Lord of the Dance: The Mani Rimdu Festival in Tibet and Nepal.

• Author: Makley, Charlene
• Position: Reviews of Books - Book Review

Lord of the Dance: The Mani Rimdu Festival in Tibet and Nepal. By RICHARD J. KOHN. SUNY Series in Buddhist Studies, Matthew Kapstein, ed. Albany: STATE UNIV. OF NEW YORK PRESS, 2001. Pp. xxxiv + 366. $86.50 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).

Reading cover-to-cover the late Richard Kohn's monumental study of Mani Rimdu, an annual festival held at several Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in northeastern Nepal, is a marathon remotely akin to that undertaken by the Sherpa and Tibetan monks and lamas who perform this complex three-week-long event. For good reason. As Matthew Kapstein states in his foreword to this book, Kohn's work on Mani Rimdu, including a 1,000-page dissertation (1988) and a documentary film (1985), (1) is perhaps "the fullest cinematographic and textual documentation of a major Tibetan ritual cycle yet achieved" (p. xvii). Kohn tells us that he came to Mani Rimdu via an interest in understudied forms of Buddhist temporary art. Quickly realizing, however, that such art could not be comprehended without attention to its vital ritual contexts, Kohn shifted his focus to a study of the festival as a whole, initiating in his words, "a juggernaut of research that was to roll for a decade" (p. xxii). This book represents the culmination of that research and of a career that was unfortunately cut far too short." (2)

At the time of Kohn's research in the Solu-Khumbu district of Nepal (early 1980s to early 1990s), Mani Rimdu (mani ril sgrub, or practice of mani pills) was held at three Sherpa monasteries (Chiwong, Thami, and Tengpoche), as well as Thubten Choling, founded by Tibetan refugees from the Nyingma monastery of Rongphu just north of the border of the TAR. As part of a larger genus of Tibetan pill rituals dedicated to Tibet's patron deity Avalokitesvara, Mani Rimdu centers on the production and distribution of rice flour "pills" which are considered by the community to have a variety of benefits when eaten. The pills are manufactured by monks and lamas and then sacralized and empowered through the monk assembly's invocation of a form of Avalokitesvara called Lord of the Dance (Gar dbang Thugs rje chen bo). (3) According to Kohn's main informant, the venerable Trulshik Rinpoche, abbot of Thubten Choling, the origins of this complex of rituals are relatively recent. Apparently, the abbot of Rongphu, drawing on ritual traditions from Mindroling Monastery, the great Nyingma center in central Tibet, founded the festival at Rongphu around the turn of the twentieth century. Mani Rimdu was only taken up by the newly established Sherpa monasteries in Nepal several decades later.

The great contribution of this work lies in its almost unparalleled comprehensiveness. In this Kohn rightly takes a place in the tradition of such disciplined documenters and analysts of Tibetan Buddhist ritual systems as Rene de Nebesky-Wojkowitz, Stephen Beyer, David Snellgrove, and Robert Ekvall. He divides his study into two sections. The first, "Orientations," includes an introduction to the main...