290 CHAPTER ELEVENtrue Buddhist practice and supported the idea that all interpretations ofBud-
dhist doctrine are equally valid, with no one version in a position of ortho-
doxy above any others.
Although the Ri-med movement was originally nonpolitical, it ran into
trouble in the early twentieth century as the Gelugs began viewing it as a
threat to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama's drive for the centralization of Tibet.
The Gelug representative in eastern Tibet, Pabongkha (P'awongk'a) Rim-
poche (1878-1943) did his best to thwart the movement. The Chinese inter-
vention in the 1950s defused the conflict temporarily, but it is now resuming
on the international stage. Virtually all of the Tibetan lamas now teaching on
the international circuit are students either ofPabongkha Rimpoche or of the
Ri-meds.11.5 The Dynamics of Tibetan Ritual
Tibetan religious thought and practice revolve around Tantric ritual. Unless
one is acquainted with the ritual patterns, it is impossible to understand the
tradition at all. Although we have already discussed Tantric ritual in Chapter
6, the Tibetans have added their own style and interpretation to the ritual, de-
rived largely from their shamanic background. Thus their distinctive amalgam
deserves a separate discussion, which we will attempt here.
In the simplest terms, shamanism is the effort to gain knowledge or power
from altered states of consciousness. The various shamanic traditions around
the world differ primarily as to which altered states they regard as significant,
how they try to induce them, and what uses of these states they regard as most
worthwhile. We have already noted how early Buddhism was a variant of
shamanism, although it combined shamanism with philosophy in a way that
had never been attempted before. Tantra is also a variant of shamanism, in that
it uses the altered state of mind induced through sexual or quasi-sexual yoga
and a controlled form of spirit possession for the attainment of power. Mod-
ern shamanic practices in Tibet, which seem to continue a tradition predating
Buddhism, are also largely concerned with spirit possession and the acquisi-. tion of power, which may help explain why the Tibetans were so drawn to
Tantra during the propagation of Buddhism to their country.
As we noted previously, indigenous Tibetan religion involved four activi-
ties: divination, the ushering of the spirits of the dead to the afterlife, exor-
cism, and coercion. Of these, divination is the only practice where
pre-Buddhist forms of spirit possession still predominate. Tibetans may resort
to mediums, termed lha-pa (god-possessed) or dpa' bo (heroes), although there
are milder forms of divination, such as astrology, brought over from India, that
they may resort to as well. These mediums are used by people on all levels of
society. In 1959, for instance, the decision for the Dalai Lama to flee the ad-
vancing Chinese troops was made by the State Oracle.
A manuscript found at Tun-huang suggests that, in pre-Buddhist times, the
purpose of ushering spirits of the dead to the afterlife was primarily to make