Annually, whole villages and clans in nomadic areas along the eastern reaches of the Tibetan plateau are committing to a newly formulated set of ten Buddhist virtues that include vows not to sell yaks for slaughter, not to fight with weapons, and not to drink, smoke, or gamble. This article explores the online debate in the Tibetan-language blogosphere over a burgeoning ethical reform movement. What do these features of her oracular activities illustrate? How do they feature in her life story and relationships to other religious specialists in the area and the surrounding community? This paper outlines my ethnography of Lhamo’s practice and situates it in the context of Tibetan oracles, arguing that Lhamo’s oracular possession, which is a practice of a village oracle often regarded as involving mainly mundane and pragmatic ends, is conspicuously integrated with the soteriological, supramundane orientation of Buddhism. Her trance sessions also appear orderly and lack an intermediary figure who decodes the oracle’s enigmatic statements. The ritual of possession is performed behind closed doors hidden from clients, and the medium typically engages in oracular ingestion multiple times during every trance. The oracular practice and personal history of Lhamo, or ‘Goddess,’ present several unusual features compared to other ethnographic accounts of Tibetan oracles. This paper contributes to the study of Tibetan oracles by analyzing a distinctive case of a contemporary Tibetan oracle living in exile in India. Findings show that potency of precious stones emerges as a complex synergy of interactions between substances and their socio-historical, religious, economic, and political values, which are all encapsulated in ‘tradition.’ In line with Neveling and Klien (2010) and Scheid (2007), I look at tradition as a fluid process of knowledge transmission over time, and analyze what happens when practitioners try to explain the rationale behind processing practices they still meticulously follow, and how questioning, especially by foreign researchers, might influence practitioners to call on biomedical science to explain tradition. Based on textual analysis and interviews with Tibetan physicians in India, I address the questions: What makes these substances particularly ‘potent,’ expressed in the Tibetan term nüpa (nus pa)? How and why are these substances processed for use in medicines, and how is processing linked to nüpa? I argue that Tibetan medical practitioners authenticate their tradition of using precious stones as potent substances primarily through relying on authoritative texts and oral transmission, since the direct sensoexperiential understanding of the stones’ nüpa is limited compared to the more sensorial assessments of the nüpa of plants through smell and taste. In this paper, I analyze three precious substances-turquoise, coral, and pearl-which appear together in many precious pill formulas and are processed using the same techniques. Tibetan physicians use precious stones as medicines only after processing, without which none of them are considered medically beneficial. Turquoise, coral, rubies, diamonds, amber, and pearls are among the potent substances used in Tibet’s medical traditions, specifically in ‘precious pills’ or rinchen rilbu (rin chen ril bu).
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