The Cult of Tara

MAGIC AND RITUAL IN TIBET
and write, and he had to commit to memory all the texts of his
ritual profession : prayers and earnest wishes, confessions and offerings
of the morning and evening rituals, all the incidental verses
that might conceivably be introduced at the discretion of the head
monk, and all the large ritual texts used monthly or annually at the
great monastic ceremonies. It was a prodigious feat of memory for
a nine- or ten-year-old child to be called upon to perform, though
the learning was spread over a number of years. I can remember
every day after breakfast hearing the young monks chanting aloud
in the peculiar singsong that marked the word boundaries in the
dimly understood classical Tibetan texts they were reading, and
which alerted the teacher to appropriate punitive action when a
break in its rhythm signaled him that a student had made a mistake
in his recitation.
These younger monks also helped clean the temple before the
large rituals and served the tea during their progress. For the
young monk, his early training was a time of whippings and ear pullings,
but it was also a time of pleasure in learning, of mastering the
monastic environment, helping the older monks to fashion the delicately
wrought offerings, to fill the butter lamps, and to set out
the implements of the ritual.
Tibetan Buddhism has a ritual structure of its own, a syntax that
has been imposed upon the experiential "given" of the contemplative
experience. This structuring of meditative experience is
part of a tradition that goes back to India, where the raw data of
contemplation were ordered into ritual patterns, and these were the
structures that made up the framework of the basic Tantras. But
in Tibet this structure enclosed a basically Tibetan experience, and
the Indian prototypes were transfigured into an irreducibly Tibetan
expression. The interstices of the Indian outline were filled in with
the fierce and vibrant movements of the Tibetan shamans' dance, and
the drone and roar of Tibetan chant and music; and the flat Indian
offering cake became the refined and brilliant torma, made of barley
flour and decorated with intricate designs of colored butter, reminding
one of nothing so much as the farthest flight of a Max Ernst.
Traditionally, three years were spent later in the young monk's
life, after monastic college, in learning in a formal course the technical
details of this ritual. The three-year sequence had six parts : (1)
ritual hand gestures, (2) chanting, (3) making mandalas, (4) making
tormas, (5) playing the musical instruments, and (6) dancing. But