs of achieving the Rainbow Body (jal), a mark of high meditational attainment.20 Two of Changch'ub Dorj's sons were killed by the Chinese, but a third, S K'awang, is the present head of the community.

Nyagla Gar continues to exist under the direction of Changch'ub Dorj's surviving descendants. We have met similar small communities in Dolpo and Sherpa country, again built around a particular lama. In Nepal, they have often been regarded by Western writers, even those as well informed as Snellgrove (1961, 1967a), as marginal or decadent survivals of an older tradition. It is interesting to see that such communities formed part of the religion of twentieth-century K'am along with celibate monasticism, and that the young Namkhai Norbu Rimpoch'e was advised to visit Ayu K'andro and receive the Vajrayogini initiation from her by his own tutor at one of the Sakya colleges of K'am (Allione 1984:236; N. Norbu 1986b:155-156).

This might be less likely to happen in the Gelugpa tradition, but it continued a long-standing respect for the lay yogic tradition on the part of celibate monastic lamas of the non-Gelugpa orders. For these lamas, meditational attainment counted for as much or more than scholarly learning, and spirituality was not restricted to celibate practitioners. Namkhai Norbu makes the point clearly in a few verses from his Tibetan poem, "The Little Song of `Do as You Please'." This was written in answer to a Western critic who belonged to a Gelugpa center and asked how Norbu could practice and be a teacher when he lived like a lay person.

The incomparable father, Ever Good [Samantabhadra],

The Lord, Knowledge holder, Changch'ub Dorj,

Who resides in the dimension of the essential sphere at the center of his son's heart, my heart,

Inseparable from it in any moment.

This is the sum of the practice of the Teaching, and that's enough to give me complete satisfaction.

I don't aspire to false religious practice.

As for this title of so called reincarnation,

If it's useful I adopt it for beneficial activities.SOME RECENT LAMAS

When it's not useful for that, I just stay natural in my own way. You who desire a rank in a hierarchy, do as you please .. .

As for this consort, the so-called fruit of previous karma,

If she has good motivation, I instruct her in the teachings as far as I can,

If not, I do anything I can to make her happy.

You who are taken up with attachment and aversion, do as you please

The ineffable way of being of the Praj Priramit

And the experience of direct understanding, I have joined together, within myself.

To the intellectual path of study, I don't aspire.

You who claim to be great scholars, do as you please.

In the natural condition, the space which does not fall into limits of measurement or even the concept of direction,

Whatever presents itself there, I enjoy as an ornament.

I don't make any effort to create or reject anything.

You who take up preferences, do as you please.

(Namkhai Norbu 1986c: i I, 15, 17, 21)

Namkhai Norbu's view here, as we shall see in later chapters, is in line with the views of lay yogic practitioners from the Indian siddhas and Milarepa through to the `crazy yogins' of the fifteenth century and their nineteenth-century successors such as the Rimed lama Dza Peltrul Rimpoch'e. This is the voice of the shamanic side of Tibetan Buddhism and it runs throughout its history to the present day.Part Three

I 9

From Structure to Process

Chapters 9 to 18 have presented an essentially synchronic view of Tibetan religion as it was in the premodern period and, to a large extent, remains today. The idea of the contrasting shamanic and clerical aspects of Buddhism underlies these descriptive chapters. We have seen how these shamanic and clerical modalities interact with the various other dimensions of Tibetan religion: celibate and lay, sritra and Tantra, folk religion and Buddhist. We have also seen how they interact with the contrasting social forms outlined in Part One of the book: the agricultural communities, with greater and lesser degrees of centralization, and the pastoralists (drogpa). The relationships here are complex. The lives of the eight lamas in Chapter i8 were individual paths traced through the many possibilities and options offered by premodern Tibetan Buddhism, but they also demonstrated how those options have been structured in recent times by the two major syntheses of Gelugpa and Rimed and their differing relationships to the various political regimes that existed in premodern Tibetan societies.

I have already provided some historical background to the political forms of premodern Tibet in the regional summaries of Part One,

CIVILIZED SHAMANSFROM STRUCTURE TO PROCESS

and have referred in Chapters 3 and 8 to the significance of the Lhasa regime's moves towards greater centralization in the early twentieth century. Parts One and Two have nevertheless been essentially synchronic. The structure they depict contained internal contrasts and conflicting forces, but I have not attempted to set them into motion. Part Three, which is historical, is meant to demonstrate how these religious and political forms came into existence in the course of Asian history. Before commencing to trace this development with the origins of Indian Buddhism (Chapter 2o), I shall discuss some of the theoretical issues raised by my description.

Shamanic and clerical modalities may well correspond to fundamental dimensions of human society (see Chapter I, and Samuel 199o), but shamanic and clerical Buddhism are labels for social phenomena that arose as part of specific historical sequences. The significance of Tibet as an anthropological case study, and as part of the cultural heritage of humanity, lies in the unusual path that Tibetan society took. Shamanic procedures in other complex literate cultures became subordinated to state power and were marginalized in relation to clerical religions and governments (see Samuel 1990:121 ff). In Tibet, this did not take place. The nearest parallel to the Tibetan situation seems to be provided by some Islamic societies, such as the Cyrenaican Bedouin, Morocco during the `maraboutic period,' or Swat (Samuel 1982), but even in these cases shamanic procedures rarely obtained the dominance they acquired within Tibet, and the political supremacy of shamanic leadership was mostly short-lived.

These unusual situations are associated with some specific social, ecological, and political factors. Tibet and the Islamic societies I have mentioned shared low population densities, difficulties in communication, and a heavy dependence on long-distance trade, all factors that probably inhibited the development and maintenance of effective centralized regimes (Samuel 1982). These material factors are significant, but they hardly constitute a full explanation of why particular forms of religion developed in these societies, why they were maintained, and how they transformed in time into other religious forms.

Religious forms are not simple derivatives of their social and economic contexts. They are themselves an active part of those contexts. The development of Buddhism in Tibet cannot be reduced to the development of Tibetan social formations, because those formationswere enabled by or inhibited by the specific forms that Buddhism took. Understanding the history of Buddhism in Tibet involves understanding the nature of social processes in human society in general, and we are some way from a satisfactory general explanation of such processes.

Perhaps the most powerful theoretical approach to be applied to these large-scale social processes within Asian religions was that of Max Weber. Weber wrote on Buddhism, including the Buddhism of Tibet, and, considering the primitive state of the data with which he worked, what he had to say was remarkably insightful (1967:282-29o). My reference here, however, is more to Weber's general sociological approach. Weber's work assumes that a straightforward distinction can be made between social reality and how human beings understand that reality; in other words, he believed in a value-free social science (Samuel 199o:17-19). That belief is harder to sustain today, after all that has happened both in our understanding of science and our understanding of culture. Consequently, while echoes of a Weberian sociology occasionally emerge in this work, its fundamental assumptions are not Weberian.

Thus, the shamanic-clerical distinction bears some resemblance to Weber's opposition between charismatic and bureaucratic authority; however, both the general categories shamanic and clerical, and their particular forms in the Tibetan context, shamanic Buddhism and clerical Buddhism, refer to considerably more than a contrast in modes of authority within religious organizations. Ideas or cultural practices are more deeply constitutive of social reality than a purely Weberian sociology can allow Religious forms create and shape the reality within which those who accept it live, and shamanic religion in particular involves the continuing transformation of such realities. If we do not take these transformations seriously, we will be unable to understand shamanic religion (and Weber is perhaps at his weakest in dealing with such religious forms, see Weber 1966; Tambiah 1984:329). If we dismiss the ability of shamanic religion to reconstitute the world for its followers, we also miss a basic key to the understanding of how societies transform.

I have developed these themes at length elsewhere. They raise significant and complex issues in the philosophy of social science and in the understanding of human culture, but those issues are not central

CIVILIZED SHAMANSFROM STRUCTURE TO PROCESS

to the present book, and I refer anyone interested in these aspects of the position presented here to my book Mind, Body and Culture (Samuel 199o).

What is significant in the present context is that each religious form needs to be seen as part of a total social whole if it is to be fully understood. Tambiah has referred to this method of exposition as `totalization.' In relation to his analysis of the galactic polity, he comments:

I have tried to show that the geometry of the galactic polity is manifest as a recurring design at various levels that [a hypothetical analyst might label] cosmological, territorial, administrative, politico-economic, but of which the accurate exegesis is that this recurring design is the reflection of the multifaceted polyvalence built into the dominant indigenous concepts, and of the traditional idea of a simultaneous convergence of phenomena in a mandala pattern. A corollary of this demonstration is that the cultural model and the pragmatic parameters are in concordance and buttress one another, and cannot be dis-aggregated. (Tambiah 1985:280)

In following the development of Tibetan religion and Tibetan societies, we are following the growth, mutual competition, and decline of a series of such totalities. In Mind, Body and Culture, I refer to these totalities as `modal states.' Here, so as to make my account more comprehensible to readers less oriented towards questions of anthropological theory, I have chosen to use a more familiar term, `cultural patterns.' I should make it clear, however, that the term `cultural pattern' here has a specific sense, which goes considerably beyond that familiar from, for example, Ruth Benedict's classic Patterns of Culture (Benedict

1935).

The concept of cultural patterns, as used in this book, provides a way of tracing transformations in society and culture without implying a one-sided reductionism either to purely materialistic factors or to factors operating purely at the level of consciousness. The cultural pattern refers to the patterning of the field of relationships within human society, and between that society and its natural environment. The patterns manifest in human beings as culturally acquired ways of operating with the mind-body totality. Each of us acquires a repertoire of such patterns, and they define the contexts within which we think, feel, and behave.

A social group can also be characterized, at a particular point in space and time, in terms of a repertoire of patterns, in other words, in terms of the range and kind of pattrns operative within it. Social change involves change in the cultural patterns, and it. is not assumed that this change is always driven either by changes at the material level or by changes at the level of consciousness. The two always go along with each other. They can be described as having a dialectic relationship with each other, but this is already to reify the distinction between them to an inappropriate degree.

It is important to understand that we are not speaking here of bounded cultures dominated by a single cultural pattern. Any social context contains a variety or repertoire of such patterns, and given individuals also characteristically have a repertoire of patterns that form the basis of their thoughts, feelings, and actions. At times of rapid social change, such repertoires may be heterogeneous in nature and individuals may feel consciously torn between different possibilities for living (involving `traditional' or `modern' modes of family structure, for example, or conventional and millenarian religious forms). At other times, the repertoire may involve less obvious internal contrast. There is always both contrast and change, however, within the repertoire of patterns, both for individuals and for societies.

Consequently, I feel that a complete understanding, for instance, of the growth of celibate monasticism among the Sherpas would involve more than demonstrating the recurrence of a single `cultural schema,' however pervasive, throughout Sherpa history (Ortner 1989a, see Chapter 17 above). What we should be looking for is the decline of one cultural schema and the growth of another, or perhaps a shift in the consequences of a single cultural schema given transformations in other factors within the society.'

The historical account in Chapters 20 to 28 is concerned with large-scale processes throughout Tibetan society as a whole, and it is rarely possible to do more than suggest some of the underlying shifts in cultural patterns. Several of these suggestions are little more than a spelling out of the implications of the work of other scholars. Tibetanists will recognize, for example, that my basic orientation towards the Nyingmapa-Rimed developments and much else is greatly indebted to the work of E. Gene Smith (1960, 197oa, etc.). Other suggestions are perhaps more original. If the proposals have value, it ought to be possible to demonstrate both the patterns and their historCIVILIZED SHAMANSFROM STRUCTURE TO PROCESS

ical development in more detail in specific studies of particular periods, regions, and bodies of material.

The concept of cultural patterns (or modal states, in the language of Samuel 199o) also provides the basis for a model of how shamanic processes work. Such processes can be interpreted as operating with the balance of cultural patterns within individuals and societies. They are generally carried out with the aid of symbblic representations of cultural patterns. These symbolic representations may take various forms, which are usually interpreted in Western terms as vocabularies of gods, spirits, witchcraft, sorcery, ancestor-shades, or other 'supernatural' entities. In the Tibetan context, the local gods, the la spirit-force, and Tantric deities can all be interpreted in these terms.

The shaman's symbolic vocabulary is typically treated as deriving from some other realm of reality more fundamental than ordinary, everyday reality. Shamans are held to communicate with this realm through alternate states of consciousness, and their access to it justifies and authenticates their pronouncements. It will be recalled that shamanism was defined in Chapter 1 as the regulation and transformation of human life and human society through the use (or purported use) of alternate states of consciousness by means of which specialist practitioners are held to communicate with a mode of reality alternative to, and more fundamental than, the world of everyday experience. This definition is consistent with, and derives from, the analysis of shamanic processes suggested here (see Samuel 199o).

Shamanic processes are most common and most fully developed in nonliterate and stateless societies. Effective state power tends to control and limit them, because they represent an alternative source of power and authority. This underlies the contrast between Buddhism in Theravdin societies and in Tibetan societies traced in Chapter 2.

Cultural patterns may be in varying degrees egocentric (focused on the satisfaction of goals defined at the level of the individual) or sociocentric (focused on goals of the social group). `Altruistic' behavior is motivated by sociocentric cultural patterns. Each pattern implies an ethics, an emotional vocabulary, a set of goals and a framework for rational thought. Shamanic techniques are essentially concerned with manipulating a subset of the cultural patterns in symbolic form, and particularly with maintaining a balance of patterns within the individual and society, which is adequately weighted towards the sociocentric. To perform these tasks the shaman needs to be able to enter a visionary state within which the cultural patterns can be seen and operated in a symbolic manner. The shaman can also act as a source of innovation by introducing new combinations or variations of cultural patterns.

Such procedures may be contrasted with the rationalized procedures typical of, for example, clerical Buddhism or modern Western societies, where there is a universal rationality and an accompanying linear ethical code deriving from an officially endorsed cultural pattern.

Major world religions such as Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity frequently derive their initial impetus from a `shamanic'-style revelation. The initial stages of many such religions have a `millenarian' character, and can be seen as a response to a period of radical social change. Buddhism seems to have originated in this way in the sixth century B.C. as a response to the collapse of tribal society and to the initial growth of large centralized states in North India. We can see early Buddhism as an attempt to create a framework that could reconcile the literate, rationalized, hierarchical society that was coming into being with the human values of the older, shamanic form of society. In its subsequent development in India, Buddhism increasingly took on the role of a clerical religion within the new `rationalized' states; however, the shamanic dimension never altogether disappeared, and at times regained major significance. The Buddhism that the Tibetans received from the Indians preserved these complementary aspects, and developed them into a uniquely Tibetan synthesis.

In Chapters 20 to 27, I shall follow the convention of listing and numbering the principal `cultural patterns' to be discussed within each chapter at the beginning of the chapter. It should always be remembered that these patterns refer to structurings of mind and body as well as patternings of relationships among human beings and between human beings and their environment (Samuel 199o). In cases where a particular social role (for example, folk shamanic practitioner, 13) is used to label a pattern, it should be noted that each pattern implies not only that specific role but the other social roles that accompany it. Thus, the folk shamanic practitioner pattern (13) implies not only the role and modes of behavior, thought, and feeling of the practitioners themselves, but also those of their clients and patients.

As I have pointed out elsewhere (Samuel 199o:78), the delimitaCIVILIZED SHAMANS

tion of these patterns depends on the level of analysis. In this book, we are dealing throughout at a general level. This is particularly true of the earlier chapters, where patterns referred to by a single label (such as Isa) cover many centuries and considerable internal development.

In the lists of cultural patterns, I indicates India, T refers to Tibet. Numbers indicate main patterns (e.g., Is); letters indicate subdivisions (e.g., Isa). The antecedent patterns to a given pattern are indicated, where appropriate, after each pattern (