Mo Before Tarot: Tibetan Dice Divination, Mañjuśrī, Mipham, and the Ritual Logic of Uncertain Futures
A six-sided die looks almost trivial beside the monumental imagery of Tibetan Buddhism. It has none of the visual drama of a wrathful deity, a…
Tibetan Buddhism
Chöd Before the “Demon Feeding” Myth: Machig Labdrön, Prajñāpāramitā, and the Ritual Art of Cutting
Machig Labdrön, the Tibetan yogini associated above all with Chöd, in a nineteenth-century Tibetan painting now in the Rubin Museum collection. Public-domain reproduction via Wikimedia…
Phurba Beyond the Demon Dagger: Vajrakilaya, Wrathful Compassion, and Tibetan Ritual Technology
A Tibetan ritual dagger (phurba), photographed at the National Museum of Scotland. Photograph by Alf van Beem, released under CC0 via Wikimedia Commons. A Tibetan…
Phurba: Why Tibet’s Ritual Dagger Is a Peg, a Deity, and a Map of Transformation
The phurba is often described as a Tibetan “magic dagger,” but its three-sided form belongs to a much deeper ritual language. This source-based guide traces…