Abstract

The Tibetan female ascetic Ma gcig Lab sgron¹ (1055-1153) developed the tantric Chöd ritual practice, a meditation practice method through which a practitioner can rapidly increase his or her level of bodhicitta and "cut" (Tib. gcod) ² attachment to the habitually mistaken notion of a truly-existent "self" with the antidote to "self-grasping" ignorance: the realisation of the emptiness of all phenomena. The Chöd practitioner learns to develop bodhicitta and operationalise the experience of fear to reverse the habitual tendency to cherish the self above others and thereby attain enlightenment.

Inviting all beings throughout the universe with the thighbone trumpet (Tib. rkang gling) for a feast and to pay down one's karmic debt to them, the Chöd practitioner plays the symbolic ritual instruments and sings the mgur style "songs of meditation experience" (the same genre in which the famous Tibetan poet saint Mi la ras pa composed). Chöd performance involves the detailed visualising of giving the body away to various guests in a succession of distributions, including: the Buddhas, bodhisattvas and dharma protectors and the invited spirits. Giving away the mentally transformed body to the latter guests to pay down the practitioner's karmic debt to them, even in visualization, may conjure up the experience of fear and attachment, which the practitioner aims to recognise as habitual self-preservation. At a critical moment in the ritual dramaturgy, when the practitioner is most protective of the "self," s/he aims to "cut" the habitual grasping to this apparently existent "self." When unable to find a "self" to protect, the practitioner is faced with the erroneous basis for "self-grasping" (bdag 'dzin), and thereby has an opportunity to realise the truth of "emptiness" which is understood as the mutual interdependence of all phenomena.

While the Chöd ritual has increasingly received Western scholarly attention during the past few decades from Buddhist studies scholars working in the areas of historiography, translation and hagiography, a gap remains with respect to the study of the musical and performance aspects of the practice. Researching Chöd from the perspective of ethnomusicology, this multi-site ethnographic study combines a musical apprenticeship to recognized masters of the Chöd tradition with musical transcription and analysis, to explore, for the first time, the various functions served by the music in the Chöd ritual. My research has yielded a fascinating discovery about the relationship between the melodies and the textual liturgy. Based on a case study of two Chöd sādhana practices, Dedicating the Illusory Body as a Heaped Offering and Offering Ganachakra in Connection with the Yoga of the Profound Path of Chöd, there is substantial evidence that there are music-text (performance-visualization) correspondences in the main liturgical texts of the Ganden Chöd Tradition's lineages. This corrects an earlier impression that the mgur genre of spiritual song-poetry is the result solely of spontaneous compositions with the insight that Chöd Lamas appear to have deliberately crafted Chöd music and poetry in ways to enhance the meditative experience for practitioners of the ritual and augment the efficacy of Chöd as a transformative event.

¹Pronounced Machig Labdrön. ²The spelling Chöd is used throughout. See explanation for decisions with respect to language on page xxv.