A Culinary Aesthetics of Food and Healing in Tibet

Asian Medicine 6 (2010–11) 33–54 brill.nl/asme Shaping the Illness of Hunger: A Culinary Aesthetics of Food and Healing in Tibet Frances Garrett University of Toronto Abstract This essay will consider the relationship between eating and maintaining health or curing illness, as seen in Tibetan pre-modern texts. In particular, it will focus on selected “ritually” enhanced food practices that are aimed at treating illness and improving one’s psycho-physical health and power. It begins with a look at practices that model hunger as an illness for both humans and non-humans, observing a resulting blurring of boundaries between food and medicine. The essay proposes continuity along a range of “culinary” practices, focusing in particular on “ritual cake” ( gtor ma) offerings and “nectar” (bdud rtsi) recipes involving creation of pills and healing foods. The essay posits a “culinary aesthetics” of healing and personal enhancement and introduces speculation about Tibetan understandings of food as medicine that may shape our understand- ing of the relationship between medical and religious thinking and practice in Tibet. Keywords Tibetan medicine, food, healing, ritual, culinary aesthetics Although much has been written about food’s cultural meanings in Hindu South Asia, only a small amount of research has been dedicated to the roles of food in the Buddhist world. This essay will address one aspect of the topic by considering the relationship between eating and maintaining health or curing illness, as seen in Tibetan pre-modern texts. While Tibetan medical texts have much to say about dietetics—indeed, diet is one of the medical tradition’s main pillars of therapy—in this essay we will instead look more closely at “ritually” enhanced food practices that are aimed at treating illness and improving one’s psycho-physical health and power. In the process, I will speculate about Tibetan understandings of food as medicine, and about what this may say about the nature of the relationship between medical and religious thinking and practice in Tibet. I will begin this exploration with a look at practices that model hunger as an illness for both humans and non-humans. Configur- ing hunger as an illness leads to a blurring of boundaries between food and © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/157342110X606851 34 F. Garrett / Asian Medicine 6 (2010–11) 33–54 medicine, and as these boundaries are questioned, we are better able to see links connecting a range of what I will call “culinary” practices, such as “ritual cake” ( gtor ma) offerings and extracting the essential nutriments of foods and shaping them into pills. In considering these practices, I will reflect on a “culinary aesthetics” of healing and personal enhancement. Among the few works on food in Buddhism, very little has been written on the topic from a text-historical approach. This essay will focus exclusively on literary descriptions of food practices drawn from several genres, including biographies, propitiatory offering texts, yoga texts, explanatory texts on religious practices, medical works, and pill-making manuals, all of these pre- modern. In these works we will examine a variety of consecrated substances that are said to have healing effects when eaten: first “ritual cakes” (which I will simply refer to using the Tibetan “torma,” as the term is familiar to many English speakers), and then a range of pills (chos sman, bcud len, and others). Certainly, freedom from illness is said to be a general benefit of all kinds of Buddhist activity.1 Despite the obvious example of illness as a major form of suffering, however, relatively little has been written in secondary scholarship about specific Buddhist practices—that is to say, practices not primarily understood as medical—that may be aimed at treating illness. This essay will consider several such practices, focusing on a few that are not widely known in secondary scholarship for their association with healing. Although in some contexts, a torma sculpture is understood to be a repre- sentative of the deity or a home for the deity, in this essay we will look at torma’s role as food for the vast host of beings involved in a religious operation and, in what I will argue is an extension of that, torma’s role in healing or enhancing health. Procedures that utilize torma abound, of course—the offering of torma is one of the primary “ritual modules” that constitute a larger ceremonial event. Indeed, according to eighth-century Padmasambhava, torma offering is an essential preliminary step for every other kind of religious activity. In Illuminating the Meaning of Torma Practices, the first Dalai Lama Dge ’dun grub (1391–1474), explains Padmasambhava’s claim by agreeing that, to be sure, “torma are required for [activities such as] pacifying disease and evil spirits, extending life and enjoyment, releasing or conquering unfa- vourable conditions, and liberating yourself from enemies and obstacles”.2 In some cases, a large ceremonial event may be generally aimed at healing, with the torma offering “module” being merely one part of the larger event. But Dge 1 Even Guiseppe Tucci has noted that one of the main aims of ritual practice is to maintain or bring about health (nad med ); other aims are prosperity or auspiciousness (bkra shis, bde legs), long life (tshe ring), and wealth (longs spyod ). Tucci 1980, p. 172. 2 Rje dge ’dun grub, p. 498. .

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