Journal of East Asian Cultures

Vol. 13 No. 1 (2021): Community Building: Family and Nation, Tradition and Innovation
Articles

An Initiation Rite in Tibetan Historiography

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  • Mónika Szegedi
Mónika Szegedi
Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE)
Bio
DOI: https://doi.org/10.38144/TKT.2021.1.12

Published 2021-12-15

Keywords

  • Tibetan historiography,
  • Khri-srong Lde-btsan,
  • rite of passage,
  • aternal rite cycle,
  • “Chalk Circle”,
  • sitting on the lap
    • ...More
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How to Cite

Szegedi, M. (2021). An Initiation Rite in Tibetan Historiography. Journal of East Asian Cultures, 13(1), 187–209. https://doi.org/10.38144/TKT.2021.1.12

Copyright (c) 2021 the author(s)

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Abstract

I shall investigate a quasi-historical event in the biographies of the second ‘Dharma King’ of the Tibetan Empire, Khri-srong Lde-btsan (Trisong Detsen). As the newborn heir to the throne, he was stolen from his mother by a rival queen; however, at a ceremonial event the still infant prince indicated his true descent by sitting on the lap of his maternal uncle. As Ruzsa (2016) noticed, the complex motif of the new ruler choosing his family by sitting on the lap of a male representative can be found in the Indian legend of Śunaḥśepa, embedded in a much richer structure. Following his reconstruction, by analysing further parallelisms in a wider corpus, it appears that the seemingly innocent story of a baby prince is, in fact, a remnant of an archaic rite. I suppose that originally this was a rite of passage, a special variant of puberty initiation: the consecration of the heir apparent. Furthermore, its relationship to the Indian legend of Śunaḥśepa connects it indirectly with the stories of Isaac and even Snow White and also with several rites of passage in ancient Greece. I will also suggest that some versions of the legend point to a probably even more archaic cycle of maternity rites with parallels in Solomon’s judgment and the Chinese Chalk Circle.

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