Creating Death: Meditative Tukdam Deaths and the Tibetan Ontological Body

• In Event: Diagnosing Death: Critical STS Perspectives - III

Abstract

Acknowledging the technologically mediated nature of biomedical death, and the way technologies have contributed towards new definitions of death – and new forms of death-in-life – my presentation will juxtapose biomedical dying with Tibetan Buddhist forms of dying. Looking at culturally distant Tibetan understandings and practices around death highlights how profoundly differently death can be understood and manifested. This becomes particularly apparent in the tradition of dying in meditation known as tukdam, where the bodies of meditators show no signs of death for days or even weeks after clinical death, in accordance with tantric Buddhist theory.

As medical anthropologist Sharon Kaufman notes, “Death is known, defined and disputed through various forms of human activity that surround it. Thus death is not a natural phenomenon. It is made. It varies culturally and historically.” Juxtaposing biomedical and Tibetan Buddhist versions of death, with a particular focus on tukdam, I ask to what extent is death “made”? To what extent can we think of death as mediated, or can we go even further and see bodies and their death processes as culturally created distinctive ontological realities in part arising from ways of seeing-perceiving-conceiving the body and its death?

I draw on medical anthropological ideas of local biologies, the ontological turn, as well as Buddhist theory. My presentation will raise parallels between ANT and Buddhist notions of dependent origination, and explore a different sense of technological mediation: tantric ritual or contemplative “technologies” as contributors towards Tibetan understandings and manifestations of death.

Supplementing my spoken presentation will be images and video-clips.

Author

• Michael Donagh Coleman, UC Berkeley