James Gentry talks about the thousand-year history of the Tibetan maṇi pill, back to its medieval origins in an age of Mongol invasions and epidemics, through an infusion of psychoactive fungi for experimental meditation in the 13th century, and as a shared token for today’s global Tibetan Buddhist diaspora.

James Gentry is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford. He specializes in Tibetan Buddhism, with particular focus on the literature and history of its Tantric traditions. He is the author of Power Objects in Tibetan Buddhism: The Life, Writings, and Legacy of Sokdokpa Lodrö Gyeltsen, which examines the roles of Tantric material and sensory objects in the lives and institutions of Himalayan Buddhists. Before joining Stanford, James was on the faculty of the University of Virginia. He has also taught at Rangjung Yeshe Institute’s Centre for Buddhist Studies at Kathmandu University, where he served as director of its Master of Arts program in Translation, Textual Interpretation, and Philology. He has also served as editor-in-chief of the project 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha, which aims to commission English translations of the Buddhist sūtras, tantras, and commentaries preserved in Tibetan translation and publish them in an online open-access forum.

Interview by Miles Osgood.

[Prologue]

MILES OSGOOD: Welcome to “The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford” podcast. Come join us by the tree.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar]

Should we be asking more of the pills that we take? There’s a dark-red pill you can get for free, and in bulk, that, according to its distributor, will protect you from SARS and COVID-19 just by wearing it around your neck. If you ingest one, one of these pills may purge you completely from the inside. Another may induce a psychoactive vision of gnostic knowledge that dwells within you. And one study claims that the taste alone is enough to liberate you from this world.

The distributor promising these miracles is the Office of the Dalai Lama. The study comes from the eleventh century, out of the Nyingma School in Tibet. And the medicine in question is the maṇi (or “jewel”) pill, an edible pellet consecrated through tantric liturgy and distributed throughout the world to this day in little plastic bags.

Depending on which century of commentaries you search through for the recipe, the maṇi pill is a compound made from the flesh of a body that has been reborn seven times as a Brahmin, or from the essence of the compassionate activity of Avalokiteśvara himself, or even from the excretions of the living Dalai Lama.

For the scholar, the maṇi pill also mixes other materials that we otherwise tend to keep at arm’s length. It is both a tributary gift and religious relic, a political symbol and a spiritual talisman. Its history entangles the material and the philosophical, re-combining what academics sometimes divide as the “culture” of religion and the “core.”

That may be why scholars haven’t closely studied these pills—at least until our guest today first held them in his hand.

JAMES GENTRY: “The pills often receive very little explanation. So that’s something—I mean, the opacity of what this is, to me, or my lack of understanding of what that is, really compelled me to figure out, ‘Why am I receiving these? What do these do?’ And so you can see that this, kind of, has flowered into a whole lifelong study actually—this kind of curiosity.”

On the podcast today, we’ll hear about the results of that study, and the book that sprang from that curiosity.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐]

We’re recording from the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford, and I’m your host, Miles Osgood.

My guest today is James Gentry, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies here at Stanford, and a specialist in Tibetan Buddhism and its Tantric traditions.

James was previously on the faculty of the University of Virginia and an instructor at the Rangjung Yeshe Institute’s Centre for Buddhist Studies at Kathmandu University, where he was director of its MA program in Translation, Textual Interpretation, and Philology. From twenty fifteen to twenty nineteen, he was also editor-in-chief of the project "Eighty-Four Thousand: Translating the Words of the Buddha."

James received his PhD from Harvard in twenty fourteen with a dissertation on “Objects of Power” in 16th-century Tibet, and subsequently published "Power Objects in Tibetan Buddhism: The Life, Writings, and Legacy of Sokdokpa Lodrö Gyeltsen" with Brill in twenty seventeen. In twenty nineteen, he was the editor of a special edition of the "Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines" (the "Tibetan Studies Review" journal) on “Tibetan Religion and the Senses.”

More recently, James’s study of Himalayan material culture and intellectual history has produced articles on sacred amulets and their boxes, the “Cannibal King” Kalmāṣapāda, and the “color” of Buddhahood in “Great Perfection” theory, in venues that include the Journal of Contemplative Studies, the Rubin Museum of Art, the Routledge Handbook of Religion and the Body, and the Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies.

We’re here today to talk about his forthcoming monograph, The Bodhisattva’s Body in a Pill, which will be published by University of Virginia Press this coming spring.

So with that, let’s head into the library.

[bell chimes]

MILES OSGOOD: So welcome, James.

JAMES GENTRY: Thank you so much, Miles, for having me.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, we're very excited about this. So I've gotten the chance to read the introduction to the book, which is exciting to get that preview, and it opens with a nice detail about a contemporary ritual that continues to be practiced by the Office of the Dalai Lama, where little baggies of red maṇi pills are distributed to—to Tibetan Buddhists. And that's an origin point or a starting point for the book, but it sounds like it's also been an origin point and starting point for your own Buddhist Studies, your own research: that there was a point where you were traveling and researching where you were handed one of these bags and had to think about what that meant over the years. So could you take us back to that moment as a way of introducing yourself, and tell us about why you were there, what you were interested in, and how that maybe pushed you into the research direction you found yourself in?

JAMES GENTRY: Yeah, absolutely, Miles, thanks so much for the question. Yes, I guess it goes back to a little over 30 years ago, if you can believe that, when I became very interested in Buddhism and especially meditation. So for me, my interest in Buddhism started really as somebody who wanted to learn how to meditate and to really get into the tradition that way rather than through a sort of scholarly approach. So, you know, not knowing that there were Buddhist centers—I mean, that was pre-internet really, in a way. And not knowing that there were Buddhist centers in my neighborhood, I thought I had to travel all the way to Asia actually to— (laughing) to meet meditation masters. So I did that, and I backpacked around Asia and, you know, met Tibetan lamas. And when sort of getting introduction to meditative practices—and especially in the tradition of the "Great Perfection," where the emphasis is really on mind and the nature of mind—I was struck by something that happened always in those encounters, those teaching encounters, that after getting all of these really quite impactful meditation instructions that I could then go and, you know, take with me and start practicing, I would be given an amulet or a little baggie of pills and wasn't told much about them. But the same lama who gave me the meditation instructions then said, "You should take these pills or you should wear this amulet, and these are very, very important." And so this kind of struck me at first as something that was maybe part of a cultural tradition, which it is of course, of Tibetan Buddhist culture. But I really was struck by "Why?" I mean, I just couldn't understand why I needed to take a pill or wear an amulet and how that had anything to do with the mind instructions that I was given. So that sort of drove me to think through the relationship—and I mean decades later that really resulted in trying to peer into how embedded they are with one another and looking into the textual tradition and the history of these traditions, seeing that was in fact the case. So it was—kind of set me off on a journey, I suppose, and trying to figure out what those material cultural elements had anything to do with the Buddhist tradition as I had kind of, you know, construed it or thought to appreciate it.

MILES OSGOOD: ... understood up to that point. Yeah, that makes sense. So I think we'll probably spend a good deal of this conversation answering that question "Why?" by way of your various research. It sounds like that's been the animating question, but I wonder if maybe we should stop and pause on the "What?" first of all. Sort of: what are these objects? They, you know, fill out the book "Power Objects in Tibetan Buddhism." You talk about stone cairns, you talk about sand maṇḍalas, you talk about text amulets, and I know you've brought some things in for us today that you've collected that you can maybe describe, talk about, and show for us a little bit. So yeah, can you tell us about the "what-ness" of these various physical objects that were handed to you or that are handed to other adherents? And maybe what they might indicate about a history?

JAMES GENTRY: Yes, yeah, absolutely. I guess I'll start with the very first peculiar, at the time, object that I was confronted with, and I'll just reach down here and get it because this is actually it. Back in nineteen ninety-four, as I was leaving Hilltop Hermitage in Kathmandu, that was owned I suppose you could say by a really famous Tibetan lama who's since passed away. We were all—everyone in attendance was given this little booklet. So what this is is—it's the—it's called the "Only Child of the Buddhas Tantra," and it's an actual tantra, a tantric scripture that's, you know, been printed in—it was printed in Hong Kong, and in gold on blue paper, as stipulated by the tradition that goes all the way back to the 12th, 13th century, and distributed to everybody in the audience after receiving these "Great Perfection" or "Dzogchen" mind instructions. And so we were all told, “Okay, well this is really the encapsulation of the teaching that we had received, and we should just wear this.” We weren't taught about it per se, or told to recite it, but in researching it, I learned that there is a tradition of reciting it and even hanging it on the bodies of the deceased. And there's funerary practice associated with it. And it describes the path of—the contemplative path of what's known as the "Heart Essence" or "Nyingthig" tradition of Buddhism...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: ... which is about eliciting visionary experiences of indwelling wisdom in order to reach Buddhahood. So there's a lot more to it. But that's part of another study that I'm doing at the moment: the history of this and other things like it.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, fascinating. So it sounds at some level that even if that wasn't explained to you, you'd be able to intuitively figure out, "Okay, I'm carrying a scripture around with me, tantric scripture, something I could recite, something that I could imagine conferring blessings by nature of having some sort of content." Are there other things that require more, kind of, conceptual, abstract, (laughing) artistic interpretation to make sense of?

JAMES GENTRY: Yes, very good question. That would be these kinds of things in here. I don't know if you can see the tiny little pills there, but—and really getting no instruction whatsoever on what these are—but this is one of the, I suppose you could say, units of—gift units that you would receive when meeting a Tibetan lama in a traditional context, or even maybe here in California actually.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: So go and meet a lama and ask a question, and you might get a little baggie of pills...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: ... and a string to tie around the neck or the wrist, some kind of—and the string is often described as, "Okay, this is protection." The pills often receive very little explanation.

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm.

JAMES GENTRY: So that's something—I mean, the opacity of what this is to me or the—my lack of understanding of what that is really compelled me to figure out, "Why am I receiving these?" "What do these do?"

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: And so you can see that this kind of has flowered into a whole lifelong study actually (laughing), this kind of curiosity.

MILES OSGOOD: And is your sense that, that gen... that people living in Tibet who, you know—maybe their, you know, parents and ancestors would have also been familiar with this ritual—kind of have an intuitive sense or a cultural sense of what the pills are? Or is there a kind of deliberate sense of mystery withheld from the giver to the receiver?

JAMES GENTRY: It's both. There is a sense that people know what they are, that they're sacred pills. They're "dutsi" in Tibetan or they're "damdzé," which means “sacred substance” or even kind of “binding substance.” There's sort of two meanings to that term.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: So there is a sense culturally that... It's highly valued. And there's a sense that they are coming from the lamas. Now the sense given to that—whether that's literally, you know, the bodily products of the lamas...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: ... or that's something that lamas are producing, is somewhat murky...

MILES OSGOOD: Okay.

JAMES GENTRY: ... and it's not always known.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, yeah, and partly the reason that I ask is that one thing that I was really struck by when I was reading "Power Objects," and I think this comes up as well in the new book, is that it seems as though the kind of religious or cultural prestige or esteem that these objects have has also waxed and waned a little bit within Tibet. That, you know, you talk about Guru Chöwang in the—in the 13th century, you know, creating the sort of maṇi pill tradition out of a, out of kind of a hybrid of multiple different sources— and we can get into that— and then being criticized by trans-sectarian scholars in the following centuries. Or Sokdokpa Lodrö Gyeltsen in the 16th century, then being disclaimed fully as a “charlatan” by the fifth Dalai Lama after having done this kind of ritual master practice. So I wonder, you know, has the knowledge been gained and lost over generations or reclaimed and revived as Tibetans themselves have kind of had varying attitudes towards this practice?

JAMES GENTRY: Yeah, yeah, thanks for that. I would say that the actual practice of producing pills and distributing them, you know, among wider audiences and consuming them has been fairly constant over the centuries. But who is perceived as the purveyor and the producer of the most potent pills...

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm.

JAMES GENTRY: ... and the ways in which those pills are produced...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: ... the valences given to them, the practice associated with their production: those kinds of things have been hotly contested over the centuries by different sectarian groups or individuals who want to be perceived as producing the most potent pills.

MILES OSGOOD: Oh, I see.

JAMES GENTRY: Or, you know, those doctrinal elites who use Buddhist doctrine to kind of critique what they regard to be as excessive promises or claims of soteriology connected with those pills. Like, for example, the idea that you could just consume one and be delivered to a Pure Land.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: Or put one into the mouth of an animal or a deceased person, and they could reach awakening in the next lifetime, or what have you. So these kinds of claims have been contested doctrinally, but really I think everyone was really—they were quite... I don't know, negotiating with one another over, you know: who could be perceived as having the most powerful pills and which institution could be in charge of producing those and distributing those.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: So in that sense, it's been fairly constant, but there have been many shifts historically because of these, I don't know, contestations.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, I’m curious about the doctrinal side of it. I mean, certainly that aspect of sort of, you know, power games and, you know, who gets institutional esteem, where the religious hierarchy lies: that all makes sense. The reason the doctrinal side of it, and the sort of philosophical side of it, is of interest to me is because I know you've wrestled a little bit with other critics who also worry that this kind of fixation is maybe at odds with the sort of more philosophical, intellectual way that we might approach Buddhist Studies more generally. That this, that this—all this kind of attention to material culture or to, you know, power objects with their, you know, supposed karmic or magic, you know, possibilities are in some way less rigorous or less "core" to what the religion really offers for meditation practices, for philosophical awakening. And it seems like this is a battle you've had to fight with contemporary scholars— like this is maybe a battle that has existed in Tibet in some form or another among the scholars of the living practice, but I—but it seems like maybe in the academic world it exists as well. Is that right?

JAMES GENTRY: Yes, I would say absolutely. In terms of the role we should give them as scholars...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: ... whether to take them seriously as deserving of scholarly attention and— or whether we should kind of divert our attention or sort of focus more on what are considered to be, you know, the real "meat" of it, sort of the doctrinal issues, these kind of, whatever, big ideas.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, so what is the status now of sort of the study of material culture and the study of philosophical culture and what they have to say to each other in maybe Buddhist Studies in the last 10 or 20 years, or the time that you've been studying?

JAMES GENTRY: Major shift has taken place really. And I would say over the last 30 years. So Buddhist Studies has really moved toward the material pole. And I guess that really inflects the larger sort of material turn in the study of religion that we're seeing across the study of religious traditions.

MILES OSGOOD: Mm. Mm-hmm.

JAMES GENTRY: But there's been a renewed interest in Buddhist Studies, you know, in studying things like the body and relics and places, pilgrimage places...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: ... and different kinds of material practices. But there's still— and I would say there's still a kind of shadow of bifurcation between the so-called "elite studies"— which are still on—ongoing—you know, philosophical studies, doctrinal studies—and the study of material culture and artistic production and so forth. And there's little effort to kind of bring these together or integrate them...

MILES OSGOOD: Right.

JAMES GENTRY: ... holistically. I mean, it's still the case that when I tell some colleagues who are old friends—and I value their work in philosophical studies—that I'm going to give a paper on an—on an amulet, for example, in a Buddhist philosophy panel, that they roll their eyes and sort of say—oh, you know, they stop themselves short of saying "Not this," you know? "I can't believe it." Like it's a sort of sign of the degenerate age or something that we're talking about that.

MILES OSGOOD: So one answer to that seems to be to say that, "Okay, the shift is—the shift is already happening, "and it's not just happening in Buddhist Studies, "but generally we've realized "that this is a neglected feature "of religions around the world that is just important." But it sounds like you're also saying that there's some value here in terms of integrating how we should understand what we have treated as purely intellectual or philosophical or spiritual with material practices that have always been tied up in them to begin with. I mean, we go back to your original story and say: you go on a pilgrimage, you go meditate, and you get handed this object. They are part of the same event, and they seem to be about the continuation of the work that you're doing that is spiritual or meditative. Is that right? So what do the "materialists," as it were (laughing), have to say, you know, back to the sort of philosophical side of religious studies in terms of what benefit this is to them?

JAMES GENTRY: Often, I think at least, the two uncritically accept that bifurcation and say, "Okay, well we're doing something "completely different, "so now we're really going to pay attention "to the material side of things and how important that is, and the cultural and the social and so forth and so on." And rather than kind of push back against the dichotomy and, you know, take a step back and rethink the dichotomy between the elite and the popular, the doctrinal and the material, and these kinds of...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: ... these kinds of dyads that sort of mark the field.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: So I think there's, there's still room to sort of push back on that—on that bifurcation.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, interesting. And you mentioned the elite and the popular there. So it sounds like once you start to take bits away from one dividing line, there are other axes as well that feel a little bit less rigid, a little less rigid, or a little less... yeah, severe.

JAMES GENTRY: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, one of the things that comes out of my study— because I study these things textually and not ethnographically, I think— is that I see that the... the great luminaries of the tradition actually were absolutely concerned with these things and writing a lot about them. So it's not that they're sort of somewhere in the corner in the tradition. They're front and center concerns for the main figures that are also studied philosophically and doctrinally.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, so this material culture is already a philosophical, scholarly culture in its own, in its own time. Yeah, that makes sense.

JAMES GENTRY: Absolutely.

MILES OSGOOD: So all this— all this leads really nicely into "The Bodhisattva's Body in a Pill," where you're thinking about a thousand-year history of an object, but also a thousand-year cultural, intellectual, philosophical history as well. What was it that motivated you, having already talked about, a little bit, the "seven-times-born Brahmin" idea and "flesh pills" a little bit in "Power Objects," that this particular object and this particular tradition needed—needed a new book, (laughing) and not maybe the pages you'd already sort of touched on it or approached it in your earlier work.

JAMES GENTRY: Yeah, that really, it came out of Sokdokpa: so, this figure that I studied for my first book, for my dissertation.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, tell us about him a little bit.

JAMES GENTRY: Really fascinating figure. And in that period that he lived, in the late 16th, early 17th century, there were a lot of crises going on institutionally, and you could say in terms of sectarian strife. So there was a sense in which history became a focal point. So figures like Sokdokpa and others were writing a lot about tradition and trying to kind of reconfigure what it means going forward. So then writings from that period—not just Sokdokpa, but others—are really incredible lenses through which to kind of look to the past. So they give us a lot of source material, and they actually historicized the past themselves. So it was really following the leads of Sokdokpa Lodrö Gyeltsen and others of his time period, like the fifth Dalai Lama and other figures who were maybe not in agreement all the time, that sort of led toward thinking— rethinking, "Oh, well, does it go back the way they say? "And can it be, is it sourced? "Are these traditions sourced in other kind of earlier traditions and where does it go?" And sort of just following the threads basically and kind of pulling at them...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: ... led to a sort of, I don't know, a kind of revelation after revelation in terms of where the pill tradition started and how far it could be traced back. And I had no vision of it at all as something that you could really tie together...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: ... as a sort of discrete set of traditions or even a discrete tradition...

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm.

JAMES GENTRY: ... that could be historically traced.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, so by way of one scholar, you get the invitation to go look at a thousand years of history and see how well interconnected it is. And so, you know, I wonder about the slant that— you mentioned he historicizes it in a particular way— and the slant that he gives it. And then what, you know—the ways in which you feel you have to go through the scriptures and correct the record or just establish kind of what that history was. Because the other thing that Sokdokpa, you mention, is fixated on, at a moment of crisis, is protecting borders in various ways...

JAMES GENTRY: Yes.

MILES OSGOOD: ... personal borders, spiritual borders, but also political borders. Does that inflect the way he thinks about what the pills are doing in his time? And then do you have to round out other things the pills meant at different times?

JAMES GENTRY: Absolutely, absolutely, because in his time, the valence, the main valence of the pill for him was about power and, you know, martial power essentially.

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm.

JAMES GENTRY: So one of his gurus was said to be a seven-times-born Brahmin, you know, whose flesh would be efficacious in turning back Mongol armies...

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm.

JAMES GENTRY: ... if a—if a stūpa with his body interred were created at a particular geomantic juncture, you know. So that didn't happen. And so he attributes the Mongol invasions to that, that issue, that his students instead took his body to Bhutan.

MILES OSGOOD: Oh, okay, so, "You didn't follow my advice and therefore..." (laughing)

JAMES GENTRY: Yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: "... and see, I was right."

JAMES GENTRY: Yeah, yeah.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: So then I had to look to other periods of time and what the pill uniquely meant in those other time periods for different individuals, you know, struggling with different issues.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, so could you take us through what were some of those things? What did it mean at different moments?

JAMES GENTRY: Yeah, for—well, the pill tradition, as we know it today, really started in earnest in the 13th century with a figure named Guru Chökyi Wangchuk, or Guru Chöwang, that— a lot of people know of him as one of the great treasure revealers of Tibetan history. And he was contending with, also with Mongol invasions actually. So that was the—really the rise of the Mongol period...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: ... the Yuan dynasty and the Mongol invasions in the 13th century. But with that came sectarian strife as different Tibetan institutions were trying to play off different Mongol factions to further their institutional prestige. And that, you know, at the same time period, there were epidemics, there were natural disasters and basically social fragmentation. So his perception of the time period was one of decay...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: ... moral, ecological, political, and religious. And so for him, as far as I see it, the pill was about bringing people together, essentially. So he created temples at, you know, marketplaces and popular pilgrimage places and sponsored mass pill production and consecration rituals to which he invited not just Tibetans of all walks of life, but also Chinese and Mongolians and other people.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: And yeah, different sectarian persuasions, and men and women, children, the infirm, everybody.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, and so maybe this is the point to ask: why a pill? And like what is it about a pill in particular? So you mention decay and you mention epidemics, and from our modern perspective, we think therefore, "Okay, yes, a medicine." But you also mention sort of political danger and invasions and whatnot. A pill doesn't seem necessarily the most obvious (laughing), you know, solution to all of that. So what is it—what is this object supposed to be?

JAMES GENTRY: Well, the 13th century, I think— an important context for this ...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: ... is the 13th century was also the period when Tibetan medicine became much more pervasive across the plateau. So it's with the rise of Tibetan medicine and pill production overall...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: ... was something that, you know, people were quite aware of. And with Mongol invasion and a lot of traffic through Tibet, there were epidemics. So a lot of people were experimenting with different remedies and things like that. But a lot of people were dying.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: So this particular pill, the maṇi pill, is not so much for physical healing, but for access to Avalokiteśvara's Pure Land.

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm.

JAMES GENTRY: So the way that the ritual looks is thousands of people gathered saying the mantra actually, and not just "Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐," but with "hrīḥ" added to it. That was his special innovation to add a "hrīḥ" to the six-syllable mantra to create the seven-syllable mantra…

MILES OSGOOD: ... which means altogether?

JAMES GENTRY: Oh, it's—"Oṃ maṇi padme hūm hrīḥ"? It has a meaning. But I mean, I guess roughly you could say that "maṇi padme hūm" just... "Oṃ" is sort of just, I guess you could say beginning the mantra...

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm. Right.

JAMES GENTRY: ... and has so much meaning that we could really go on forever about it.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: But "maṇi" means "jewel."

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

JAMES GENTRY: "Pema" or "padme" means "lotus" and "Oṃ maṇi padme hūm," the "hūm" is just another capstone mantra that has—that's loaded with meaning.

MILES OSGOOD: Right.

JAMES GENTRY: And the "hrīḥ" again— and these are things that— they're "seed syllables," the "Oṃ," the "hūm," and the "hrīḥ" connected with particular deities.

MILES OSGOOD: I see.

JAMES GENTRY: So the "hrīḥ" is considered to be linked with a particular form of Avalokiteśvara.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: And so it doesn't really have any sort of Tibetan meaning, but Tibetans wouldn't really necessarily appreciate it as having any discursive meaning.

MILES OSGOOD: Got it. But adding extra emphasis or doing kind of what the "Oṃ" and the "hūm" were doing at some level...

JAMES GENTRY: Yes.

MILES OSGOOD: ... with something added, yeah. Okay, so, okay, so we have this pill that gives us some kind of access to Avalokiteśvara and the Pure Land that is not just a medicine, but some kind of grander protection and grander, maybe, soteriological salvation. Then—and that's in the 13th century. What is the fate of the pill going forward? What are other key moments for it?

JAMES GENTRY: Well, one of the aspects of the pill that Guru Chöwang developed is that he combined medicinal substances with it that would've had purgative effects.

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm.

JAMES GENTRY: So we're talking mass rituals, people taking the pill at the culmination of the ritual together, and either having an induced vomiting or diarrhea experience basically that would be— would be indexing karmic purification. So you can imagine a kind of scene and this vulnerability that we create and kind of tantric commitments that would be received at that— so binding people together in that sense.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: So moving forward to the 14th and 15th century, some of those elements change. The purgative medicinal element was toned down, and it entered the monastic sphere basically. So we have it operating as a kind of interface between monasteries and the wider laity.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: And that enabled it to cross sectarian boundaries and also kind of regional boundaries.

MILES OSGOOD: And this seems like a big part of the thesis of your book, right? Is that we might imagine that when you have the experience, as you had, of going on your own meditation practice, looking for something personal and being handed these pills, that fundamentally what they are offering you is something personal and individual about your own meditative practice, about your own karmic salvation— however you want to think about it. But what you're seeing throughout history seems to be something that is more social, more about—more political, maybe even more geopolitical— about the ways these pills bring people together. Is there—is there something— is there some way that—like what would we say about that in the contemporary moment? What social role does it seem to be playing now?

JAMES GENTRY: Hmm, yeah, I think a really important one for Tibetans in diaspora...

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm.

JAMES GENTRY: ... and in Tibet still...

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm.

JAMES GENTRY: ... because this is a tradition actually that the 14th Dalai Lama, the current Dalai Lama, started to do again in exile. So it was revived, essentially. And it was something that was done in Tibet, but then there was a kind of cleavage. And so it was reintroduced in the diasporic context not that long ago, a few decades ago, to... I mean, you could say for doing a lot of things. But one of the—I mean, it's, they're highly valued by Tibetans, basically.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: So Tibetans in Tibet are not really permitted to carry photographs of His Holiness, for example. So maṇi pills function as a kind of surrogate for representations of his presence, his photographic representations, because they're consecrated by him.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: So they're in a sense, considered a concentrate of his salvific, beneficial power.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: So, I mean, you can go on eBay actually, and they're being sold, but the Dalai Lama gives them away for free. So they're produced annually in the month of "Saka Dawa," the Tibetan, the fourth month, which celebrates the awakening of the Buddha basically and other things. But then they're distributed free of charge, and there's just hundreds of thousands of them. And so people line up, and you can actually see, there's footage available on YouTube of the event when they're first made available. And they are truly some of the most prized items that you can bring friends when you visit China, Tibetan friends who want them, or Tibetan friends who live in Toronto or Tibetan friends anywhere around the world. So to me, they have this function of, kind of, in the absence of any actual state authority, sort of reviving in a sense the, you know, the traditional prerogative of the state...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: ... in extending the blessing of the Dalai Lama...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: ... healing, blessing of the Dalai Lama to the Tibetan people.

MILES OSGOOD: So it sounds like in fact, you're invited or at least welcome to gift the pills further forward, and thereby kind of extend the social reach of who is in this community together, tracing their— tracing back to the compassion of Avalokiteśvara or back to the body of the Dalai Lama, and thereby having some kind of node in common from which—from where these pills came. Is that right?

JAMES GENTRY: Absolutely, absolutely. So it's a kind of social network that's created through that. But then I think that's rooted in, you know— you can sort of think back historically to these big consecration events...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: ... some of which were attended by, you know, thousands and thousands of people actually, and lay people and people from all walks of life in Tibet. And they would culminate with actually ingesting the pill together. So you can see—I mean, this kind of commensality that that is, in a sense. And then the—just the tantric commitment that would be bestowed upon them that they share.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: And so it's this kind of a global extension of that, I would say.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, yeah, what a new life for that to take: to have, you know, the ability to disperse itself around the world, not only as pills, but almost as seeds, as opposed to the thing that you take a pilgrimage for to go and ingest and leave there, as it were— so different than the way that we often think of relics and reliquaries and maybe stūpas, where you have to go to a particular place and worship it there, and therefore join the community there, but rather, yeah, to allow something to spread outward.

JAMES GENTRY: Absolutely, yeah, the portability of it is— it really transformed the way that— the kind of function that it can have, I think.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, wow, okay. So an ongoing life and an ongoing set of mutations of meanings, it sounds like. Well, one thing that I wanted to close on was to ask you a little bit about where your own research is heading and mutating. You mentioned when we talked before that, you know, as part of your work kind of combing through these archives, overseeing perhaps as an editor translations that are happening, participating in your own translations, you just get deep into the records of Tibetan Buddhist scripture that maybe, you know— some of which maybe have gone lost. And, you know, I'll let you tell this story and this research a little bit more for yourself, but just to tease it a little bit: that there's long been a consensus, you know, against the sort of snooping curiosity of the West, maybe, that, "Oh no, Tibetan Buddhist or Buddhists generally "didn't have an interest "in the kinds of meditative experiences that maybe, you know, "Americans were trying to combine with psychoactive drugs "in the 60s and beyond. "That's just something we're projecting backward and imagining that they might have done." But no, it turns out: actually maybe there are attempts to have tried and experimented with those kinds of experiences dating to the 13th and 14th century. So could you tell us a little bit about what you found and where you're headed with that research?

JAMES GENTRY: Yeah, thanks very much for that. I just presented on this actually at a conference at University of Virginia this last weekend. So it's, yeah, very exciting. You know, funny—it's that, it's a commentary on this tantra.

MILES OSGOOD: Hm.

JAMES GENTRY: So the tantra that's in this amulet.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: There's a commentary on it that's attributed to a figure named Garab Dorje, who can be dated to quite early: sixth, seventh century. But I'm pretty sure it's actually from the 13th, 14th century from text internal evidence. And there you have pill recipes for— the way it's put is to eradicate attachment to the senses by disrupting ordinary sensory experience. So the way that these pill recipes go is that you gather together ingredients, bury them until fungi form, and then cultivate that fungi and form pills out of them and take them with the expectation that your field of vision transforms. Yeah, so there's—there’s considerable evidence that contemporary meditators or modern meditators have taken psychoactive substances that are available, you know, on the Tibetan plateau or in India to kind of test their realization, the stability of their realization. And so we find this in biographical and autobiographical materials from the current age, but there's been this idea, yeah, that nobody did that as an integral part of the Buddhist path actually, that that's something that we're, yeah, imposing, as you said, from our vantage point: it's a kind of anachronism. But yeah, the text, this— the commentary on this “Only Child of the Buddhas Tantra”...

MILES OSGOOD: The amulet we were looking at before.

JAMES GENTRY: Yeah, the amulet that we were looking at, this blue and gold amulet, stipulates precisely that we are to, you know, gradually induce visionary experiences that lead to sort of grander visionary experiences that index an indwelling gnosis within our bodies. But that as a preparatory phase, we can cultivate fungi and form them into pills and take them. And it's quite interesting because the visionary experiences to be induced from the fungi map to the ten "kasiṇas" of the Pali tradition. So this is sort of ten, you could say, concentration practices where you take one or another object as a focal point— like earth and water— and the elements are there, or certain examples of the elements and colors— and focus on them until your entire field of vision is transformed into that as a kind of way of gaining mastery in concentration meditation. So these sort of psychedelic versions of it that we find in Tibet, map quite closely to those in the details. But you're using a fungi to kind of elicit the experience rather. And it's—and you're not supposed to stop there necessarily, but this is where, as the text puts it, gradually kind of training oneself or cultivating oneself in the visionary experiences that index a kind of indwelling wisdom towards awakening. So they're framed as precisely integral to the Buddhist path...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: ... in ways that we thought were just not present in the traditions.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. But it sounds like it's another way of training yourself or opening yourself up to different kinds of mentalities as opposed to something that you return to over and over again. You're not doing the fungi-based pills every time to reattain the same experience. Is that right? It's more to get a glimpse.

JAMES GENTRY: Yes, yeah, that's exactly how it's framed as something that you know, that you do as a preliminary.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

JAMES GENTRY: If it's difficult to elicit the visions without them, you can do it to kind of get a glimpse into what's possible.

MILES OSGOOD: I see, and you talk about other experiments too that are related to this, right, in terms of using sensory deprivation. Maybe these are other access— other ways of kind of playing with the visual. So what other things have you discovered there?

JAMES GENTRY: Yeah, that is kind of part of the mainstream tradition, as it were, of the “Heart Essence,” of the "Great Perfection" where you would—and sort of the fungi cultivation and ingestion is framed as something as a preliminary to these sorts of visionary experiences— where what you do is you do sky gazing, sort of at oblique angles to the sun and manipulating, you know, your eyes and using masks and so forth. Or complete sensory deprivation where you just stare into the pitch-black darkness in a special enclosure in order to elicit the same visions. And sometimes you can alternate between these or create sort of gray rooms that are sort of dappled light in order to manipulate light sources to create visual effects.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. Yeah, wow. And one more way in which the pill has been used and conceived—and things you could put into the pill it sounds like that I hadn't even realized. Well, that's fascinating. So it sounds like from power objects to the pill and then on to this, there is more to this history to be uncovered, there are more to these texts to be uncovered. And so we all look forward to hearing about that, to seeing how that talk evolves into more published work. Well, thanks so much, James, for doing this conversation with us and sharing all your research. It's great to have you with us and to have you around Stanford.

JAMES GENTRY: Thanks so much, Miles. I really appreciate it.

[Epilogue]

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and bells]

Thanks again to James Gentry for joining the show. You can now pre-order The Bodhisattva’s Body in a Pill from University of Virginia Press online. And check out the first few minutes of the video of this interview on YouTube if you want to see close-ups of the maṇi pills and the text amulet.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐]

We always close with Ani Choying Drolma’s chant of “Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐,” as recorded at Stanford in twenty seventeen, but today maybe you’ll listen to it and imagine a seventh syllable, the “hrih” that James mentioned.

As you heard, that seventh syllable was the addition of Guru Chöwang, to invoke Avalokiteśvara and the seven-times-reborn Brahmins, for the mass pill consecration rituals of the 13th century.

Until next time, this has been “The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford” podcast.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐]