UC Berkeley

In the Tibetan Buddhist postmortem state known as tukdam, bodies of meditators do not show the usual signs of death for days or even weeks after their clinical deaths. For Tibetan Buddhists, the meditators are resting in a subtle state of consciousness with an associated subtle material energy present in the body, and so are still in the process of dying. Yet according to modern biomedical definitions they are dead, as also documented in the transnational “Tukdam Study” originally led from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My dissertation introduces tukdam as it is understood and realized in Tibetan Buddhist worlds, and as encountered in the scientific Study. Bringing these different figurations of tukdam together creates sparks, problems of commensuration and onto-epistemological quandaries that this work thinks through. Unknown to science until recently, tukdam has not yet been adequately explained in biomedical terms. One way to understand this phenomenon is through ideas of different cultural bodies and death processes, where tukdam emerges as a particular kind of Indo-Tibetan death. I draw upon medical anthropological scholarship and literature in history of science and cross-cultural medicine looking at epistemological theories of perception where different ways of conceiving-perceiving and attending to the body contribute toward producing different medical bodies—and deaths. This epistemological approach has entailed the idea of one reality “out there,” which I call into question. I argue instead for an ontological approach, where epistemology and ontology are collapsed so that different forms of conceiving-perceiving contribute toward different forms of being. Such an approach seems apt in the case of different cultural bodies and death processes that we encounter with tukdam and other extraordinary Tibetan death displays. To sketch out theory for how ontologically distinct bodies might come about, I explore resonances between medical and ontological anthropological and STS theory on the one hand, and Buddhist Yogācāra philosophy, and especially Buddhist pramāṇa or epistemology and their later Tibetan appropriations, on the other. Such theorizing suggests that Tibetan and scientific figurations of tukdam enact ontologically different objects, which in part explains difficulties of their commensuration. Tantric Buddhist bodies and deaths emerge as largely incommensurable with, and invisible to, the modern medical gaze with its attendant Euroamerican regime of truth where visibility, quantification, and technological measurability set the grounds for the real. This regime also dominates in the European documentary film world, as I discovered while making a documentary on tukdam. Titled "Tukdam: Between Worlds," the documentary forms part of this multimodal dissertation, consisting of film and text. The film contains more ethnographic and narrative aspects of my project—including several tukdam stories and following the scientific Study—while the text takes flight into meta-theory contemplating different (cultural) ontological bodies and death processes to account for difficulties of commensuration between Tibetan and scientific figurations of tukdam, as observed in the film. Although ideally engaged together, both film and text also function as independent creations in their own terms.