University of Toronto: Dept of Religion -Buddhist StudiesPHD Candidate Interests in Epic Literature (King Gesar of Ling) poetry and Buddhist visual arts Address: Toronto
This article proposes that many Tibetan rituals are shaped by a language of creating, giving, and... more This article proposes that many Tibetan rituals are shaped by a language of creating, giving, and eating food. Drawing on a range of premodern texts and observation of a week-long Accomplishing Medicine (sman sgrub) ritual based on those texts, we explore ritualized food interactions from a narrative perspective. Through the creation, offering, and consumption of food, ritual participants, including Buddhas, deities, and other unseen beings, create and maintain variant identities and relationships with each other. Using a ritual tradition that crosses religious and medical domains in Tibet, we examine how food and eating honors, constructs, and maintains an appropriate and spatiotemporally situated community order with a gastronomic contract familiar to all participants. FOOD AND EATING IN TIBETAN BUDDHISM FOOD AND EATING have long been objects of study for anthropologists and historians of Asian cultures and regions. Some have decoded the symbolic languages of food or analyzed eating as a performative activity , and others have thought about the economy of food exchange and the
This article proposes that many Tibetan rituals are shaped by a language of creating, giving, and... more This article proposes that many Tibetan rituals are shaped by a language of creating, giving, and eating food. Drawing on a range of premodern texts and observation of a week-long Accomplishing Medicine (sman sgrub) ritual based on those texts, we explore ritualized food interactions from a narrative perspective. Through the creation, offering, and consumption of food, ritual participants, including Buddhas, deities, and other unseen beings, create and maintain variant identities and relationships with each other. Using a ritual tradition that crosses religious and medical domains in Tibet, we examine how food and eating honors, constructs, and maintains an appropriate and spatiotemporally situated community order with a gastronomic contract familiar to all participants. FOOD AND EATING IN TIBETAN BUDDHISM FOOD AND EATING have long been objects of study for anthropologists and historians of Asian cultures and regions. Some have decoded the symbolic languages of food or analyzed eating as a performative activity , and others have thought about the economy of food exchange and the
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