Dr. Cameron Bailey

November 17th, 2024
3pm UK time

Online via Zoom

Magic in Tibetan Buddhism

Like other commonly used categories in the study of Buddhism, such as “religion” and “tantra,” the term “magic” has a certain natural appeal that is easy to understand on an intuitive level when interpreting certain phenomenon and discourse within the tradition but is exceedingly difficult to precisely define. Unlike other analytical categories, however, “magic” is often singled out by critics as especially unhelpful, misleading, or even worse in the context of Buddhist studies specifically, a colonialist relic used to denigrate parts of the tradition(s) under study, or employed as an excuse to ignore certain aspects of these tradition(s). However, drawing on Western Renaissance and occult sources it is possible to construct an analytical category of magic with a more positive valance that more accurately captures the symbiotic, if at times strained, relationship between normative religious practice and more specialized magical practice in Buddhist traditions. The discourse of magic as an extra-ordinary form of action for producing super-normal effects suffuses Tibetan literature, from miracle tales of siddhas to practical handbooks of ritual sorcery. While there is no one term in Tibetan that is a precise analogue to the category of “magic” there are a variety of terms that are not readily translatable and understandable without recourse to it.

About the speaker

Dr. Cameron Bailey has an MA in Tibetan Buddhism from Florida State University and a DPhil in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies from the University of Oxford. He is a former assistant professor of Indian Philosophy at Dongguk University, Seoul. He is the author of several articles focusing on the cults and mythology of Tibetan Buddhist protector deities, a contributor on this topic to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Buddhism, and a co-editor and contributor to Tibetan Magic: Past and Present.