Text, Art and Performance in bon Ritual

The aim of this project is to carry out fundamental research on rituals of the Bon religion. The three axes of research indicated by the title are intended to underscore the principle that none of these components can be adequately represented in isolation, and that an integrated approach must be adopted to do justice to the richness of the material. Research will focus on the examination of unpublished Tibetan ritual texts, performances based on these works, and the material culture associated with the ceremonies. The documentation of these objects will in turn require the study of published - mainly canonical - Tibetan commentarial literature. The project will be coordinated and directed by Professor Deborah Klimburg-Salter in collaboration with the Principal Investigator (Charles Ramble, CRCAO, Paris) at CIRDIS. This unique framework is built on many years of experience in interdisciplinary research on Tibetan culture and has developed the expertise necessary to create a web-based resource that can adequately represent the complexity of the project`s anticipated outcome. With its strong emphasis on ritual art and objects, the project will offer an important arena within which students can develop their understanding of Tibetan material culture and - since the categories of objects concerned are almost completely unrepresented in the scientific literature - will, in turn, benefit the project by contributing the knowledge acquired in their respective areas of research. Research will be carried out in collaboration with the Centre de recherche sur les civilisations de l`Asie orientale (CRCAO), Paris, and the Triten Norbutse Institution, Kathmandu. The project will be developed on the foundation of earlier exploratory investigations that have made it possible to identify and process some of the core materials, and have led to preliminary publications. Thanks to two periods spent at the University of Vienna as a Visiting Researcher, the Principal Investigator had an opportunity to examine and translate a number of core texts, which were presented at weekly graduate seminars. The Technical Assistant of the project proposed here (Kami Gurung), a member of the Triten Norbutse Institution, was invited to Vienna for six months, and during this time he and the proposed Work Contract-holder (Uwe Niebuhr) have begun the task of databasing the material (photographs, commentaries and textual prescriptions) relating to ritual sculptures. The outcomes will include two books, one emphasising the material, Bon torma as ephemeral art and the performative aspects of the rituals, and the other giving greater weight to the textual component; a series of articles, and a website. The website will contain the digitised texts, along with searchable roman transliteration and translation or paraphrase and commentary; subtitled video footage of ritual performances; and a database of annotated photographs of the ritual items, emphasising the dough-and-butter sculptures known as torma (Tib. gtor ma). It is also intended that an exhibition of these ritual objects - both the construction process and the finished products - be held at the Vienna Volkerkundemuseum in February-April 2013.

The project set out to examine the multimedia aspects of Bon rituals from three perspectives: the literary aspect, which entailed defining the corpus of texts to be considered in the study and making their content accessible; the ephemeral ritual art, notably the dough-and-butter sculptures called tormas, but also illustrated manuscripts (11/12th c.) and thangkas; and the actual performance of rituals. The most notable results that transpired during the three year long process of documenting Bon rituals in Vienna, Nepal and India was how the Bon iconography witnessed in all of the visual media collected formed an intimate relationship with the ritual texts and the ritual performance. The video material is a unique documentation of contemporary regional rituals. Also during the field trip in 2015 it was possible to document the paintings and extensive inscriptions dating to the 10th c. phase at Tabo monastery thus opening a dramatic new chapter on the earliest historical in situ evidence for Zhang Zhung visual culture. Thanks to the cooperation with the Centre of Image and Material Analysis in Cultural Heritage (CIMA) it was possible to use the latest technology (black light and infrared) to reveal in clarity the original 10th program. Due to the success of this approach this team will continue the documentary and interpretative process enabling the approach of a definition of Zhang Zhung visual culture (Bon/chös). The pioneering role of the first scientific analysis of tormas is likely to increase attention to this area of ephemeral art, also emphasizing on the interrelationship with Bon visual iconography. All the tormas were subjected to an in-depth analysis and art historically examined for the website. The over 13,500 photographs documenting the rituals and ritual objects are now archived, catalogued, categorized and classified in the Western Himalaya Archive Vienna (WHAV) and are available for public access through its database. All the audio and video material will be made available in the new Himalaya Archive Vienna (HAV), which is currently being established. A part of the photographs and ritual manuscripts and manuals and texts for the manufacture of tormas are placed on the Bon website, the romanised text being searchable. The methods used to display the results of the analysis are the 360-photo-documentation of tormas with the feature of rotating tormas on the project website and the attempt to capture related documentation materials in their complex context (audio, video, text, transliteration); structured, comparative representation of individual ephemeral ritual objects from different productions. The data content and digital platform furthers research and teaching through the texts, translations and notes. The substantial core of data is of large interest for linguists, comparative mythology and the history of religion. Combining these materials with subtitled film footage on the website offers a valuable resource in the fields of Social Anthropology, Museum Ethnography and Religious Studies.