Dalai Lama and the Nechung Oracle

Tibetan Buddhism and the Dalai Lama enjoy global popularity and relevance, yet the longstanding practice of oracles within the tradition is still little known and understood. The Nechung Oracle, for example, is believed to become possessed by an important god named Pehar, who speaks through the human medium to confer with the Dalai Lama on matters of state. The Dalai Lama and the Nechung Oracle is the first monograph to explore the mythologies and rituals ofthis god, the Buddhist monastery that houses him, and his close friendship with incarnations of the Dalai Lama over the centuries.In the seventeenth century, during the reign of the Fifth Dalai Lama, the protector deity Pehar and his oracle at Nechung Monastery were state-sanctioned by the nascent Tibetan government, becoming the head of an expansive pantheon of worldly deities assigned to protect the newly unified country. The governments of later Dalai Lamas expanded the deity's influence, as well as their own, by establishing Pehar at monasteries and temples around Lhasa and across Tibet. Pehar's cult at NechungMonastery came to embody the Dalai Lama's administrative control in a mutual relationship of protection and prestige, the effects of which continue to reverberate within Tibet and among the Tibetan exile community today. The friendship between these two immortals has spanned nearly five hundred yearsacross the Tibetan plateau and beyond.

This is an important and expertly researched account of the relationship between the Tibetan protector deity Pehar and the lineage of the Dalai Lamas, and the rituals and traditions surrounding Pehar's psychophysical manifestation in the Nechung Oracle., Impressive overview, This is an accomplished ... work of scholarship, that takes us deep into the complexities of an arcane aspect of Tibetan Buddhism, which yet retains a significant role in Tibetan national identity.

Christopher Bell is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Stetson University in Florida. His research focuses on Tibetan ritual and deity cults, as well as Asian models of divinity.