“One’s Own Body of Pure Channels and Elements”: The Teaching and Practice of Tibetan Yoga at Namdroling
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Wonderful essay, thank you. Just a few comments, suggestions:
1: minor corrections
l. 163: second "created" can be deleted
l. 165: "the demeanor of a surfer" is probably obscure for a majority of the journal's readership, should be replaced or explained
l. 187: add "to"--"used to chase"
l. 201: either "both" or "alike"--sentence reads clumsily because of the redundancy
l. 205: clarify referent: "he hung him"--"his father hung him" or some such
l. 211: Kālacakra, not Kālācakra
l. 242: the last phrase "to gain access to" seems unnecessary and could be eliminated
l. 267: "the body's gnostic resources" the meaning of "gnostic" here is unclear; do you mean the body's own wisdom??
l. 447: strongly recommend deleting "profound" as inappropriately laudatory for a scholarly essay
2. larger considerations
l. 255: the idea that philosophy and practice are "entangled" (nice way to put it) does not to my mind indicate some "deep commitment to philosophy," perhaps instead praxis involves both comprehending the doctrinal teachings and seeing their expression in practices
¶. ll. 372–378: would benefit from an example from daily prayers and recitations (if not bound by secrecy, of course)
l. 380: again, here it seems more a matter of personally integrating into one's way of being in the world a particular doctrinal framework, a "view" (the idea that practitioners become skilled adepts of Buddhist philosophy in this training as described is not supported)
ll. 493–495: this needs to be expanded with an explanation that "taming" means transformation by killing and consuming; see, for example, Ronald Davidson "Reflections on the Maheśvara Subjugation Myth" Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, 1991; and Jacob Dalton, The Taming of the Demons, Yale 2013.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
This article is a valuable study that provides a clear presentation of Tibetan yogic techniques as taught and practised within a contemporary Tibetan monastery in South India. With this in mind, I offer below some suggestions for improvement.
The extensive period devoted to ethnographic fieldwork through participant observation (and active involvement in the yogic practices concerned) has clearly given the author a detailed insider’s insight into the way these practices work and the manner they are understood and contextualized within the Tibetan monastic environment.
The introduction to the article offers a very useful contextualization of the practices themselves, their lineage and the environment within which they are currently being taught. In this part, references to modern scholars’ works are well-chosen. I noted, however, the absence of two fairly important works: Samuel, Geoffrey, The Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions to the Thirteenth Century, New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
White, David, Gordon, The Alchemical Body, University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Is this because you did not find them relevant to your subject?
From page 12 onwards, the explanation seems to be exclusively based on the oral instructions delivered by Lama Rabjee and other lamas at Namdrolling. This is surely a useful vantage point, for how else to understand the intent and purport of such practices – a purely textual approach would not do. However, it would be beneficial to at least occasionally draw on the texts from which these teachings are taught (the gNam chos manual, for instance), since you refer repeatedly to the manner in which the lama makes the text come alive and in which the practices encode the text in the body of the practitioner.
In the introduction, you seem to hold that prescriptiveness is an essential feature of Tibetan yoga that distinguishes it from other forms of Indian yoga. But is this prescriptiveness not found in yoga traditions across the board? In the sense that postures are all prescribed with the intent of achieving very specific results. Of course, as your article abundantly makes clear, the Tibetan yoga is characterized by prescribed visualizations and a specific worldview that accompany the postures. Yet these may well have been part of Indian yoga traditions as well, only the Tibetans have so far been better at resisting the commodification of their practices. This, as you make clear, is partly because of the monastic setting within which they are taught, and partly because of the systems in place (in brief, the initiations, preliminaries, secrecy) to prevent them from being accessed in a decontextualized manner. So my point is that you may need to reflect on whether it is really prescriptiveness that distinguishes this Tibetan yoga.
In the conclusion, I am fairly unconvinced that what you describe in the article is really all that different from what is intended by Gavin Flood’s ‘entextualization of tantric doctrine’ upon the body; to me at least, what you present confirms Flood’s hypothesis.
Here are also some other, more minor, points:
- You fluctuate between using yogin and yogi; it would be good to stick to one convention, knowing that yogin is perhaps slightly more scholarly, whereas yogi is the more popular alternative.
- rdzogs: sometimes, you translate this as ‘completion’, at others as ‘perfection’.
- Sometimes, you introduce a topic, but the reader has to wait for the explanation until later. For example, ll.55-56 you discuss the three-tiered programme, but what the three tiers are only becomes clear later on. Likewise, in l.351, discussing “all three levels”; the levels are only explained in the next section. So adding “(see next section)” in bracket would be helpful, as it anticipates the needs of the reader.
- Similarly, you talk of beb-s in l.684, but they are only defined in the paragraph below. It would be good to provide at least a working translation of the term in brackets, along with the scientific transliteration, which would be ’bebs.
- Throughout your piece you write mahayoga, but this should be corrected to mahāyoga.
- Likewise, saṃsara and saṃsaric should be corrected to saṃsāra and saṃsāric, or if you are using the popular transcription, without any diacritics at all.
- Repeatedly, you use ‘their’ and ‘them’ when you mean ‘one’s’ and ‘one’.
- l.251 and l.423, l.426: ‘examine’ and ‘look for’ do not seem to be appropriate verbs in this context; do you think they do justice to the ethos of effortlessness that pervades the Great Perfection?
l.36: Lama Rabjee’ >> Lama Rabjee’s
l.39 : heavily-bodily oriented >> heavily body-oriented
n.7: yoga traditions in there >> this seems wrong
n.8: tat the >> ?!
n.10: prescribed >> prescriptive
notes 14 and 15: remove italics
n.15: who at the time of writing (change order)
n.16: It would be interesting to add a few comments on whether and how such an epistemological treatise would inform the practice of yoga.
n.23: You quote David Higgins’ thesis; note that it has since been published as a book (Arbeitskreis für Tibetische und Buddhistische Studien Universität Wien, 2013), so it may be worth quoting the published version instead.
l.123: better >> better suited
n.34: the folio number is missing. Moreover, please provide exact publication details for Tibetan works that are quoted.
ll.152-158: While it is interesting to have this account from your fieldnotes, this distinction between the dharma of the authoritative scriptures (Skt. āgamadharma) and the dharma of realization (Skt. adhigamadharma) reported by the Khenpo is in fact quite a common trope in Buddhist philosophy. See La Vallée Poussin, Louis de, L’Abhidharmakośa de Vasubandhu, Traduction et Annotations, 6 Volumes, Bruxelles: Institut Belge des Hautes Études Chinoises, 1971, vol.5, ch.8, p.220. So the Khenpo is here drawing on this common distinction.
l.163: created >> delete
l.164: he’s not teaching >> too informal for an academic paper
n.20: Here the format of your bibliographic references suddenly changes. Please stick to one format, also in subsequent notes.
l.187: used chase >> used to chase
ll.193-194: 500,000 Foundational Practices >> then only put Tibetan in bracket, rather than after 500,000
ll.205-206: Such a detailed description seems unnecessary; English-speaking readers will know the word ‘nettle’.
ll.200-208: The account of Lama Rabjee’s sufferings seems too long. All this can be summarized more briefly and less anecdotally, e.g.: “when young, he suffered at the hands of his father, who inflicted various kinds of corporeal punishment on him.”
ll.232-233: are you not here repeating the question already asked in l.78?
l.249: their own >> one’s own
enlightened beings >> add “and non-enlightened debtors” – after all, the demons are also guests of the feast.
l.257-258: feats of the body >> bodily feats
l.272: direct transcendence doesn’t seem to be a very appropriate translation for khregs chod. Sam van Schaik’s ‘breakthrough’ would probably be more fitting. See van Schaik, Sam, Approaching the Great Perfection: Simultaneous and Gradual Methods of Dzogchen Practice in the Longchen Nyingtig, Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2004, pp.99-101.
l.303: and inner heat >> close quotation marks
l.317: add “in the 8th century”
ll.315-325: Here there is a very detailed study that could be referred to: Cantwell, Cathy, Dudjom Rinpoche’s Vajrakīlaya Works: A Study in Authoring, Compiling and Editing Texts in the Tibetan Revelatory Tradition, Sheffield: Equinox, 2020.
l.350: oneself >> themselves
l.373: conceptually >> add comma >> conceptually,
l.385: bodhicitta >> italics
l.399 >> course >> coarse
l.403: Buddha-body >> delete hyphen
l.421: on the ’khor ’das ru shan, see van Schaik, Sam, Approaching the Great Perfection: Simultaneous and Gradual Methods of Dzogchen Practice in the Longchen Nyingtig, Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2004, p.98.
l.429: consciousness, >> delete comma
The terms ‘storehouse consciousness’, while no doubt fitting in the Yogācāra context, just doesn’t really work once one reaches the level of Dzogchen exegesis. See Germano, David F., and Waldron, William S., ‘A Comparison of Ālaya-vijñāna in Yogācāra and Dzogchen’, in Nauriyal, D.K., Drummond, Michael S., and Lal, Y.B. (eds.), Buddhist Thought and Applied Psychological Research: Transcending the Boundaries, London: Routledge, 2006, pp.36-68.
ll.422-431: Here, it would make sense to refer to Hatchell, Christopher, Naked Seeing: The Great Perfection, the Wheel of Time, and Visionary Buddhism in Renaissance Tibet, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
l.434: I wonder whether here one might risk reading too much into this simple greeting. After all, it could just reflect clichés about Westerners being burnt-out busybodies who come to India to find some inner peace, or alternatively it could just be a friendly greeting.
n.30 You refer to Kapstein here for the first time, yet you fail to provide the detailed bibliographical reference.
n.28: remove italics. Could you provide the page numbers and the publication information?
ll.469-477: Such a long quote needs to be indented.
l.494: tame them >> add “by manifesting a form more terrifying than that of the demon to be subdued”.
l.506: themselves >> oneself
l.507: their own >> one’s own
l.511: that themselves >> that they themselves
l.512: is doing >> are doing
l.516: space after full stop
l.525: corpse eating >> add hyphen >> corpse-eating
l.534: Eventually >> add comma
ll.555-559: This may need to be qualified somewhat. First, in that all three are but experiences, they are not to be equated with realization. Second, in that Dzogchen adepts would be careful to distinguish their non-conceptuality from that of Chan, for instance.
l.595: The sudden mention of holy places here needs further comment if it is to be made intelligible to those unfamiliar with the tantric mode of presenting things.
l.605: into >> on to
p.14: here you repeatedly use bindu, although before you had used ‘seminal essences’.
ll.624-625: which causes >> causing
l.625: dig pa >> sdig pa
l.644: which creates >> with the risk of creating
l.660: To those not in the know, it will be unclear what a ‘wind disease’ is. There’s a good book by Janet Gyatso on Tibetan medical understandings. This could usefully be referred to here and elsewhere in your article. Gyatso, Janet, On Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
l.669: they will >> one will
l.703: tsalung practice >> space too wide
l.716: they feel >> one feels
they go >> one goes
l.736: then they will >> then one will
Author Response
Point 1: The introduction to the article offers a very useful contextualization of the practices themselves, their lineage and the environment within which they are currently being taught. In this part, references to modern scholars’ works are well-chosen. I noted, however, the absence of two fairly important works: Samuel, Geoffrey, The Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions to the Thirteenth Century, New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
White, David, Gordon, The Alchemical Body, University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Is this because you did not find them relevant to your subject?
Response 1: I am indeed aware of those sources, and yes you are correct, they are not specific enough to this particular lineage and practice.
Point 2: It would be beneficial to at least occasionally draw on the texts from which these teachings are taught (the gNam chos manual, for instance), since you refer repeatedly to the manner in which the lama makes the text come alive and in which the practices encode the text in the body of the practitioner.
Response 2: I have drawn from the oral teachings on Sky Dharma extensively, and those are based directly on the text. I did not translate the Sky Dharma manuals myself. I actually spent my time translating Longchenpa's Treasury of the Supreme Vehicle (Theg mchog mdzod). This was intentional. I was not comfortable translating and sharing the Sky Dharma manuals. I have already revealed a lot about this secret yoga tradition, and do so with permission from certain Namdroling Khenpos in whom such authority is vested. But it did not seem necessary to divulge the original texts, and it also struck me that relying on oral teachings is more loyal to the experience the monks and nun are having. Of course, they read the texts, and so did I, but they do not translate them and do the deep philological work that would entail.
Point 3: In the introduction, you seem to hold that prescriptiveness is an essential feature of Tibetan yoga that distinguishes it from other forms of Indian yoga. But is this prescriptiveness not found in yoga traditions across the board?
Response 3: I should be more clear about this. I refer to modern yoga, and that does not only mean traditions in India. I often think of Westerners doing yoga for exercise completely divorced from religion when I make such statements.
Reviewer 3 Report
Please see attached. Thanks.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Thank you very much for your comments!
Point 1: Towards the end of the MS, I have expected more on the author’s integration of the Sky Dharma yoga into her mental state. What are her realisations? What forms of tantric transformations did she undergo? How did the external and the internal inform and transform each other? Perhaps this will be in her next article.
Response 1: Actually, it's true, I did have some special moments that were revelations birthed through the practice. I appreciate your interest in them. It's possible that in the future I will write about those experiences. They were short-lived. As the lama pointed out to me, one has special experiences in each retreat, and they accumulate over time. None is tantamount to complete enlightenment. That is the life of a practitioner.
