The Rising Corpse
Tibet (Central Tibet, the Ü-Tsang region) · Folk and tantric tradition, recorded twentieth century
The rite was not for the household. The accounts agree on this. The rite was performed by a ngagspa, a sorcerer of the unreformed schools, in a closed room into which no member of the dead man’s family was admitted. The corpse was fresh. The corpse was laid on its back upon the floor of the room. The sorcerer lay upon it, mouth to mouth, body the length of the body beneath, and began the recitation.
The recitation was a single mantra. The accounts do not give it.
The recitation was held for hours. The records of Alexandra David-Néel, who in the years between 1912 and 1923 travelled in the Ü-Tsang region and in the eastern marches under the protection of the lama Yongden, report that the sorcerer was not to break the contact of the mouths until the rite was complete. The hands of the sorcerer were placed on the hands of the corpse. The legs of the sorcerer were placed on the legs of the corpse. The lamps in the room were few. The door was barred from the inside.
The corpse began to move.
On the rite
The records describe the movements in stages.
In the first stage the limbs of the corpse twitched, in the way limbs are sometimes recorded to twitch in the hours after a death, and the sorcerer did not stop the recitation. In the second stage the chest of the corpse began to swell beneath him, and to fall, and to swell again, in a slow rhythm that was not breath. In the third stage the body began to push. The sorcerer was lifted from the floor by the rising of the body and was held above it by the contact of the mouths alone. The accounts of the eastern marches insist that the sorcerer must not, in this stage, release the mouth. The whole of the rite turned on what the corpse would do with its tongue.
The corpse opened its mouth.
The tongue of the corpse, the records say, pushed forward into the mouth of the sorcerer. The tongue was longer than a tongue. The sorcerer, at the moment the tongue was fully extended, bit it through at the root and tore it out. The body fell back to the floor. The sorcerer rose, the tongue held in his teeth, and stepped out of the room.
On the object
The tongue, dried, became the object of the sorcerer’s power.
The accounts describe it carried in a small pouch at the belt, used in the work that the ngagspa was paid to perform, and never spoken of in detail. David-Néel records that she was shown such an object, by a sorcerer in the Kham country who would not name what he had done to obtain it, and that the object was the colour and the texture of old leather and was kept between two folds of red wool.
The corpse rose by the length of the spine, and could not bend, and the doorways of the village had been built low for this reason.
The accounts of central and eastern Tibet are consistent on the architectural detail. The lintels of the houses were low. A man entering had to stoop. A corpse, the joints of which had stiffened in death and which had been animated by the rite, could not stoop. The corpse, walking, walked the length of the room and struck its head against the door-beam and fell. The villagers, hearing the strike, knew the rite had been performed and knew the body had risen and knew the sorcerer had not yet bound it. The villagers stayed within their houses until the morning.
On what was buried
The body, after the rite, was given to the funeral specialists. The corpse was no longer entire. The tongue was gone. The villagers reported the absence and made no inquiry into the cause. The sky-burial men cut the body in the manner the rite of the jhator required. The vultures came.
The archive records that the Bardo Thödol was, in the cases attended by lamas of the reformed schools, read aloud for the full forty-nine days. The archive records that the doorways of the village, in the generations that followed, were still built low. The archive records that the sorcerer, in the accounts that name him, did not return to the household.
The archive holds no position on whether the tongue of the corpse continued, in the pouch at the belt, to speak. The archive observes only that the body had been laid down, and that the body had risen, and that something had been taken from the mouth, and that the door of the room had remained barred until the rite was complete.
- David-Néel, Alexandra. Magic and Mystery in Tibet. London: John Lane, 1931. The chapter Psychic Sports, pages 132 to 135, the first English-language account of the ro-langs rite as observed in eastern Tibet.
- Nebesky-Wojkowitz, René de. Oracles and Demons of Tibet: The Cult and Iconography of the Tibetan Protective Deities. The Hague: Mouton, 1956. The standard ethnographic reference for the ngagspa class of sorcerers and the corpse-rites attributed to them.
- Wayman, Alex. The Buddhist Tantras: Light on Indo-Tibetan Esotericism. New York: Samuel Weiser, 1973. The textual context for the ro-langs as a category within the lower tantric literature.