Dr. Gergely Orosz (ELTE University, Budapest): Tibetan Ransom Rituals from Mongolia

13 May 2020

Due to the outbreak of the Corona virus, the guest lecture has been postponed.

In the Tibetan collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences there are approximately 200 texts from Mongolia that belong to the genre of ransom offering rituals usually termed in Tibetan as mdos, glud, bcos thabs, and gto. Most of the texts are manuscripts made in Mongolia in the late 19th – early 20th century, but  there are also a couple of works among them that are included in a printed collection of Thu’u bkwan Blo bzang chos kyi nyi ma, supposedly made at dGon lung. The exceptionally high occurrence of this type of ritual does not only indicate that the ransom was the most important apotropaic rite in dGe lugs dominated Mongolia, but it also surpasses the number of the works included in the well-known mdos-collections of the rNying ma and bKa’ brgyud schools, as well as in the famous Rin chen gter mdzod.  In my talk, I will give a general typology of the rituals based on the Mongolian texts, then I will try to shed light on their origin. Were these texts composed by dGe lugs pa authors, or are they adaptations of earlier works written by masters of other schools?  Do they show any Mongolian influences? And what causes may lie behind their extreme popularity in Mongolia?

• Click here to download the invitation [PDF]

Due to the outbreak of the Corona virus, the event has been postponed. 

Prof. Dr. Dorji Wangchuk (Director)
Khyentse Center for Tibetan Buddhist Textual Scholarship (KC-TBTS)
Abteilung für Kultur und Geschichte Indiens und Tibets, AAI, Universität Hamburg
Alsterterrasse 1, D-20354 Hamburg