FAS Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

Author: Ariel Lewin

Dissertation Advisors: Professor Michael Witzel and Professor Francis X. Clooney

Title: The Hagiography of Khumbu Beyul’s “Flying Yogi” Lama Sangwa Dorje Reassessed in Light of Vajrayāna Dzogchen Materials and a New Thangka Series at Pangboche Pal Riwo Monastery

This dissertation investigates the paradox surrounding the 16th to 17th century “Flying Yogi” Lama Sangwa Dorje, who founded Pangboche/Pal Riwo, which was the first monastery in Khumbu, Nepal. The Lama was a documented, religious authority of Terton Ratna Lingpa’s Southern Treasure lineage. He was the first to institutionalize the Dumchod (deity mandala offering) ritual in Khumbu, which is also regarded as a beyul/hidden refuge land. The Lama is the most famous religious figure in Khumbu Beyul, but the written materials about him are scarce. The Lama is locally recognized as establishing the oldest, continuous Vajrayāna Dzogchen lineage in the region, and was an influential Ponlop/ “ruler” who is still referred to as the “King of Khumbu Beyul”. However, he lacks a conventional written hagiography, because his original handwritten namgur/poetic autobiography was lost.

Furthermore, previous researchers, who gathered local oral histories about the Lama, did not evaluate his legacy within the context of his Vajrayāna Dzogchen framework, or visit his five, key yoga caves, study his sacred body prints, or incorporate his monastery’s chayik/charter, which was the first one written in Khumbu. I am the first researcher who was permitted to examine Lama Sangwa Dorje’s Pangboche monastery chayik. Consequently, earlier scholars, who did not read the chayik, often dismissed the religious culture of Pangboche monastery as an informal, folk religion, particularly due to Pangboche’s monastic model of mixed celibate and non-celibate membership.

This dissertation argues that Lama Sangwa Dorje has a sacred presence, which has endured in Khumbu that does not derive from his missing written hagiography, but from the living transmission and continuous practice of his Vajrayāna Dzogchen rituals. Therefore, his sacred presence is embodied in his Dumchod ritual, local oral-visual histories, in his kujey/sacred body prints and relics, and in visual practices such Thongdrol (liberation through seeing). This combination of factors, which includes the Lama’s previously inaccessible chayik along with the pilgrimage to his five, key yoga caves, reveals a structured religious culture at Pangboche’s Pal Riwo monastery, and challenges prior scholarly dismissals which assume that Pangboche’s mixed celibate and non-celibate membership indicates an informal folk religion. Furthermore, this study demonstrates the primacy of material, spatial, and lived modes of transmission over textual authority in Himalayan Buddhism and how a hagiography in the form of consecrated artwork opens new constructed spaces that facilitate experiencing sacred presence and esoteric pilgrimage via gaze.

My method included pilgrimages to the Lama’s five, key yoga caves in Khumbu, studying and documenting his kujey as well as observer-participation in the 2024 Drubchod (Dumji) ritual, and examinations of previously unpublished documents from private Sherpa collections that I was permitted to study. Trust-based collaborations were made with Pangboche ritual specialists, and a Pangboche master artist, Khapa Nyima Dorje Sherpa, who is recognized by the local Sherpa community as a specialist in creating Buddhist thangkas and clay deity sculptures. This collaboration resulted in a new consecrated hagiographic thangka series for Lama Sangwa Dorje, which was revealed as a Thongdrol during the 2024 Drubchod. In October 2025, the thangka series was installed as series of permanent murals. This series is a living archive, which sequentially maps the Lama’s local oral-visual history and provides an interface for intimate experiences of the Lama’s sacred presence. Significantly, the series is a spiritual support for the Nyingma practice of Thongdrol and is publicly accessible.

This study integrates the theoretical approach of Robert A. Orsi regarding his framework of lived religion and “abundant presence,” David Morgan’s theory of religious visual culture and the “embodied eye” and “sacred gaze” as well as Jonathan Z. Smith’s concepts of “place-making” and the “construction of sacred space”. These lenses reveal how oral-visual narratives actively create sacred space and bridge the incongruity between scholarly textual expectations and the richer territory of lived practice.

In conclusion, Lama Sangwa Dorje’s Vajrayāna Dzogchen transmission tradition, rituals, relics and oral-visual elements at Pangboche sustain his presence more powerfully than through a written hagiography. The chayik further demonstrates that Lama Sangwa Dorje instituted a structured religious culture with specific rules, rituals and doctrine that challenges prior assumptions. This study significantly relied on trust-based collaborations with the Pangboche Sherpa community. By combining that with the access to rare, privately held materials, this study contributes to South Asian and Himalayan Buddhist studies by foregrounding embodied, material, and spatial modes of transmission in non-text-based hagiographic traditions that rely on key oral-visual elements.

This study examines the trajectory of Mahākāla, one of them most popular Buddhist protectors, from his earliest appearances in Buddhist textual sources to his elevation as the paramount protective deity of the Mongol Yuan empire in the thirteenth century. Drawing on Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese sources spanning eight centuries, it asks how Buddhist traditions incorporated a figure of dangerous alterity without eliminating the very qualities that renders him visible and deployable, and what this process reveals about the mechanisms through which Buddhism manages powers they cannot afford to discard.

This study argues that Buddhist traditions do not reject or eliminate dangerous powers it encounters, as represented by Mahākāla, but approach them as a condition of possibility: ungoverned, such forces bind beings more tightly to saṃsāra; governed, they generate extraordinary efficacy and liberation. Mahākāla exemplifies this logic at an institutional scale: his violence is never denied or moralized away but disciplined and redirected through a succession of frameworks, each of which depends on the preservation of the very force it controls. It is this structural premise, the dissertation contends, that operates both at the level of doctrine and at the level of institutional history. The deity who comes to preside over the most powerful empire of the premodern world was never fully tamed, and ultimately, the tradition that enables his deployment carried within its own soteriological logic the recognition that no worldly protection is sufficient.

This dissertation looks to the past in order to make claims about the future—or multiple possible futures—of a literary text. It does so by presenting a grounded ahistorical reading of Kādambarī, a remarkably difficult work of Sanskrit literary prose written by the court poet Bāṇa in the seventh-century capital city of Kannauj. This reading illustrates what I call “four-dimensional philology,” the self-reflexive interpretive practice whereby an influential conceptual resource from a text’s reception history functions as a point of departure for novel rereading. The main conceptual resource employed by this dissertation is Bhāmaha’s notion of “enhancement” (atiśaya). With it, I examine moments of heightened experience and expression in Bāṇa’s prose romance, particularly those involving divine horses and precious stones. Instead of limiting myself to the historical question of “what has been said about Kādambarī?” I instead opt for the irrealis mood, asking “what could be said?” in the hope of gaining greater clarity into what should be said about Bāṇa’s work. Ultimately, this dissertation aims to read Kādambarī better with the hope that we might better read ourselves. What is it about literature—especially difficult literature—that piques our curiosity? What forms can the ensuing “revelation” take? And why, after all this, would we ever wish to read Kādambarī again?

This dissertation explores the role of gardens and gardening in the intellectual and material culture as well as the social life of early modern South Asia through the study of writings on gardens and horticulture across multiple languages and diverse textual genres. In addition, it draws on the pictorial record of the visual arts and surviving garden sites as well as continuing horticultural practices to contextualize and interpret these. The study argues that by the sixteenth century, a particular conception of the (elite) garden began to crystallize that combined a Persianate formal layout and temperate plant species introduced via West and Central Asia with Indian horticultural practices and vegetation, as well as an increasing number of new plants introduced from the Americas and East Asia. This idea of the garden, widely generalized across all but the southernmost regions of the Indian Subcontinent and transcending religious and linguistic divisions, emerges as a hallmark of the cultural world shared by the Mughals and most of their vassals, competitors, and eventual regional successors. Gardens are are thus both materially and symbolically prominent sites, and in turn feature extensively throughout the literature and arts of the period. Two distinct traditions of technical literature on gardening and farming – one in Sanskrit, the other in Persian – saw a spate of new and subtly innovative compositions and recompilations from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries that reflect their encounter with each other as well as with the material reality of the Indo-Persian garden. Moreover, they can be situated in the context of a global efflorescence of gardening manuals beginning in the sixteenth century. While the sudden proliferation of such works in Western Europe has been attributed to the rise of print, a similar trend manifesting at the same time in South Asia, the Ottoman Empire, and even East Asia suggests a much more widespread phenomenon with more complex causes. Beyond gardening manuals, writers in Persian as well as vernaculars like Urdu and Brajbhāṣā produced lengthy and sophisticated – and uniquely South Asian – descriptions of gardens both real and imagined. Literary works, especially in tightly constrained genres like the Persian and Urdu ghazal, were also enriched by elaborate conceits based on detailed and specific botanical knowledge. The image of the well-tended garden was a central metaphor in the Mughals’ conception of their state, and the upwardly mobile class of highly educated clerks tasked with the everyday running of that state – the munshīs of the title – produced some of the most personal and expressive records of Mughal horticulture. Gardens and gardening, in real life as well as in text and image, became an important nexus for a complex array of societal relations and a site for assertions of status and of community or individual identity. A garden could be a public display of power and prosperity, but was also imagined as an escape from society’s moral strictures. It could be an Islamic symbol of paradise or allude to the sacred landscapes through which the Hindu god Kr̥ṣṇa cavorts with his beloved Rādhā; it could proclaim ethical refinement or a personal passion, and express, paradoxically, both conformity and individuality. Through this kaleidoscope of meanings, gardens and gardening – and what South Asians chose to write about these topics prior to European colonial rule – serve to illuminate the contours of an incipient Mughal modernity, and of the intellectual and material foundations onto which the developments of the colonial and post-colonial periods have subsequently been built.

In this dissertation, I examine some of the ways in which different ontological schemata were developed, critiqued, and defended in the Sanskritic intellectual tradition of late pre-modern India. I do so by focusing specifically on the stream of thought known as Navya Nyāya, whose adherents displayed a commitment to realism and rigorous analysis and a willingness to subject long-standing ideas to withering critique. I look at three major ontological schemata:

1. the so-called “Standard Model”, particularly as exemplified in Jagadīśa Tarkâlaṅkāra’s Tarkâmṛta, which developed out of an earlier period of creative synthesis of the older Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika traditions.
2. the “Radical Revision” proposed by the brilliant Raghunātha Śiromaṇi in his Padârtha-tattva-nirūpaṇa.
3. Veṇīdatta’s “Attempted Synthesis” of the Standard Model and the Radical Revision in his Padârtha-maṇḍana. I also examine two other texts that provide innovative perspectives on the debate on ontological schemata and on the language in which this debate was conducted:
4. Gaṅgādhara Sūrī’s Kāṇāda-siddhānta-candrikā, in which he presents a “sedimentary” account of the ontological debate in Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, describing the key features of the Standard Model while pointing out the major loci of dispute with the Radical Revision and with other Naiyāyika-Vaiśeṣika ontological schemata.
5. Maheśacandra Nyāyaratna’s Navyanyāya-bhāṣā-pradīpa, in which he explains the key features of the technical language of Navya Nyāya without a strong commitment to specific ontological positions. These schemata are all usually described in Navya Nyāya texts using the peculiar but astonishingly powerful technical language developed by Navya Nyāya philosophers. I also “translate” these traditional schemata into the language of modern mathematics, using tools developed in fields like category theory to model the formulations of the Navya Nyāya language. Using this, I show that the developments in the Navya Nyāya ontological schemata over time are increasingly more conducive to representation in category-theoretical terms. Finally, I indicate some important ways in which the trajectory of this set of debates continues to be of relevance to us even now. This project is as much about the intellectual history of Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika as it is about the intellectual future of some of its core philosophical ideas.

This dissertation examines ancient South Asian concepts and mythology of time. It journeys from the Ṛgveda to the later texts of the Vedic tradition (Upaniṣads), then to the epics, and on to philosophical tractates of different schools of Indian thought. It reconstructs South Asian mythology of time, establishes its Vedic and Indo–European origins, and shows historical development of the concept of time from an early pre-philosophical period to its mature form in the Hindu mythology and philosophy. By analyzing data from Vedic and early Brahmanic sources in comparison with Indo-European materials, such as Iranian Zurvanite mythology and thought, I reconstruct early views on time and consider if there existed a unified understanding of time and an early, pre-philosophical, notion of time. I investigate etymological and conceptual connections between such Vedic terms as the year (saṃvatsara, vatsara), World Order/Truth (ṛta), and a period/season (ṛtu), and conclude that even in the earliest period, i.e., in the Ṛgveda, the concepts that are developed in the later tradition can be found in their preliminary form: an idea of two types of time, or two times, — the first is time-eternity, and the second one is transitory, “concrete”, or “profane” time; and also — a view that time is the Lord of the universe that regulates and even creates it. Proceeding, I analyze texts belonging to the late Vedic tradition and then turn my attention to the epics and philosophical works. I establish conceptual and historical connections between early views on time (Vedic period) and those of Hinduism. A special attention is paid to the doctrine of kālavāda that depicts time as the Absolute unmanifested reality and power that creates, regulates, and destroys the universe; to the relation between time and death, and also to the idea of two times: one is eternal, undivided, and unchangeable; the other is empirical, changeable, and divisible. South Asian sources are studied in comparison with a wide range of Indo-European mythological and linguistic materials. This approach is crucial to be able to find the origins of the concepts considered, reconstruct time-related Indo–European myths and motifs, and clarify functions of different mythological characters.

This dissertation examines the impersonation of Indra in the R̥gveda (conventionally Rigveda), arguing that a ‘textualized self’ emerges during performance. What does it mean to disguise oneself verbally during ritual sacrifice? In order to answer this question, I examine how the text conceives of poetic performance, a kind of speech act which occurs in the same time frame and spatial proximity of its speaker. Reference to that performance, I argue, is marked by proximal deixis and performative verbs, both of which characterize actors and events as being in the here and now of the text. Through these traces, I distinguish two distinct Indras. One Indra is the mythological figure responsible for cosmogonic events, and the other is the present speaker. To collapse these two Indras into one is to collapse time and make the primordial Indra present at the performance. Stylistically, this is often accomplished through the so-called injunctive, a finite verb form which is temporally and modally unspecified; its use renders narrative time ambiguous. The hymns are not only linguistically marked, but articulate what I term a ‘mimetic circle’, in which the song presents itself as its first singing, establishes its origin, and imagines a future in which it shall be re-performed. Each new performance of the song repeats the mimetic circle, re-creating the connection between primordial Indra and the performer who asserts he is Indra. These ‘mimetic circles’ reveal a curious relationship beteen text and self which bears further investigation. To pursue that investigation, I use the ‘grammar of mimesis’ developed by studying the impersonation of Indra to approach mimetic impersonation in the rest of the R̥gveda. I find evidence that during the Soma sacrifice the seven priests mimetically impersonate the seven seers, who accompany Indra to the Vala cave to re-enact that cosmogonic event. The idea of a ‘textualized self’ restored to life in performance constitutes a developmental missing link between the Indo-European concept of 'immortality in song' and the notion of an immortal self reincarnated in body after body which is ubiquitous in Hinduism and other South Asian religions.

This dissertation focuses on one of ancient India's most fascinating and unique pre-Hindu religious commentaries. The Jaiminīya Brāhmaṇa was composed circa 800 BCE and remains one of the most intriguing texts of its type. Brāhmaṇas are middle Vedic texts concerned with the justification of sacrifices and rituals. Their aim is to explain why certain rituals have the form they do and what are some of the deeper insights necessary to manipulate the world through sacrifice. The rituals and sacrifices come in large variety of shapes. There are simple offerings of clarified butter into the fire at sunrise and sunset; there are also manifold variations of rituals focussing on the divine beverage Soma. Apart from the ritual commentary, the text also contains clues to social history and other idiosyncracies in ideology pertaining to the Jaiminīyas. Interpreting these undercurrents significantly enhances our knowledge of the middle Vedic period. A period which is probably the least studied and well-understood era in ancient Indian history. It is, however, an era of massive changes in religion, philosophy and way of life. The Vedic Indians started to settle down after having lived semi-nomadic for centuries. Their area now encompasses almost the entirety of North India. Religiously, novel ideas revolutionise the ideas about the world. The old panthenon loses importance and there is an emphasis on a creator god. It is a preliminary step into the direction of religious and philosophical monism found in the slightly later Upaniṣads. The four chapters of the dissertation explore various aspects of Vedic belief system, religion, ritual, and society.

This dissertation examines Tibetan funerary manuals based on the Sarvadurgatipariśodhana Tantra (SDP), an Indian Buddhist work first translated into Tibetan in the eighth century. I trace the transmission and study of the SDP in Tibet and the ways that it and the works it inspired distribute agency across multiple actors—human, divine, and material—in describing ritual methods for saving the dead from bad rebirths. A fundamental claim in these texts is that their rites can liberate even those who have committed terrible acts over many lifetimes. Focusing on Rje btsun Grags pa rgyal mtshan's (1147–1216) Light Rays for the Benefit of Others (Kun rig gi cho ga gzhan phan 'od zer) and several manuals and polemical works written in response to it, I explore how these texts shift responsibility away from the deceased and assign it to a network of actors including the ritual officiant and his disciples, a panoply of deities, and ritual objects. This speaks to contemporary discussions of agency and materiality, and emphasizes the importance of the latter in the study of ritual manuals. Focusing on agency also reveals a critical difference between works based on yogatantric sources like the SDP and those inspired by advanced yogic practices characteristic of Highest Yogatantra. While SDP-oriented manuals frame the dead as passive recipients of liberating rites, texts like Liberation upon Hearing in the Bardo (Bar do thos grol) imagine the dead as agents capable of securing their own freedom. This difference in necroliberative strategy is underscored by the Sa skya pa scholar A mes zhabs Ngag dbang kun dga' bsod nams' (1597–1659) Dispelling All Obscurations: Explaining the Bardo Teachings (Bar do chos bshad sgrib pa kun sel), which attempts to integrate these two models. Through a close examination of these writings, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of Tibetan traditions of Yogatantra and Highest Yogatantra vis-à-vis mortuary practices and the afterlife.

This dissertation aims to recover a model of religious authority that placed great importance upon individual gurus who were seen to be indispensable to the process of revelation. This person-centered style of religious authority is implicit in the teachings and identity of the scriptural sources of the Kulamārga, a complex of traditions that developed out of more esoteric branches of tantric Śaivism. For convenience sake, we name this model of religious authority a “Kaula idiom.” The Kaula idiom is contrasted with a highly influential notion of revelation as eternal and authorless, advanced by orthodox interpreters of the Veda, and other Indian traditions that invested the words of sages and seers with great authority. The purpose of recovering and contextualizing the Kaula framework for religious authority is to demonstrate the ways in which it makes Abhinavagupta’s representation of himself as a guru in his lengthy “autobiographical” excerpts intelligible. Although Kaula notions of religious authority and transmission—focused on the agency and intervention of perfected masters (Siddhas)—inform Abhinavagupta’s representation of himself as a guru, his self-portrayal also adds new elements to what an ideal guru should be. A close reading of the form, content, and didactic power of Abhinavagupta autobiographical passages suggests that the ideal guru should not only be a fully-enlightened Kaula master, but also schooled in the finer points of Indian scholastic discourse and a connoisseur of Sanskrit poetry; in short, a cosmopolitan Siddha.