Return wandering spirit

Source: TW

Ritual account

Among the Mongols, Turks and Manchus, there is a ritual wherein a grievously ill person’s spirit is believed to have wandered away. A shaman can summon it back to cure the said individual. Below is an account of the same among the Mongols drawn from the researchers the Hungarian Sarkozi and Russian Sazykin:

When a person falls gravely ill and their soul is believed to have departed, a shaman is called to perform the ritual of calling the spirit back. The preparations begin with two pieces of pure white felt—both new, unblemished, and perfectly clean. One piece is laid beneath the sick person; the other is placed under the shaman’s feet.
Tradition holds that these first ritual objects were originally sent down from heaven, and so the felt is regarded as sacred.
It is also said to represent a white cloud, the vehicle by which the shaman ascends to the upper world.

Next, a bucket is prepared with “white food”—milk, sour milk, or similar offerings. At the bottom of this bucket a silver ruble is placed to represent prosperity.
Into this bucket the shaman plants a special ceremonial arrow, the dalangajin nomo, which is used in many sacred rites to request blessing and aid from the heavenly powers. The bucket is then set in the western part of the yurt.

A long red ribbon, tipped with a copper button, is tied to the arrow and carried out through the open door of the yurt. Outside, it is fastened to the branch of a birch tree that has been planted upright in the ground. This bright red ribbon forms the path along which the wandering soul is expected to return. The yurt door remains open for the entire ceremony so that the soul may pass freely.

Near the birch branch a man sits holding the bridle of the patient’s finest, best-harnessed horse. It is believed that the horse will sense the soul’s arrival: it will begin to tremble and neigh when the returning spirit draws near.+++(4)+++
The soul is thought to re-enter the world by first settling upon the man outside, and then traveling along the red ribbon until it reenters the body of the sick person.

Inside the yurt, a table is set with an abundance of offerings—wine, spirits, tobacco, sweets, sugar, confections, cakes, and nuts—all gathered in a large bucket. The shaman purifies and blesses these provisions by fumigating them with smoke from heather grass, marking the final stage of the ritual.

काली-मन्त्रः

On of the more surprising journeys of a mantra is that of a kAlI mantra finding its way into a the Mongolian shamanic ritual of the summoning back of the spirit that has left the body of an ill person (see QT).

A version of this ritual attributed to padmasambhava for the curing of a certain chakravartin Khan (evidently a memory of the old Tibetan emperor Trisong Detsen). At the climax of the rite, when the shaman plants the ritual arrow known as the dalangajin nomo (see QT) into the ritual bucket he utters an incantation 108 times, it goes thus:

OM kAlI ! kAlIye huM huM phaT phaT svAhA ||

He then makes food offerings with the incantation:

OM huM chaM chaM huM phaT cuu phaT ching ching huM phaT phaT ||

With that the ill man’s spirit is brought back into his body.

Thus, a kAlI mantra has lodged itself right in the heart of a purely Altaic ritual free of any bauddha envelope. Similarly, in another performance of the same rite other Mongol shamans have incorporated the invocation of lokapAla-s free of the tathAgata-s indicating how they connected with the deeper, original layer of the religion.+++(4)+++