Genuine vintage and or atnique, used tantric Buddhist ritual instrument known as a kangling used by practitioners of Chöd.
Made from a human femur, this kangling or thigh bone trumpet from Tibet has heavily carved Silver (sterling?) metal covering the epicondyle end which serves as the sounding end of the horn. This particular Kangling is made from a human femur and also has inlaid coral and turquoise stones. It was sold to us as an antique, and while it certainly has age and use, we cannot guarantee its age.
Purchased in an antique store in Nepal in 2000. The Tibetan Kangling was part of the traditional ritual kit of a Lama in a Himalayan village.
Made of the human thigh bone, the 'spirit evoking' trumpet known as the Kangling. A ritual object of Tantric Buddhism, and used at the time of tantric ceremony. Used in the Chod ritual 'Cutting off of Ego', and various dubthab rites. The Chod ritual appears to have its source during the shamanistic Bon period of Tibet, in the animistic cults relating to sacrifice and exorcism.
Played with the LEFT hand, and sounded in conjunction with the double-sided hourglass shaped drum made from a pair of human crania the Damaru. Because of their special qualities, they tend to be used in rituals concerned with wrathful deities or in contexts requiring special musical expedients. Used to drive away evil spirits, and used by 'naldjorpas'(adepts of the Short Path), to 'summon' spirits. Often used in conjunction with a Phurba (ritual dagger) for weather control in the summoning and cessation of rain.
Some people mistakenly believe that Tibetan Buddhism is a macabre religion with ghoulish deities and a strange obsession with bones, blood and gore. This is a complete misunderstanding of the symbolism involved in the tantric rituals. The fact is that there is an emphasis on each of our own impending deaths, but this is not a morbid fixation, but rather an impetus to make the most of life while we have the opportunity. The belief is that since death is inevitable, one should be mindful of the important things in life - cultivating kindness and compassion for all sentient beings, and practicing virtue and meditation - techniques to discipline the mind and elevate consciousness.
Many people have an aversion to bones and blood and such because, when it comes down to it, this makes them think of their own mortality, and they don't want to think about that for a second. So among worldly people there is a certain degree of repulsion for such things. On the other hand, the tantric Buddhist approach is to view them, contemplate them, even handle them and use them - its all about using the symbols of death as a means for understanding what life is really about. Utilizing death to come to terms with life is "skillful means" - a very important concept in Buddhism as many of you are no doubt very aware.
Tibetan Lamaic Buddhists made both short trumpets and hour-glass drums out of human bones. The drums, damaru, were composed of two skull caps; the thigh-bone trumpet or flute - the rkang gling - is perhaps the best known and is considered extremely tuneful. The thigh bone of a murdered virgin was said to be most efficacious in summoning spirits. Short bone trumpets have also been found in Buddhist monasteries in Mongolia.
Such bone instruments reached Tibet from India in the 8th or 9th century, where they served to remind the living of both the dead and death itself. The practice is thought to have originated with the Kaplikas, a Hindu sect from the 2nd century BCE. Elsewhere, human bone rasps, Omitzicahuastli have been discovered at Aztec sites, and in Hawaii there are drums, pahu, which use human teeth. The Omitzicahuastli can be heard on the album Sacred Rites by Elisabeth Waldo, which attempts to recreate the sounds of early Meso-American cultures. Many instruments used by the Aztecs took animal and human form, incorporating parts of the animals they were supposed to represent as well as clay, shells, reed, stone, copper, gold and bronze.
Kanglings are a ritual instrument often used in Tibetan ceremonies, especially those surrounding fierce and protective deities such as the Dharmapala. Alhough these deities do exist in the Indian tradition, where they are guardians of temples to the gods Shiva and Vishnu, the term is most often used for eight major and several minor guardians of Tantric Buddhism as practiced in the Himalayan countries and regions.
Dharmapalas can usually be recognized by various attributes they are depicted as wearing or carrying. Among these, one finds clothing made of tiger-, elephant- or human skin, bone or skull-made anklets, garlands, necklaces or girdles; as well as the crown of five skulls. Hand-held implements include the skull cup and double skull drum as well the flaying knife and many more.
The major Dharmapalas, also known as the Eight Terrible Ones, are listed below:
Sanskrit Name Tibetan Name (spelling)
Sitabrahma Tsangpa Karpo (ts'ans-pa dkar-po)
Hayagriva Tamdrin (rta-mgrin)
Kubera Namthose (rnam-thos-ras)
Mahakala Gompo (mgon-po)
Ekamatri Sridevi Peldan Lhamo
Yama Shinje (gsin-rje)
Yamantaka Shinjeshe (gsin-rje gsed)
? Begtse (beg-ts'e)
As the above terms show, these so-called trumpets are variously made from the thigh bone of either a tiger or a human, then fitted with a mouth-piece. They make fierce, otherworldly and bone-penetrating sounds.
Such human bone trumpets are most often used in the charnel ground rituals of the Chöd-pa, i.e. practitioners of Chöd.
The illustration shows a trumpet that has been been tightly fitted with leather, and the metal encasing has been enhanced by a turquoise.
One of the Eight Great Chariots of the Practice Lineage, Chöd is somehow an independent 'school' - though often classed together with Shijed - but its teachings are practiced by adepts of many other schools at the higher stages of the Inner Tantras. Because of Chöd's esotericism on the one hand, and its specific, dangerously "magical" rituals on the other, it has often been conveniently "forgotten" when speaking of the various Tibetan schools and has long received little attention in Western works about Tibetan Buddhism.
The Tibetan Chod translates as cutting, severing and/or dismemberment, terms to be understood mainly in a symbolic and/or psychological sense (as a radical liberation from one's ego and all that it usually fears). However, to a Tibetan - in a culture in which the deceased were actually left on a charnel ground and their bodies cut up and fed to vultures and other carrion animals - such visions of dismemberment also represent a "soon to come" reality.
In a typical Chöd ritual, the practitioner - equipped with a damaru and a trumpet of human thighbone - visits a charnel ground visualizing the "cutting up" and offering of his or her body, a rather universal shamanic trance practice during which the adept's body is disassembled into pieces which, if all goes well, are later re-assembled once again by divinities, demons and similar entities from the beyond.
As a whole, Chöd was inspired by the teachings of the Indian adept Phadampa Sangye (c. 1045-1117), and its adherents regard the Prajnaparamita Sutra as the school's most important sacred text. A certain distinction exists between pho-gCod (male Chöd) and mo-gCod (female Chöd), indicating two strands of the lineage.
The school of male Chöd was founded by sKyo Sa-skya ye-shes (11th century student of Phadampa Sangye). The other, female development of Chöd is based in the teachings of the unique and fascinating Machig Lapdrön (1055-1145), the Dakini Guru of this lineage and an incarnation of Yeshe Tsogyal.
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