The Rite for Destroying

Summary

The Rite for Destroying is a brief instructional manual on how to perform a wrathful burnt offering ritual. Rites for destroying are one of four types of tantric rituals undertaken to attain worldly or spiritual accomplishments. Authorities in imperial-period Tibet apparently regarded this ritual with apprehension, resulting in its excision from The Tantra Purifying Bad Rebirths.

Acknowledgments

This text was translated by Patrick Lambelet. Many thanks to José Cabezón for his guidance, to the UC Santa Barbara Department of Religious Studies, and to Rory Lindsay and Nathaniel Rich for their valuable support and patience.

The translation was completed under the patronage and supervision of the 84000–UC Santa Barbara Buddhist Texts Translation Initiative. Rory Lindsay edited the translation and the introduction, and Ven. Konchog Norbu copyedited the text. Martina Cotter was in charge of the digital publication process.

Introduction

The Rite for Destroying consists of brief instructions for a homa, or burnt offering, a tantric Buddhist ritual performed for worldly or spiritual accomplishments (siddhi; dngos grub). The text first describes the appropriate environment in which to conduct this practice, followed by the dimensions of the fire pit, the substances used to construct it, and the symbols to be drawn upon it. Instructions on the actual performance of the rite are extremely brief; presumably the practitioner would need to draw on previous training in ritual or refer to other texts to supply the elements common to burnt offering rites in general.

The substances to be offered in the actual ritual, as with the other elements, are all associated with acts of violence and destruction‍—substances such as flesh, blood (presumably human),^⁠1 iron filings, powdered bones, poison, mustard seed, feces, and urine. Once the ritualist has invited Agni, the god of fire, they are instructed to make offerings to him one hundred thousand times. Upon the conclusion of the practice, it is said that the persons or beings toward whom the ritual is directed will suffer numerous misfortunes both in this life and the next.

The Rite for Destroying is positioned in the Degé Kangyur between the two translations of The Tantra Purifying Bad Rebirths (Toh 483 and Toh 485). The placement of this text reflects the belief among Tibetan scholars that authorities censored this rite during the imperial period, removing it from the first translation of The Tantra Purifying Bad Rebirths.^⁠2 According to some Tibetan accounts, the passage on the rite for destroying was never translated from the Sanskrit original; others argue that while this passage had indeed been translated, it was not included in the official Tibetan version, although it may have been inserted as needed in certain ritual contexts.^⁠3

Whatever the case may be, Weinberger has argued that The Tantra Purifying Bad Rebirths and other tantric works underwent a type of “sanitization.”^⁠4 Violent rituals were either selectively translated or censored when such translations were completed in the eighth and ninth centuries. During the later dissemination of Buddhism to Tibet, reform-minded Tibetan rulers such as Lha Lama Yeshé Ö (lha bla ma ye shes ’od, 947–1019/1024) sought to limit the translation and dissemination of antinomian tantric texts and to purge what they saw as apocryphal Tibetan tantric traditions. Gray has also noted that only a fraction of the texts containing violent ritual practices were transmitted to East Asia, and when they were, the offensive passages were edited or removed entirely.^⁠5

This translation is based on the Degé block print and the Comparative Edition (dpe bsdur ma). The colophon states that the text was translated by the Indian abbot Śāntiṃgarbha (a.k.a. Śāntigarbha) and the translator Bandé Jayarakṣita, both of whom are also credited as translators of the first version of the Sarva­durgati­pariśodhana Tantra.