designed to confer upon the deceased the magic power of rising up in the ghost-body or Ka possessed of all sense faculties, the service having consisted of ‘the opening of the mouth and eyes’ and the restoration of the use of all other parts of the body. Likewise, the lāmas’ aim, at the outset, is to restore complete consciousness to the deceased after the swoon-state immediately following death, and to accustom him to the unfamiliar environment of the Otherworld, assuming that he be, like the multitude, one of the unenlightened, and thus incapable of immediate emancipation.
In conformity with our own view, that that part of the Tibetan funeral rites directly concerned with the effigy and the spyang-pu has come down to our day as a survival from pre-Buddhist, probably very ancient, times, Dr. L. A. Waddell writes of it as follows: ‘This is essentially a Bön rite, and is referred to as such in the histories of Guru Padma Sambhava, as being practised by the Bön [i.e. the religion prevalent in Tibet before the advent of Buddhism, and, in its transcendentalism, much like Taoism], and as having incurred the displeasure of the Guru Padma Sambhava, the founder of Lāmaism.’
Of the spyang-pu itself, Dr. Waddell adds: ‘Its inscription [as in our copy above] usually runs:
‘I, the world-departing One, … (and here is inserted the name of the deceased), adore and take refuge in my lāma-confessor, and all the deities, both mild [translated by us as “peaceful”] and wrathful;[1] and [may] “the Great Pitier”[2] forgive my accumulated sins and impurities of former lives, and show me the way to another good world!’[3]
At the left shoulder of the central figure of the spyang-pu, as in our copy, and sometimes down the middle in other
- ↑ ‘Of the hundred superior deities, forty-two are supposed to be mild, and fifty-eight of an angry nature.’—L. A. Waddell.
- ↑ ‘An aboriginal or Chinese deity now identified with Avalokita, with whom he has much in common.’—L. A. Waddell.
- ↑ Our translation is based upon that made by Dr. Waddell; cf. Gazetteer of Sikhim, pp. 387–8.
