I've been thinking about this practically since I started studying Tibetan and have even talked to other Tibetologists about it. A couple months ago I spoke to the esteemed Dan Martin over a talk about Alexandra David-Neel, one of the less seedy characters in the development of Tibetan cultural imports into New Age culture, and a woman with the fine distinction of being the first western woman to visit Lhasa.

In short, she was responsible for spreading the notion that Tibetan monks train in levitation and flight. Dr. Martin, far from accepting this at face value, emphasized that he was a Tibetologist studying text, not a scientist there to disprove that people couldn't fly (my words).

He also took issue with something we have a tendency to write in Tibetology, "The tradition states..."

His criticism seems to be that we don't really need to specify that it’s not something we believe, and in fact might be detrimental since we imply that it’s something that the Tibetans and Himalayans believe, but that we scholars distance ourselves from such superstitions. When we should really just… I’m not sure, just state it outright? I asked him to clarify how he thinks we should explain succinctly (which is what I think the phrase “The tradition states” does) what we’re discussing without implying that we’re necessarily believers (of course, many Tibetologists are, and sometimes separating the music from the noise is difficult, if I do say so myself).

Anyway, the discussion didn’t go very far after that, but I’ve learned a lot since then.

I have to say that visions don’t really bother me. I’ve met people in real life who have told me about visions of meeting Jesus or other dead people, and I’m sure it’s not that uncommon a phenomenon (just turn on A.M. radio if you live in the US and you’ll hear them). Put another way, there are people who study the life of Joan of Arc, but the validity of her visions isn’t really important for studying her life, the course of the Hundred Years’ War, or her influence on history. Only a niche slice of historians trying to discuss the validity of her trial and subsequent execution are out there discussing it. The same holds true for Buddhism and visions of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.

What is more concerning is when that magic jumps out of people’s heads.

There’s a lot we could discuss, but let’s talk about Padmasambhava, Pema Lingpa, and the Nechung Oracle.

Padmasambhava

Known as Guru Rinpoche by Nyingmas and Bhutanese, and Pema Jungney by most others, it’s impossible to broach Himalayan and Tibetan Buddhism without bumping up against him. But practically every story is immediately unbelievable. As his name implies, he was born from a lotus flower in the middle of a pond. Later when he and his wife were accused of murder, Padmasambhava was burned at the stake and his wife drowned. Both of them survived. When he was meditating in charnel grounds during a famine, he transmuted corpses into food.

His life story is head spinning. Just his Rigpa Wikipedia page is mind-blowing. (For a much better read, check out The Lotus-Born: The Life Story of Padmasambhava Recorded by Yeshe Tsogyal). It involves becoming the King of a hidden kingdom somewhere in Nepal (fictional? Or is it a Kingdom that is simply lost to history?) and binding demons and spirits to become Dharma protectors. This latter was his specialty and precisely how he came to Tibet.

The Tibetan Emperor Tri Song Detsuen invited the wise and learned abbot Shantarakshita to come to Tibet to spread the Buddhist Dharma. Shantarakshita had trouble coming as suddenly there were lightning storms, earthquakes, and floods. He told the Emperor to invite the Tantric master Padmasambhava to bind the demons of the earth. Long story short, Tri Song Detsuen did so, and those demons got bound.

Telling stories about how you were King in a country no one’s ever heard of is one thing (you wouldn’t know that country, she goes to another school…) but to fake whole earthquakes and lightning storms? Something doesn’t feel right.

According to the Testament of Ba (sometimes “Wa,” it’s a bit unclear) one of the earliest Tibetan Histories we have, Padmasambhava still plays the same role, as one who bound the spirits of the Tibetan countryside, but his skills are far less fantastical. The Testament specifically states that Padmasambhava had “power over water.” And his skills seemed useful at benefiting and pacifying local lords and chieftains. What else we know is that India had a longer history with more advanced irrigation techniques. So if you ask me, this seems to be a case of the fish getting bigger: Padmasambhava used his knowledge of better agricultural practices to keep the violence down. But as the centuries passed, his knowledge in irrigation turned into magical powers, and the violence turned into mystical weather phenomenon. Of course, it’s only an educated guess about a pretty unprovable hypothesis, but again, every story about the early spread of Tibetan Buddhism needs to include it, because Guru Rinpoche is ubiquitous in Himalayan religion and without better records, well, the magic storms and wizard is all we have to go by.

When Padmasambhava left Tibet, he fled to Bhutan being chased down by his former student the Emperor. Padmasambhava froze his pursuers in place “like paintings.” Did they need to be magically stopped? It’s kind of superfluous. He got away. People flee successfully all the time. But such is the historical record.

When he arrived in Bhutan, he was led to a King suffering from severe depression. The local King had invited Padmasambhava to his own Kingdom to convert his Kingdom to the Dharma. The local demon took it upon himself to kill the King’s heir. When Padmasambhava heard about this, he leapt into action and went down to bind the demon to the Dharma. He meditated for a long while and then went to the King’s palace to defeat the demon. Guru Rinpoche transformed himself into a garuda while the demon in the form of a lion attacked him. The Guru led one of the first “mask dances” and this action “bound the demon to become a protector of the Dharma.

A bit anecdotal, but I have a comparison that may illustrate the historical phenomenon of ceremony and ritual. I used to live with an Ajahn from Laos. Back in Laos, he wandered the jungle and visited villages where he would ask them to point the way to their nearest cave. Almost all of the time, people would point him, and then warn him that a demon lived in the cage so he shouldn’t go there. He did anyway, and would scare the bejeezus out of the locals by screaming all night for the demon to go away. In the morning, he’d go to the villagers and tell them their problems were over and the demon was gone. They’d celebrate and throw him a feast (clearly impressed that he lived at all). When he came to the United States, he used to do the same thing all over New England, clearing haunted houses to the vast pleasure of some locals.

This phenomenon my Norse Mythology teacher referred to as the “don’t bring your battleaxe to bed phenomenon” or why Fenrir was bound by a chain of moonlight, not of anything substantial.

Do I believe there was a demon in central Bhutan in the 8th Century that needed an Indian magician to defeat? Well, I don’t really think there was a ghost in a cave in Laos 20 years ago that needed a monk to dispel. But the locals then, as now, did. And if all it took was a little screaming in the dark, then so be it. Ritual serves a psychological purpose if not necessarily a metaphysical one. Unless it’s the actual subject of what we’re discussing (like we are now), however, it’s not really something that needs mentioning. But here we are.

I don’t think belief has much to do with it, but my understanding of how ritual works makes the story pretty clear to me: that Bhutan King’s son died, probably of a disease, then fell into a deep depression. When Guru Rinpoche came to convert the King to the Dharma, he conducted an elaborate ritual that killed two birds with one stone, and ended up blaming a single demon for both the son’s illness and the king’s subsequent depression. Of course, as time went on and the story got told and retold, it got bigger and spread.

Generally speaking, history as a whole is full of claims of supernatural events and encounters. The historian's job is not simply to dismiss them but to investigate the causes and events of history. Sometimes we look for naturalistic methods of explaining claims of the supernatural, while other times we dismiss them. However, I find when dealing with religious history it sometimes matters less what happened than what people believed happened.

For instance, Tibetans believed that Padmasambhava dispelled the demons of Tibet and turned them to Buddhist protectors, we can maybe see this as a metaphor for Buddhist monks converting people and pre=Buddhist deities being incorperated into Buddhism, but that doesn't change that people strongly believed Padmasambhava to have these supernormal abilities. The Mongolians who formed the Mongol Empire were quite sympathetic to Tibetan Buddhism in part because they thought the Lamas had great power. Whether they did or not is somewhat irrelevent as it is the belief that led to their ascendency in Mongol (especially Yuan) courts.

Of course, like I said, the historian always works from the realm of naturalistic explanation and thus will not, or at least should not, take supernatural claims at face value. Take Terma for instance: historians do not typically believe that Padmasambhava and various Buddhas went around Tibet burying teachings and then 300 years later instructing mystics on their location and contents, but instead look at the various social factors that led to the development of Terma traditions.

Terma appeared as a Nyingma response to the so-called "era of fragmentation" where the translation of Indian scriptures slowed and later on to compete with the Sarma or "new translation" schools. These traditions nativised Buddhism and provided an intellectual progression allowing the development of Tibetan Buddhist thought while legitimizing themselves by attatching them to legendary masters and being presented with the veil of esoteric wisdom.

So yeah, the general approach is not to dismiss, but explain naturalistically as well as lay out the causes for such thinking. This is universal and not exclusive to Tibet.