Description:

 The maṇi pill is one of the most popular relic traditions in Tibetan Buddhism. Treasured around the globe, maṇi pills are small edible pellets formed from mixing the powdered bodily remains of buddhas and bodhisattvas with ingredients used in Tibetan medicine and sanctified through a tantric liturgy. Maṇi pills are today predominantly produced by the Fourteenth Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso, who consecrates and distributes hundreds of thousands annually, but the tradition of producing and consuming maṇi pills stretches back more than a millennium.
 
In this talk, the speaker presents research from his forthcoming book about the maṇi pill and its significance in Tibetan religion and culture. Examining the broad cultural history of Buddhist tantra in Tibet through the lens of the maṇi pill, the author illustrates how these pills have influenced Tibetan conceptions of the body, medicine, healing, collective identity, and shared past; how they have functioned as a point of interaction, contestation, and negotiation between different Buddhist sects and institutions; and how they have created and shaped social bonds and religious identity across Tibet and beyond to the present day.

James Gentry is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University. He specializes in Tibetan Buddhism, with particular focus on the literature and history of its Tantric traditions. He is the author of Power Objects in Tibetan Buddhism: The Life, Writings, and Legacy of Sokdokpa Lodrö Gyeltsen (Brill, 2017), which examines the roles of Tantric material and sensory objects in the lives and institutions of Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhists. He is also the author of The Bodhisattva’s Body in a Pill (forthcoming from University of Virginia Press), which traces the history of the maṇi pill, one of Tibet’s most popular and enduring Buddhist relic traditions, from its precedents in the eighth and ninth centuries to the present period as a lens into the broader history of tantra in Tibet at the nexus of ritual and medicine.